[House Hearing, 115 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
AIR QUALITY IMPACTS OF WILDFIRES: PERSPECTIVES OF KEY STAKEHOLDERS
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
OCTOBER 4, 2017
__________
Serial No. 115-61
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Printed for the use of the Committee on Energy and Commerce
energycommerce.house.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
27-516 PDF WASHINGTON : 2018
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COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE
GREG WALDEN, Oregon
Chairman
JOE BARTON, Texas FRANK PALLONE, Jr., New Jersey
Vice Chairman Ranking Member
FRED UPTON, Michigan BOBBY L. RUSH, Illinois
JOHN SHIMKUS, Illinois ANNA G. ESHOO, California
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas GENE GREEN, Texas
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee DIANA DeGETTE, Colorado
STEVE SCALISE, Louisiana MICHAEL F. DOYLE, Pennsylvania
ROBERT E. LATTA, Ohio JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
CATHY McMORRIS RODGERS, Washington G.K. BUTTERFIELD, North Carolina
GREGG HARPER, Mississippi DORIS O. MATSUI, California
LEONARD LANCE, New Jersey KATHY CASTOR, Florida
BRETT GUTHRIE, Kentucky JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland
PETE OLSON, Texas JERRY McNERNEY, California
DAVID B. McKINLEY, West Virginia PETER WELCH, Vermont
ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois BEN RAY LUJAN, New Mexico
H. MORGAN GRIFFITH, Virginia PAUL TONKO, New York
GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida YVETTE D. CLARKE, New York
BILL JOHNSON, Ohio DAVID LOEBSACK, Iowa
BILLY LONG, Missouri KURT SCHRADER, Oregon
LARRY BUCSHON, Indiana JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, III,
BILL FLORES, Texas Massachusetts
SUSAN W. BROOKS, Indiana TONY CARDENAS, CaliforniaL RUIZ,
MARKWAYNE MULLIN, Oklahoma California
RICHARD HUDSON, North Carolina SCOTT H. PETERS, California
CHRIS COLLINS, New York DEBBIE DINGELL, Michigan
KEVIN CRAMER, North Dakota
TIM WALBERG, Michigan
MIMI WALTERS, California
RYAN A. COSTELLO, Pennsylvania
EARL L. ``BUDDY'' CARTER, Georgia
Subcommittee on Environment
JOHN SHIMKUS, Illinois
Chairman
DAVID B. McKINLEY, West Virginia PAUL TONKO, New York
Vice Chairman Ranking Member
JOE BARTON, Texas RAUL RUIZ, California
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania SCOTT H. PETERS, California
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee GENE GREEN, Texas
GREGG HARPER, Mississippi DIANA DeGETTE, Colorado
PETE OLSON, Texas JERRY McNERNEY, California
BILL JOHNSON, Ohio TONY CARDENAS, California
BILL FLORES, Texas DEBBIE DINGELL, Michigan
RICHARD HUDSON, North Carolina DORIS O. MATSUI, California
KEVIN CRAMER, North Dakota FRANK PALLONE, Jr., New Jersey (ex
TIM WALBERG, Michigan officio)
EARL L. ``BUDDY'' CARTER, Georgia
GREG WALDEN, Oregon (ex officio)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hon. John Shimkus, a Representative in Congress from the State of
Illinois, opening statement.................................... 1
Prepared statement........................................... 3
Hon. Paul Tonko, a Representative in Congress from the State of
New York, opening statement.................................... 3
Hon. Greg Walden, a Representative in Congress from the State of
Oregon, opening statement...................................... 5
Prepared statement........................................... 6
Hon. Frank Pallone, Jr., a Representative in Congress from the
State of New Jersey, opening statement......................... 7
Witnesses
John Bailey, Professor, Oregon State University, College of
Forestry....................................................... 10
Prepared statement........................................... 12
Answers to submitted questions............................... 170
Jim Karels, State Forester, State of Florida..................... 19
Prepared statement........................................... 21
Answers to submitted questions............................... 173
Knox Marshall, Vice President of Resources, Murphy Company....... 31
Prepared statement........................................... 33
Answers to submitted questions............................... 178
Christopher Topik, Director, Restoring Americas Forest, The
Nature Conservancy............................................. 40
Prepared statement........................................... 42
Answers to submitted questions............................... 182
Submitted Material
Statement of the Western Governors' Association.................. 81
National Climate Assessment 2014, chapter 7 on forests........... 96
EPA report entitled, ``Climate Change Indicators in the United
States: Wildfires''............................................ 116
Climate Central report entitled, ``Western Wildfires: A Fiery
Future'' \1\
Climate Central article entitled, ``Wildfire Season is Scorching
the West''..................................................... 125
Climate Central article entitled, ``With Warming, Wesern Fires
May Sickent More People''...................................... 130
Climate Central article entitled, ``Climate Change Behind Surge
in Western Wildfires''......................................... 134
Article entitled, ``In the West, communities pioneer cooperative
approach to fighting wildfires,'' Christian Science Monitor,
September 21, 2017............................................. 140
Article entitled, ``Climate Change Expected to Fuel Larger Forest
Fires--If It Hasn't Already,''San Diego Tribune, July 4, 2017.. 151
Article entitled, ``Heat Waves and Wildfire Signal Warning about
Climate Change (and Budget Cuts),'' Union of Concerned
Scientists, June 19, 2017...................................... 155
Article entitled, ``A Warmer World is Sparking More and Bigger
Wildfires,'' Yale Environment 360, October 2, 2017............. 161
----------
\1\ The information can be found at: http://docs.house.gov/
meetings/if/if18/20171004/106463/hhrg-115-if18-20171004-
sd007.pdf.
AIR QUALITY IMPACTS OF WILDFIRES: PERSPECTIVES OF KEY STAKEHOLDERS
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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2017
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Environment,
Committee on Energy and Commerce
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:01 a.m., in
room 2123, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John Shimkus
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Shimkus, McKinley, Harper, Olson,
Johnson, Flores, Hudson, Walberg, Carter, Walden (ex officio),
Tonko, Ruiz, Peters, Green, DeGette, Cardenas, Dingell, Matsui,
and Pallone (ex officio).
Also Present: Representatives Schrader and McMorris
Rodgers.
