Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENTZ. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to call the Nation's attention to a tragic event unfolding in my State of Oregon, the horrifically destructive Bootleg fire.

This fire, now the third largest in my State's history, has consumed some 400,000 acres. That is about 660 square miles of previously beautiful landscape, pine, fir, sagebrush, grass, and meadows. The fire has taken millions of board feet of timber, the lives of thousands of forest creatures, cattle by the dozens, if not hundreds, horses, fences, buildings, and homes. The fire has released hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon, which could have remained sequestered far into the future. The smoke plume created by this conflagration has reached across this Nation, more than 2,000 miles, to pollute the air across the U.S., reaching finally the East Coast, including the air right here in Washington, D.C.

I have spoken with people whose homes and ranches were in the path of this fire. It moved so fast they could not gather and remove their cattle in time to save them. They have been sending me pictures of animals that have perished and pictures of many others who had to be put down because of injuries they suffered from the flames from which they could not escape. These are truly some of the saddest photos I have ever seen.

How did we get here? Fires happen naturally in our Western forests. They have always been a part of the Western landscape. These fires used to burn low to the ground at relatively low temperatures. Underbrush, vegetation, and smaller trees would burn, and in what were normal times, larger trees would survive.

Then about 100 years ago, our Nation decided to put out and suppress these fires. For years the trees and brush that grew unabated by fire were reduced to some extent by logging activities then allowed in our forests.

In the 1970s, forests saw the beginning of a steep reduction in forest management, and our forests began to grow unnaturally dense. Federal regulations decimated the timber industry, leaving more and more trees and brush on our Federal lands. The fires, fueled by this huge amount of ever-increasing woody mass, grew in their ferocity and danger. And now, after years of fire suppression and woefully inadequate forest management, we are paying the price.

The horrific infernos we are seeing out West are not the fires of centuries past. These terrifying, out-of-control wildfires become so immense, they often start burning from the top of the trees, not from the underbrush, leaping from treetop to treetop, causing the fire to travel faster and burn hotter.

The blame for our forests' deplorable and dangerous condition does not belong to any one person or group. However, I must call out the massive special-interest lawsuit industry that profits from the operation of the Equal Access to Justice Act by legally kneecapping almost every attempt to manage our Western forests.

So what is the long-term solution? We are seeing some early evidence that managed forests fared far better than did forests that were not thinned or otherwise treated in anticipation of the fires that are sure to come. Firefighters on the ground indicated that thinned areas slowed down the fires so that firefighters had a fighting chance to bring the fire in those areas under control.

This is good news because it means there is some hope. There is a way out of this if Congress can find the political will to work toward a solution.

I am pleased to report I am working with ranking member Bruce Westerman, whose Resilient Federal Forests Act will be a huge step toward giving the Forest Service the tools it needs to better manage our vast public lands.

In fact, today, I introduced legislation included in that package, the Commonsense Coordination Act. This bill will cut through some of the red tape that agencies must overcome to complete critical forest management activities.

I express my sympathy to the people suffering from the Bootleg fire and all the fires across the West. My staff and I have been on nonstop calls with local officials, county commissioners, and ranchers. The experiences they are sharing are incredibly sad and made more so by the fact that we could have done so much better when it came to protecting our Nation's forests and those that live in and around them. I will continue to do all I can here in Congress to help.

Lastly, I thank all the brave men and women who are out fighting the fires, including firefighters, farmers, ranchers, helicopter pilots and others. This is hot, dirty, difficult, and dangerous work, but their tireless efforts are saving lives, homes, forests, wildlife, livestock, and property.

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