Staff Present: Ray Baum, Staff Director; Mike Bloomquist,
Deputy Staff Director; Allie Bury, Legislative Clerk, Energy/
Environment; Kelly Collins, Staff Assistant; Zachary Dareshori,
Staff Assistant; Wyatt Ellertson, Research Associate, Energy/
Environment; Tom Hassenboehler, Chief Counsel, Energy/
Environment; Jordan Haverly, Policy Coordinator, Environment;
A.T. Johnston, Senior Policy Advisor, Energy; Ben Lieberman,
Senior Counsel, Energy; Mary Martin, Deputy Chief Counsel,
Energy/Environment; Drew McDowell, Executive Assistant; Katie
McKeogh, Press Assistant; Annelise Rickert, Counsel, Energy;
Dan Schneider, Press Secretary; Peter Spencer, Professional
Staff Member, Energy; Jason Stanek, Senior Counsel, Energy;
Hamlin Wade, Special Advisor, External Affairs; Jeff Carroll,
Minority Staff Director; Jean Fruci, Minority Policy Advisor,
Energy/Environment; Caitlin Haberman, Minority Professional
Staff Member; Rick Kessler, Minority Senior Advisor and Staff
Director, Energy/Environment; Alexander Ratner, Minority Policy
Analyst; Andrew Souvall, Minority Director of Communications,
Outreach, and Member Services; and C.J. Young, Minority Press
Secretary.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN SHIMKUS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS
Mr. Shimkus. The Subcommittee on Environment will now come
to order.
The chair recognizes himself for 5 minutes for an opening
statement.
First of all, actually, even before I start, we are also
going to be joined by two of my colleagues from other
subcommittees: Congressman Schrader from Oregon; I think Cathy
McMorris Rodgers from Washington State is also going to come.
By the rules of the committee, they are not allowed opening
statements. They can ask questions once all the members of the
subcommittee have. They are both from the great Northwest,
along with the chairman of the full committee. So we look
forward to their participation, and we welcome them to the
subcommittee.
This subcommittee has jurisdiction over the Clean Air Act,
and, for that reason, we frequently hold hearings about EPA
regulations and policies designed to address air pollution.
Today, we will address a source of air pollution so bad that it
accounts for some of the Nation's worst air quality episodes,
and that is the wildfires occurring across the U.S., especially
out West.
While most of the focus during and after these fires is on
the ecological and economic harm and the loss of life, the
public health impacts from these wildfire air emissions also
deserve congressional attention.
The statistics are staggering. So far this year, there have
been almost 49,000 wildfires in the United States, destroying
nearly 8.5 million acres. And the emissions from these fires
can have serious impacts on air quality over a range that can
stretch for many miles. As a result, millions of Americans can
be exposed to pollutants found in wildfire smoke, sometimes for
extended periods of time.
Nearly every other significant source of combustion, from
vehicles to power plants to factories, are subject to very
stringent controls, but the emissions from wildfires are
completely uncontrolled. Worst of all, the sharp increase in
particulate matter emissions from wildfire smoke can contribute
to eye and respiratory irritation, impaired lung function,
bronchitis, and exacerbation of asthma, especially in
vulnerable populations.
In looking for solutions to these wildfires and the
resulting air quality impacts, it is important to note how much
greater wildfire risks are on Federal lands as compared to
state or private lands. Often the largest and most polluting
fires originate or involve Federal lands. Many point to active
management of state and private forests as a reason behind
their relatively lower risk of catastrophic wildfires. There
are a number of preventative measures that have a proven track
record for reducing both the extent and severity of wildfires.
Where these measures are used, we see a much lower risk.
I look forward to learning more about active management
from our distinguished panel of forestry experts.
One successful forest management strategy is prescribed
burns, in which small, deliberate fires are set that
significantly reduce the risk of far more damaging wildfires
later on. Unfortunately, at least in some places, government
restrictions impeded the use of prescribed burns, due in part
to concerns about their air emissions from them. But these
restrictions may be counterproductive if prescribed burns help
avoid much greater air emissions from wildfires.
These are the kinds of policies we need to review. Congress
should be looking at any and all ways to address wildfires and
their emissions and, most important of all, the policy measures
that can help prevent or minimize wildfires in the first place.
With that, I am ending my opening statement, and, seeing no
other colleague asking for the remaining time, I yield back
mine.
And I now turn to the ranking member of the subcommittee,
Mr. Tonko, for 5 minutes.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Shimkus follows:]
Prepared statement of Hon. John Shimkus
This subcommittee has jurisdiction over the Clean Air Act,
and for that reason we frequently hold hearings about EPA
regulations and policies designed to address air pollution.
Today, we will discuss a source of air pollution so bad that it
accounts for some of the nation's worst air quality episodes,
and that is the wildfires occurring across the U.S. and
especially out west. And while most of the focus during and
after these fires is on the ecological and economic harm and
the loss of life, the public health impacts from these wildfire
air emissions also deserve Congressional attention.
The statistics are staggering. So far this year there have
been almost 49,000 wildfires in the United States destroying
nearly 8.5 million acres. And the emissions from these fires
can have serious impacts on air quality over a range that can
stretch for many miles. As a result, millions of Americans can
be exposed to the pollutants found in wildfire smoke, sometimes
for extended periods of time.
Nearly every other significant source of combustion--from
vehicles to power plants to factories--are subject to very
stringent controls. But the emissions from wildfires are
completely uncontrolled. Worst of all are the sharp increases
in particulate matter emissions from wildfire smoke, which can
contribute to eye and respiratory irritation, impaired lung
function, bronchitis, and exacerbation of asthma, especially in
vulnerable populations.
In looking for solutions to these wildfires and the
resulting air quality impacts, it is important to note how much
greater wildfire risks are on federal lands as compared to
state and private lands. Often, the largest and most polluting
fires originate on or involve federal lands. Many point to
active management of state and private forests as a big reason
behind their relatively lower risk of catastrophic wildfires.
There are a number of preventive measures that have a proven
track record for reducing both the extent and severity of
wildfires, and where these measures are used, we see a much
lower risk. I look forward to learning more about active
management from our distinguished panel of forestry experts.
One successful forest management strategy is prescribed
burns, in which small deliberate fires are set that
significantly reduce the risk of far more damaging wildfires
later on. Unfortunately, at least in some places, government
restrictions impeded the use of prescribed burns, due in part
to concerns about the air emissions from them. But these
restrictions may be counterproductive if prescribed burns help
avoid much greater air emissions from wildfires. These are the
kinds of policies we need to review.
Congress should be looking at any and all ways to address
wildfires and their air emissions, and most important of all,
the policy measures that can help prevent or minimize wildfires
in the first place. Thank you.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. PAUL TONKO, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW YORK
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for calling this
important hearing.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here this morning.
Gentlemen, thank you for making the effort. I appreciate the
opportunity to hear more about wildfires and the serious air
quality issues they are causing.
This year, there have been over 49,000 fires in the United
States, which have burned approximately 8.5 million acres. 2017
has been the most expensive year for firefighting yet. The
United States Forest Service has spent more than $2 billion. In
addition to these tremendous costs, public health is also at
risk. Smoke, which includes particulate matter and carbon
monoxide, is choking people in communities around the country,
particularly out West.
As these forests burn, a significant amount of greenhouse
gas pollution is also released. Undeniably, all of these issues
have become increasingly worse in recent years, so this is an
important hearing.
Many of my Democratic colleagues and I often speak about
the dangers associated with poor air quality. And it is clear
that wildfires pose significant health, ecological, and fiscal
challenges.
Today, we will hear much about the consequences of these
fires to both human health as well as forest health. We will
also hear about the changing philosophies on forest management.
I know work is being done to promote forest management
techniques, such as prescribed burns and other tools, to
improve forest health and reduce the harm of smoke. To that
end, EPA updated its Exceptional Events Rule to allow the
pollution from prescribed fires to be considered exceptional as
long as certain smoke management practices are followed.
But we would be remiss if we only discussed the
consequences of wildfires while ignoring the driving cause of
these increasingly numerous and severe disasters, that being
climate change. The 2014 National Climate Assessment identified
the relationship between climate and fire. Very plainly, it
found that, ``forests in the United States will be increasingly
affected by large and intense fires that occur more
frequently.''
Atmospheric and oceanic warming, higher temperatures
causing drier fuels and forests, changes to snow pack, and
years of drought are already coalescing to increase the length
and depth of fire season. This issue is not going away, and, in
fact, climate change will continue to exacerbate the problem,
so we cannot ignore the causes. I am sure that improved forest
management can help mitigate some of the dangers and costs, but
these bigger climate issues must be considered.
Our forests are capable of capturing and storing
significant amounts of carbon, which can continue to reduce
carbon pollution and help meet emissions reduction goals.
Because forests provide opportunities to reduce future climate
change by storing carbon, inevitably they must be part of our
climate solution. But having more and more acres burn without
addressing the underlying causes will only make our air quality
and greenhouse gas pollution issues that much worse.
So I ask that we keep the causes in mind as we think about
how to help ensure our fellow Americans are able to have the
air quality they expect and deserve in order to live a healthy
life.
With that, I again thank you, Mr. Chair, and yield back.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back.
The chair now recognizes the chairman of the full
committee, Mr. Walden from the State of Oregon, who is living
this as we speak. And the chairman is recognized for 5 minutes.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. GREG WALDEN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OREGON
Mr. Walden. I thank the chairman, and I commend him and Mr.
Tonko for your statements on this matter. And it is time that
we looked at air quality as part of the overall mix.
Oregonians have been living with this problem in the rural
West for years--smoke-clogged skies from catastrophic fires.
Just this summer in my home State of Oregon, we watched as
fires burned more than 678,000 acres. That is equivalent to
two-thirds the size of Rhode Island. And over $340 million has
been spent so far to fight those fires--state, local, Federal
costs.
And you can see the impacts. I have a photo up here. Sue
from Rogue River sent me this. This is what it looked like in
her pasture during one of these fires. It is really dense
smoke. You may think that is fog. That is smoke from a fire
that burned more than 190,000 acres.
And what you have to understand is that didn't burn off in
the morning. That was there probably for a month. This is what
we are facing throughout the Northwest, throughout the West
every summer. In these basins, the smoke settles in like that,
and there it sits.
Across Oregon, schools were forced to close because the air
quality was so bad they didn't want the children in the
schools. Some high schools had to travel hours away for
football games. The Mighty Oregon Ducks had to go over to the
Oregon coast to practice because the air quality in Eugene was
so bad. Annual community events, from the Sisters Folk Festival
to the 30th anniversary of Cycle, Oregon, to Shakespeare plays
in Ashland--all cancelled. Nine plays, $400,000 lost to the
Shakespeare theater, just in nine plays.
That is just the direct cost. I can't tell you how many
people I talked to who had health issues develop that never had
them before, people that had to go see physicians or go to the
hospital because the air quality was so bad.
We know that wildfires pour significant amounts of
pollution into our air. And, according to the EPA, forest
wildfires emitted an annual average of 105.5 millions tons of
carbon dioxide into the United States between 2000 and 2005.
And, in fact, in 2005 alone, wildfires resulted in more than
126 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the United
States.
And in a fire that I remember, the 2002 Biscuit Fire in
southwest Oregon, the carbon dioxide emitted during that fire
amounted to almost one-quarter of the total of carbon dioxide
emitted in Oregon for the entire year. So, to Mr. Tonko's
point, this is a contributing factor to additional carbon and
other pollutants in the atmosphere.
It doesn't have to be this way. Fuel loads continue to
build up in our forests because of broken Federal forest
policies that have led to a lack of management. As you can see
in the next chart that we are going to put up, between 2011 and
2015, Federal forests in Oregon grew by 1.3 billion cubic feet.
Of that, 9 percent was harvested; 29 percent, that represents
how much timber died; and the remaining 62 percent, or 822
million cubic feet, remains as fuel for fire. The point is our
forests are not static but our management is.
Reducing that fuel load reduces the severity of a fire and
the emissions. In fact, a 2014 study by the Sierra Nevada
Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy, and the Forest Service
showed that fuel treatment projects can reduce size and
intensity of fire between 30 and 76 percent. Treatment also
reduces carbon emissions from these fires by up to 85 percent.
Now, we are always going to have fire, but we can reduce
the risk and intensity through proper management. And when we
do get fire, we must get in and clean up and replant. To our
colleague's point, healthy, green forests sequester carbon.
Old, dead, dying forests emit it. And forest fires do the worst
in that respect. The forests are really our lungs, and we
should restore forests that are destroyed by fire. In fact, a
study by the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research
Station found that younger growing stands of trees absorb more
carbon than far older stands.
We also need to consider how we choose to fight fire and
the impacts of letting fire burn within wilderness areas simply
because of that management designation. I have had a lot of
complaints from people I represent and people throughout Oregon
who are concerned that part of the Forest Service policy is
``let her burn.'' And that is because it is in a wildness area,
and they are not supposed to use intensive forest fire
practices.
I understand that, but my concern is, does that take into
account what happens to people who have to suffer from the
smoke from those fires? The communities in my district, like
Grants Pass and Medford, that saw days on end of ``very
unhealthy,'' or worse air quality during the Chetco Bar Fire.
That fire was spotted at a quarter of an acre on July 12 in
wilderness. It has now burned 191,000 acres.
These decisions on how, when, and how aggressively to fight
fire matter. They matter to our forests, to our habitat, to our
watersheds, and to the air quality in our communities. So let's
have less of this ash and less of the ruin and better air
quality.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Walden follows:]
Prepared statement of Hon. Greg Walden
Today, we're taking a long overdue look at an air quality
issue that has affected Oregonians and those living across the
rural West for years--smoked clogged skies from catastrophic
wildfires. Just this summer in my home state of Oregon, we
watched as fires burned more than 678,000 acres--equivalent to
two-thirds the size of Rhode Island--and over $340 million has
been spent--so far--to fight them.
And you can see the impacts. Sue, from Rogue River, sent me
these pictures of what looks like fog on her pasture. In
reality it's dense smoke from a fire that burned over 190,000
acres.
Across Oregon schools were forced to close because of smoke
and poor air quality. Some high schools traveled hours away for
football games, and my Oregon Ducks had to practice on the
Oregon coast to get away from the smoke.
Annual community events, from the Sister's folk festival,
to performances of the Britt Festival in Jacksonville and the
famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland were canceled.
Communities have watched timber jobs disappear as more and more
of our federal land has become locked up. Those same
communities are now watching tourism dollars slip away as
visitors stay away from the smoke.
In meetings across my district earlier this month, I heard
similar stories in different communities of people that were
finding themselves visiting a doctor, only to learn their
respiratory challenges were a result of the smoke.
We know that wildfires pour significant amounts of
pollution into our air. According to EPA, forest wildfires
emitted an annual average of 105.5 million tons of carbon
dioxide in the United States between 2000 and 2005. In 2005
alone, wildfires resulted in more than 126 million tons of
carbon dioxide in the United States. And in a fire that I
remember--the 2002 Biscuit Fire in southwest Oregon--the carbon
dioxide emitted during that fire amounted to almost one-quarter
of the total carbon dioxide emitted in Oregon that year.
It doesn't have to be this way. Fuel loads continue to
build up in our forests because of broken federal forest
policies that have led to a lack of management. As you can see
in this chart, between 2011 and 2015 federal forests in Oregon
grew by 1.3 billion cubic feet. Of that, only 9% was harvested,
29% dies, and the remaining 62%--or 822 million cubic feet
remains as fuel for fires.
Reducing that fuel load reduces the severity of a fire and
the emissions. A 2014 study by the Sierra Nevada Conservancy,
The Nature Conservancy and the Forest Service, showed that fuel
treatment projects can reduce the size and intensity of fire
between 30 and 76 percent. Treatment also helps reduce carbon
emissions from these fires by up to 85 percent.
Now, we're always going to have fires but we can reduce the
risk and intensity through proper management. And when we do
get fire, we must get in and clean up and replant. Just like
private forest managers do. These forests are our lungs after
all, and we should restore forests that are destroyed by fire.
In fact, a study by the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest
Research Station found that younger, growing stands of trees
absorb more carbon than far older stands.
We also need to consider how we choose to fight fire, and
the impacts of letting fires burn within wilderness--simply
because of its management designation--on air quality.
For communities in my district like Grants Pass and Medford
that saw days on end of ``Very Unhealthy'' or worse air quality
during the Chetco Bar fire, which was spotted at \1/4\ of an
acre on July 12th in wilderness, and has now burned over
191,000 acres, these decisions matter greatly.
There are plenty of questions to explore today and I look
forward to exploring them a bit more depth over the course of
this hearing.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his time.
The chair now recognizes the ranking member of the full
committee, Mr. Pallone from New Jersey, for 5 minutes.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. FRANK PALLONE, JR., A REPRESENTATIVE
IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY
Mr. Pallone. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This year has been a terrible year for natural disasters.
Record numbers of wildfires and catastrophic hurricanes have
claimed lives and property across the country and in the U.S.
territories, and the human and financial costs of these events
are extremely high and still rising. Recovery takes years, and
some places never fully recover.
Climate change, in my opinion, is having the effects that
were anticipated by the scientific community, and yet the Trump
administration and the congressional Republican leadership
continue to stick their heads in the sand. And they do so at
all of our peril.
It is long past time for us to deal with the realities and
risks we face due to the change in climate. We need to do a
much better job of protecting communities by making them more
resistant and resilient to natural disasters, and we need to
slow the pace of climate change. And we need to adapt to the
changes that we are facing.
All of this is critical, and it simply cannot be done until
the Republican leadership actually acknowledges that it is
indeed a problem. One would hope that the hurricanes and fires
of the recent months have served as a wake-up call for some of
my Republican colleagues, and we will see.
Now, turning to wildfires, I expect all of our witnesses
today will point out that fire is and always has been part of
the lifecycle of forests. In fact, many ecosystems are well-
adapted to fire. Some systems require periodic burning to
remain healthy to regenerate. In fact, some of the problems we
are experiencing today are the unfortunate result of having
suppressed fires in these systems for too long.
But severe drought, high seasonal temperatures, expansion
of native pest species, and the introduction of invasive
species also play a role. Climate change coupled with the
buildup of brush, small trees, and other forest fuels has
resulted in more frequent fires that burn hotter over more
extensive areas.
The Forest Service recently announced that the firefighting
costs for this season have exceeded $2 billion, and we haven't
yet reached the end of the fire season. The costs for
firefighting have been climbing, and if we do not change our
management of these systems and invest more in preventative
management, we can expect the costs to continue to grow.
But proper management does not mean simply increasing
timber harvests. Logging does not prevent wildfires or minimize
the impact when fires start. We need comprehensive ecosystem
management that includes prescribed fires, selective
harvesting, and reforestation. And we need greater public
education, involvement, and participation, especially by
communities living near and around forests to help them reduce
their fire risk.
This hearing will highlight the air quality problems
associated with wildfires. Smoke from those fires contains
particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and other harmful gasses.
It is a serious health hazard, particularly for those who
suffer from asthma and other respiratory diseases, and it is a
significant threat for the firefighters who respond and spend
weeks fighting to control and put out the blaze.
The intense smoke also adversely affects visibility across
large areas--we saw a picture that our chairman put up--and
that impacts transportation, recreation, and tourism. Longer,
more intense fire seasons expose many people in these areas to
months of poor air quality.
Forests are a great resource. They provide tremendous
economic and ecological benefits. They protect water quality,
provide raw materials, and they support numerous recreation and
economic activities. They are home to a diverse array of plants
and animals. And these systems are among the most effective at
absorbing and storing the excessive carbon we continue to pump
into the atmosphere.
So, managed properly, they will continue to provide a full
array of benefits, though we must acknowledge and respond to
the threat that climate change presents to these systems and
the communities that live near them.
I would like to yield the remaining minute to Mr. Schrader,
my colleague from Oregon.
Mr. Schrader. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I think I have a slide I would like to put up on the screen
too.
Wildfire treatment and forest management must work hand-in-
glove together. The Eagle Creek Fire, burning close to
Portland, basically devastated our iconic Columbia River Gorge,
denuding popular and previously spectacular hiking trails that
now will not be available for years to come.
But there is a more dangerous and insidious problem in our
Federal forests that has gone almost completely unnoticed. That
is the carbon emissions from dead and diseased trees in our
forests. According to the Oregon Global Warming Commission,
Oregon's forests are responsible for 75 percent of all long-
term emissions produced statewide by all other sectors. And the
bulk of that is from tree mortality, not just wildfires.
More chilling yet, although Federal forests occupy 50
percent of Oregon's forests, they account for 70 percent of
yearly emissions due to tree mortality, while private forests
only occupy 33 percent of state forestland and emit 16 percent
due to tree death.
Active forest management is essential to preventing harmful
ozone-depleting emissions. And, fortunately, there is
legislation being developed to put healthy forest stewardship
back into our neglected national forest treasures.
I look forward to the panel today. Thank you. And I yield
back.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman's time has expired.
We now conclude with members' opening statements. The chair
will----
Mr. Walden. Mr. Chairman, a point of order, just for a
second.
That photo, by the way, is about 10 miles from where I
live, that he had up there, in the gorge. That is the scenic
Columbia River Gorge, national scenic area.
That fire burned 14 miles in one night, headed toward
Portland when the winds were blowing. Then it shifted and came
toward where I live. So they had to shut down barge traffic on
the Columbia River--first time, I think, in history. That is
the mighty Columbia River. And the railroads and the freeway
were all shut down.
So thank you for the indulgence.
Mr. Shimkus. Without objection. Obviously, it is a
catastrophe, and we appreciate the adding to the photos with
the real-life observations and the concerns, and part of the
reason why we are here today.
We have now concluded with members' opening statements. The
chair would like to remind members that, pursuant to committee
rules, all members' opening statements will be made part of the
record.
We want to thank our witnesses for being here today and
taking the time to testify before the subcommittee.
Today's witnesses have the opportunity to give opening
statements, followed by a round of questions from our members.
Your full statements have been submitted for the record. We
usually go about 5 minutes. As you see, this is not a highly
contentious, controversial, mean-spirited hearing, so if you go
over, that is going to be cool. But just don't go too long over
the 5 minutes, because yes, then it will become contentious by
members.
I will introduce you one at a time as you give your opening
statements.
And, with that, I would like to first start with Mr. John
Bailey, Professor at Oregon State University, College of
Forestry.
Again, your full statement has been submitted for the
record. You have 5 minutes. Welcome.
STATEMENTS OF JOHN BAILEY, PROFESSOR, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY,
COLLEGE OF FORESTRY; JIM KARELS, STATE FORESTER, STATE OF
FLORIDA; KNOX MARSHALL, VICE PRESIDENT OF RESOURCES, MURPHY
COMPANY; AND CHRISTOPHER TOPIK, DIRECTOR, RESTORING AMERICAS
FOREST, THE NATURE CONSERVANCY
STATEMENT OF JOHN BAILEY
Mr. Bailey. Thanks for the opportunity to address this
subcommittee and generally talk about these important topics.
And beyond my background and the research in teaching, in
fire, my basic philosophy is research, curiosity, education,
social engagement, and commonsense solutions. And I think this
is an example where we can really make progress on that.
I am going to make six points today.
The first, and it has come up, that the wildfire and
associated smoke is just inevitable. And it was mentioned that
these systems have evolved with fire, and it is just part of
the Western world. And so we have to be careful about
complaining about the numbers of acres and numbers of fires,
because it is inevitable and these systems burn. And really
what the issue is about the uncharacteristic behavior and the
fuel accumulations and those kinds of things that we have out
there right now.
I am sorry that my predecessors created that illusion, that
fire was somehow un-normal and destructive and catastrophic.
Some of that was our own fault, with Smokey Bear. Some of it we
can blame on Walt Disney and Bambi. But whatever the reason is,
we have to update our thinking on what is the role of fire out
there.
And, fortunately, we have a lot of available science and
technology and research to continue looking at these issues and
help us regain, you know, some ability to view and manage fire
as a natural part of the system. And that will have impacts on
our human communities and air quality.
And one of the changes I definitely want to make in the
light of climate change is, rather than repeating that our
policy is suppression, we need to just get that word,
``attempt'' suppression, in there all the time, because these
wildfires are inevitable.
Number two has already been mentioned. 2017 has been an
impressive year. It will set some records, but all the numbers
are not in yet. And it is the collision of climate and the
accumulated fuels that have been referenced. We have an
unprecedented amount of fuels on many, many of our acres out
there. And what is a bigger concern for these large fires and
landscape-level fire is that those acres are better connected
than they have ever been, and fire flows across the landscape
much like water.
So these are unprecedented conditions. Our ancestors would
not have feared these climate conditions unless they would have
had these kinds of fuel conditions. And so we have to view them
together and treat them together.
Number three, holding to our current course and hoping that
this is going to get better on its own would be a terrible
mistake to make. And remember that part of the definition of
``insanity'' is to keep doing the same thing and expect a
different outcome. In fact, there is a pathological side to
this, where doing things like 100-percent suppression or 100-
percent attempting suppress actually makes the problem worse in
the long run. And so we don't need to keep doing things that we
know are making it worse.
Number four, this is a complex issue. It has already been
mentioned that we can't just log our way out of this. This
needs to be a comprehensive view. Our forests are scenery. As
we saw, they are wild areas, they are recreational
opportunities, they are watersheds that protect our water
supply and fish. These hillsides are wildlife habitat. Yes,
they are timber, they are fiber, they are carbon, they are
ecosystems, and there are things that we haven't even thought
about yet.
But they are also fuel. And when I look at them, I see
fuel. And we need to think about them as fuel, and they are
going to burn. Sustainable forest management, as we have talked
about, ecosystem management, will yield, plenty of fiber and
wood to meet the needs of society and the planet, and that is
fine. In fact, in the near term, we have a backlog that we can
remove from our hillsides.
Number five, a lot of the biomass is actually fine fuel.
And that is going to be the role of prescribed burning, because
that is about the only way to get rid of that fuel accumulation
that is out there on the landscape. And that is a wonderful
tool that we have. And using fire to limit future fire is an
age-old proposition and approach. And it is much like
vaccination; we can vaccinate our landscapes by using good,
sound management, including prescribed fire.
And, finally, number six, we are straddled with a legacy of
accumulated outdated thinking as much as accumulated fuels for
this. And like our views on fire, also logging, and our old
thoughts about timber battles and all--we have to get beyond
the idea that preservation works in any meaningful way. These
are dynamic systems, like I mentioned, that are going to burn.
So we can't just set them aside and let them do their own
things.
The good news is there are abundant win-win-win situations
that we can move forward with. And the forestry profession and
Oregon State University forestry will contribute to that as
best we can.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Bailey follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his time.
The chair now recognizes Jim Karels, State Forester from
the State of Florida.
Welcome, sir.
STATEMENT OF JIM KARELS
Mr. Karels. Thank you, Chairman Shimkus, Ranking Member
Tonko, Full Committee Chair Walden, and members of the
subcommittee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify before
you today on this important issue of air quality and wildfires.
My name is Jim Karels. I am the state forester and director
of the Florida Forest Service. And I am here today testifying
on behalf of the National Association of State Foresters, of
which I have been a past president, and I am the current
Wildland Fire Committee chair. I have spent 36 years in the
fire and forestry business across the country, and I am honored
to share some of those experiences with you today.
NASF represents the directors of the state forestry
agencies across the country. We deliver technical and financial
assistance, along with wildfire and resource protection, on
two-thirds of the 766 million acres of forest in this country.
We do that with support from the United States Forest
Service, state and private forestry programs, and state and
volunteer fire assistance grants, which provide equipment and
training to the firefighters who respond to state and private
land fires, where over 80 percent of the Nation's wildfires
start.
As was mentioned, a very challenging year--49,000 fires,
8.5 million acres, with still more activity and potential in
California for the fall and parts of the Southeast.
Florida was not immune to wildfire activity this year.
Southwest Florida, in a span of 4 months this spring, evacuated
5,000 homes and inundated cities like Naples and Fort Myers and
surrounding communities with smoke and air quality issues. And,
at the same time, on the Georgia-Florida line, the 150,000-acre
West Mims Fire impacted rural communities, natural resources,
and air quality issues for cities as large as Jacksonville.
Fire is a natural part--well, let's back up, because I left
out the West. The western states all summer long grabbed the
headlines of the issue of smoke, hundreds of fires blanketing
communities across the western U.S., with smoke endangering
citizens and wildland firefighters and impacting, like I said,
communities large and small.
Fire is a natural part of our ecosystem. There are
beneficial fires. These fires thin our forests, they reduce the
fuels, they improve the wildlife habitat, and they improve our
forest health. However, we are seeing more and more of the
catastrophic fires, like this summer, that are very costly and
that produce a tremendous amount of air pollution.
While burning, forest produces numerous hazardous chemicals
in its smoke plume. The pollutant of most concern is that
particulate matter that was spoken of, microscopic particles,
2.5 microns in size, that penetrate deep into the lungs and
cause breathing issues and negative issues on our health.
We know the effects of exposure of these particulate matter
are felt most in our sensitive populations: our children, our
elderly, and those that have existing conditions.
We know the effects of prolonged exposure is also a
significant issue. Our bodies can eliminate this particulate
matter during a 1- or 2-hour or even a 1- or 2-day process, but
those prolonged events, weeks and months on end, as the
Congressman said in Oregon and stuff, that has significant
impact on your health, whether you are a citizen, whether you
are a firefighter. And I can speak firsthand on experience of
wildland fire safety and smoke later on, if wanted.
Wildfire smoke also has impacts on our communities in many
ways beyond the simple human health. Tourism revenue suffers.
Children suffer from the canceled outdoor events and the
inability to recreate outside. Motorists face significant
driving issues. Wildfire smoke is a major issue across our
country.
So what do we do to address the issue of these mass amounts
of wildfire smoke during the fire season? The state foresters
believe wholly in prescribed fire during the right times of
year and targeted hazardous fuel reduction projects.
With respect to prescribed fires, I mentioned it is part of
our forest ecosystem. However, it is better that fire happens
under that controlled system of a fire manager where we know
the winds, we know the temperature, we have predetermined
boundaries, and we are able to notify the public ahead of time,
rather than this uncontrolled, catastrophic large fire. And
those prescribed fires, many times, help to reduce the number
of catastrophic fires in the future.
In Florida and across the country, we also engage in forest
thinnings and targeted hazardous fuel removal for fire-
resilient landscapes. We do that with our private landowners,
we do that on our state forests, and we work with our U.S.
Forest Service partners through the Good Neighbor Authority in
Congress to reduce those fuels.
Once again, thank you for the opportunity to testify before
you today, and I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Karels follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Shimkus. Thank you, sir. Thank you for your testimony.
Now we turn to Knox Marshall, Vice President of Resources,
Murphy Company.
You are recognized for 5 minutes, sir.
STATEMENT OF KNOX MARSHALL
Mr. Marshall. Thank you.
Chairman Walden, Chairman Shimkus, and Ranking Member
Tonko, thank you for the opportunity to testify here today on
this very important issue.
As Congressman Walden and Congressman Schrader have pointed
out, they have witnessed this firsthand. We appreciate their
leadership on this important issue.
My name is Knox Marshall. I am Vice President of Murphy
Company, located in Eugene, Oregon. We are a wood products
manufacturer, and we rely on the forest for the wood products
we need to support our business. We are deeply committed to the
750 people we employ and the communities where our operations
are located.
These wildfires are having disastrous effects on our public
forests, human health, and public safety. While many natural
disasters are beyond our control, in the case of forest fires,
we can use active forest management to reduce the size and the
severity of these disasters and their impacts on direct air
quality while, also, we can produce renewable, climate-friendly
wood products used by Americans every day. A true win-win.
If the goal of our public policy is to have less toxic air,
less carbon pollution, healthy watersheds, resilient forests,
and sustainable wood products that create family-wage jobs in
rural communities, we have to manage our forests now.
Chairman Walden noted some of the serious impacts to air
quality and public health. My written testimony includes
examples of what happened this year in Oregon and Washington
when we were blanketed by smoke and ashes for the entire
summer--the worst I can remember in my career, going back 25-
plus years. Nationally, we set new records for the number of
acres burned and the cost of fighting these wildfires. Not
records anyone in this room probably wants to set.
Unfortunately, these trends will continue unless changes
are made to our Federal forest management and our Federal
forest fire suppression practices. There is an urgent need to
address the root cause of worsening catastrophic wildfires. It
is forest health. While we can't prevent all fires, science
does tell us that we can reduce the size and severity of
wildfires through active forest management, including timber
harvesting, mechanical thinning, and prescribed fire.
Nearly a century of fire suppression and the more recent
lack of active forest management of our Federal lands have
resulted in overstocked forests that are the root cause of the
mass mega-fires and the insect mortality we are seeing in
Western forests. Where we once had 50 to 100 trees per acre, we
now have 500 to 1,000-plus trees per acre. To that effect, it
is no surprise that 60 million acres of Federal forestlands are
at high risk to catastrophic wildfire.
Each year, Federal agencies are only able to mechanically
treat about 200,000 acres, and we continue to fall further and
further behind on this trajectory. It is also true that warming
temperatures are exacerbating the forest health crisis, which
is precisely why Federal agencies must act quickly to correct
these overstocked forest conditions.
We need to take a smart, proactive approach to fighting
wildfires, like the approach taken by many private and state
forest managers. These mega-fires lead to massive emissions of
CO2. The reality is that responsible forest
management and fire suppression will limit the emissions of
CO2 and sequester carbon in the wood products
produced, used every day in construction of our homes.
I want to emphasize the need for Congress to give our
Federal land management agencies new legal tools to reduce the
time and cost required to plan forest management projects,
particularly under the National Environmental Policy Act. It
will also require smart legal reforms to discourage serial
litigants who sue to delay and stop these projects.
I also personally have serious concerns, along with other
forest managers in the West, about the growing risk to our own
private forestlands. Lack of active management on neighboring
Federal lands, in what we believe is a growing failure of the
foresters to aggressively attack forest fires when they are
small and highly capable of being extinguished, poses a severe
risk to the assets that sustain our business that we have
purchased. A lot of times, the fire lines have become the
private property lines on these massive fires, because where
the management has taken place becomes a natural firebreak.
The agency's current approach to fighting fires is
imperiling much of the West and harming the air quality in a
significant manner. The choice to let the fire burn needs to be
thoroughly reviewed and utilized only in exceptional
circumstances where the risk of fire growth is absolutely
minimal and these ecological benefits are absolutely certain.
Absent any reform, state and private landowners need
sufficient authority to perform initial attack suppression
activities on Federal lands and/or the ability to hold Federal
agencies liable for damages to the private lands from the fires
that originate on Federal lands, similar to the liability we
face as landowners if we have fires burn onto Federal lands.
Thank you, and I welcome the opportunity to answer any
questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Marshall follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Shimkus. Thank you very much. Thank you for yielding
back.
The final member on the panel is Mr. Christopher Topik,
Director, Restoring America's Forest, with The Nature
Conservancy.
Thank you, sir. And you are welcome for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER TOPIK
Mr. Topik. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And, Mr. Chairman, thank you very much, and members of the
committee. I would like to associate myself with all the
opening statements of the committee leaders. A lot of good
words were said in that messaging, as well as with my
colleagues here.
I am representing The Nature Conservancy. We are a large
conservation group. Our mission is to conserve lands and
waters, upon which all life depends, and I would like to say
also air, which is even more fundamental.
I have been involved in this issue for a long time at a
policy level, and I am finding it hard not to say once again
what we have been saying for years: An ounce of prevention is
worth more than a pound of cure.
And we go to these hearings year after year. It is almost
repetitive. I have looked at some older statements. Once again,
a terrible, terrible fire year. Once again, really bad impacts
from smoke. I have experienced smoke impacts myself,
personally, and with elderly family members, so I know it is a
real problem. And yet we still often fail to invest in the kind
of preparedness that we know is important.
Air quality and the other negative impacts of these extreme
wildfires can indeed be reduced if we do more forest
restoration appropriately and we bring back more healthy fires.
And that is part of a conundrum here, to understand that it is
absolutely vital to get more fire on the landscape, but fire
that we are controlling and will end up having the burns
happen. And so that is the big challenge that we have.
We need to be able to adjust our thinking to long-term
solutions and not just short-term solutions. And without a
clear focus on forest resilience, we are going to continue to
have these smoke problems.
All levels of government need to work with and support
local communities to learn to live with fire and smoke. The
challenge we often have with local air agencies, the only thing
they can control is the prescribed fires; they can't control
wildfires. And so they often have limited airshed space, and so
that is what they restrict.
So this is a key area of importance that your committee can
have a very major role in helping us look at long-term
solutions and long-term benefits of getting the right kind of
controlled burns on the landscape.
The preparation and risk reduction does work. We have seen
it in many, many places. People have seen it. I know a Sisters,
Oregon fire was greatly reduced when it hit some areas that had
been treated, and I have seen it myself in some other extensive
areas. So it is something we need to invest in upfront.
I am a forest ecologist trained in forestry and biology,
but this is really a social problem. It is a people problem.
And so we are just not putting the attention we need to in
working with people and communities. And a little bit of money
invested in helping communities work--and I can talk for a
moment about some solutions--really does work. And that is
something we just need to do a lot more.
I also can't pass up the opportunity today to once again
say we need to fix the emergency fire suppression funding
problem. We have been saying that for years and years. It is
quite embarrassing. So I am very grateful for members that are
here for working on fixing the fire suppression funding so we
can do the upfront investments. And that solution needs to
stabilize Federal budgets for upfront work. It needs to include
disaster funding for fire. Fire is the only disaster that
doesn't get funding through the disaster fund. And we need to
reduce harmful borrowing of non-fire funds.
With respect to the forest management reforms, I am real
concerned that we be careful with taking too many shortcuts
that avoid the use of science and local community involvement.
I am very nervous about having very large projects approved
without having local and science, and I think that that will
have harmful impacts.
The NEPA process can be streamlined, but it needs to be
able to be done, to actually bring people in and build trust,
and be able to look at cumulative impacts of lots of
activities.
Some key projects and programs The Nature Conservancy is
involved in are wonderful examples, and they are really quite
inexpensive, and I encourage you all to look at these: the Fire
Learning Network, the Fire Adapted Communities Learning
Network, the prescribed fire training networks.
Today, there are, I think, five training programs going on
today, October 4, around the country, helping bring communities
and first responders together to learn better how to use fire
for controlled burning. And that is the kind of real
collaboration we need to focus in on, bringing local
communities to learn fires before, during, and after the fires,
working together, and bringing the full cycle of solutions
together.
I know I have been in Ashland, Oregon, a number of times,
and there we are able to--we and many others are working
together on a variety of solutions, all aimed at building the
resilience that reduces the fire impacts.
So, with that, I want to thank you for the chance to be
here.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Topik follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his time. We thank
you for your testimony.
Now we will go to the questions. I will start first, and I
will recognize myself for 5 minutes.
So this subcommittee is the Environment subcommittee, and a
lot of our focus is going to be on air quality and issues. So
the forestry debate, for some of those who live in the West,
they know it, but this is like ``Forestry 101 for Dummies'' for
us, so I have a couple quick questions.
Mr. Bailey, you said ``fuels.'' So define ``fuels'' for
those of us who are not from forest areas.
Mr. Bailey. Sure. Do I have a 45-minute lecture here? No.
All right.
So we would first divide living fuels versus dead fuels.
But, of course, the heat of the fire converts a living fuel
into a dead fuel. But living fuel would be all the things that
you would visualize when you walk through the woods out there.
The dead fuels include those aerial fuels up above the ground
surface----
Mr. Shimkus. So it is not just dead trees.
Mr. Bailey. Not just dead fuels--it is a whole----
Mr. Shimkus. Is the dead trees the predominant fuel that we
are talking about in this debate?
Mr. Bailey. No. The dominant fuel that is driving fire-
spread on an individual hillside or across an entire landscape
are the fine surface fuels, some living, some dead, because
they are so reactive to the fire flaming front as it comes
through.
Mr. Shimkus. OK.
Mr. Karels, you used the terminology ``hazardous fuels'' in
your statement. So what is a hazardous fuel? Or is it the same
thing?
Mr. Karels. I think it is the same thing. It tends to
become a hazard when it gets too heavy, when the fuels build up
to where there are ladder fuels, ground--the surface fuels the
doc talked about that has a ladder all the way to the tops of
the trees. So you haven't thinned it; that forest is not open.
There is not a prescribed fire program that is reducing the
ground-floor fuels. Now you have a ladder to the top. Now you
have pictures like the one you showed on the Columbia Gorge
where the fire is going 150 feet high.
Mr. Shimkus. So is the ladder to the top dead trees?
Mr. Karels. Not just dead trees. When you have a drought,
those live trees, fuel moistures go very low. The conditions
underneath preheat, and it takes the live trees just like it
takes the dead trees.
So you have a combination of both. You have a combination
of hazardous fuels that are dead trees and all--really, what we
call all that ladder fuel in between. If you have a scattered,
thin forest, you don't have those ladder fuels going to the
top, and you tend to have a lower surface fire that is easier
to suppress than the heavy fuels, the hazardous fuels that take
it into the crown and run with it, run 14 miles in a single
day.
Mr. Shimkus. Let me ask a question. With the hurricanes
that just went through Florida, was there a lot of toppling of
trees so that there is a buildup of fuels in the State of
Florida now?
Mr. Karels. In the southwest portion of the state, there
was. It will significantly increase the hazardous fuels through
that lower portion of Florida, from about Orlando, Tampa, down.
Mr. Shimkus. Is the State of Florida trying to manage that
excess fuel?
Mr. Karels. We are beginning that process. Really, right
now, Chairman, we are just digging out. I am surprised I am
here today, because I had 500 people in response right up to
last week. But that is our next step, to start to deal with
those fuels.
Mr. Shimkus. And let me go to Mr. Marshall.
Did you say something about break fuels? Or----
Mr. Marshall. My specialty is fuel reduction, removing the
fuel so there is lower risk of fire. What you will see in the
West a lot of times is, fire doesn't acknowledge property lines
or section lines, so where you have these checkerboard
ownerships, we have implemented on our own forestlands, a
thinning regime so that we actually reduce the fuel load, so
when the fires come off the Federal lands, there is a chance to
stop them because of our significant investments in these
lands.
Mr. Shimkus. And so let me go to the question I was
supposed to ask from committee staff, and that is to Mr.
Karels.
One study indicates that wildfires burning within 500 miles
of a city routinely caused air pollution to be 5 to 15 times
worse than normal and 2 to 3 times worse than the worst non-
fire day of the year. How does that track with your experience?
Mr. Karels. It tracks fairly well, Chairman, and, again, it
depends on the winds. It depends on the conditions and where
and stuff. But those are what we tend to call large,
catastrophic fires, they put a tremendous amount of smoke, a
tremendous amount of particle matter. And it is not uncommon
for impacts 200, 300, 400 miles way.
I will give you an example. We impacted the city of Chicago
in 2007 from one of the swamp fires on the Georgia-Florida
line. And just depending on how the winds are, it is that much
of an impact with those heavy fuel loadings and those really
large fires.
Mr. Shimkus. Great. Thank you for your answers.
Now I turn to the ranking member, Mr. Tonko from New York,
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And, gentlemen, again, welcome.
As you heard during opening statements, all the evidence
points to a trend in recent years of more numerous and more
severe fires. My supposition is that this is due to a number of
factors, some of which involve forest management, but many are
associated with the effects of climate change.
According to a 2015 United States Forest Service report,
``The United States burns twice as many acres as three decades
ago, and Forest Service scientists believe the acreage burned
may double again by midcentury.''
A 2012 Climate Central report found that burn season is 2
1A\1/2\ months longer than it was 40 years ago and that, for
every 1-degree Celsius temperature increase the Earth
experiences, the area burned in the Western United States could
quadruple.
So, Dr. Bailey, do you agree with this assessment?
Mr. Bailey. Yes. I have read those reports and others. It
is consistent.
Mr. Tonko. So what are the specific driving factors for the
longer fire season in recent years? And do you believe these
factors are strongly associated with climate change?
Mr. Bailey. From my reading, yes. Based on the warming, the
reduced snow pack, the small change in seasonality of
precipitation.
And some of it is our definition of the fire season. It is
not a hard-and-fast thing. It relates to the deployment of
resources and that kind of thing, as well.
But I don't think there is any question that it is. The
fuels dry out sooner. We have to get our resources out there
sooner. And they are out there later in the fall. So that is
what translates to the longer fire seasons.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you.
And, Dr. Topik, what is your view of that assessment?
Mr. Topik. Well, I certainly agree with that assessment. I
would also point out, the challenge here is not just the number
of acres but the type of acres. And so----
Mr. Tonko. Meaning what?
Mr. Topik. What I would like to see us have is lots of
acres burn in a very low-intensity fashion, producing low
emissions, low harmful smoke, rather than these big, bad, nasty
fires. And so I also agree with my colleagues that we do need
to do a lot more active management, but that has to be followed
up with controlled burns to actually bring back the kind of
resilience that, in a long term, will work.
And, certainly, the climate change connection is real, and
it is part of the problem of the vacillation of extremes. And
so it just points to the need, I think, the opening statement
remarking how important forests are for sequestering carbon. I
mean, they are now sequestering, what, 13, 14 percent of the
Nation's fossil fuel emissions. And so this is an area where we
can intervene for all these benefits that our panel has
discussed.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you.
And I believe that it is clear that any long-term
preventative plan for wildfires and the dangerous air pollution
they produce needs to get to the root of the problem and get
serious about addressing climate change as a national priority.
The 2014 National Climate Assessment found that, as
temperatures increase to levels projected for the midcentury
and beyond, Eastern forests may be at risk of die-off. Many
Americans, including Members of Congress, typically see
wildfires as a Western issue.
So do any witnesses, particularly Mr. Karels, want to
comment on whether there will be an increasing wildfire risk to
the Eastern United States?
Mr. Karels. Again, that is hard to say. Go back to Mr.
Topik's discussion, is the type of fuels. When our fuels get
heavier, when we don't manage the forest, when we don't
prescribe burn, the numbers are going to go up and the impacts
are going to go up.
When you can prescribe burn, significant number of acres to
make a difference, you have the opportunities to have these
low-intensity fires that are, one, easier to suppress, or we
can manage without the smoke impacts, without the timber
losses, and still have fuel reduction efforts.
So I look at it as more of how we manage our forest. If we
keep our forest healthy, we can keep the numbers and, really,
the real impact to our citizens down.
Mr. Tonko. And are there any different forest management
techniques or strategies to regulate or manage these fires in
the East?
Mr. Karels. In the East, especially the Southeast,
prescribed fire is a significant tool. Florida burns 2.3
million acres a year with prescribed fire. Every year, among 20
million people, we burn that many acres each year. With the
fuel growth in that subtropical environment, you would say,
that is what keeps us from having absolutely catastrophic fire
every year down there.
And much of the Southeast does a very good job in that
prescribed fire. It has been part of a culture, and the laws
and stuff allow it. That is low-impact. You do have some smoke;
you do have to manage it. But that is what our business does,
is prevent impact to the citizens.
So there are tools like that, and there is active forest
management in the East, very much so. The Southeast is the wood
basket of the world. And that active management helps reduce
the fuels and those hazardous fuels I talked about earlier.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Mr. Karels.
Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his time.
The chair now recognizes the chairman of the full
committee, Mr. Walden, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Walden. I thank the gentleman.
And I think we have a couple other slides.
I actually took this out of an airplane, flying back here.
That is Mount Hood that rises 11,238 feet. So the fire picture
you saw from Mr. Schrader was the face of this fire. This is up
on top, then, a day or so later, looking out. You can see how
that smoke just covers everything. That was all burning. They
had 10 helicopters trying to put out that fire, and it was so
smoky they often couldn't fly the helicopters.
Go to the next one.
This gives you a shot from the Washington side of the
Columbia River. That is, I don't know, probably a half-mile,
mile across river as it burns, and this is looking the other
direction. But it just tells you this went on for weeks. And
this is just one example of multiple fires.
And I want to follow up with Dr. Topik.
On your point about fire funding, we are all in. In fact, I
was in a meeting in the Speaker's office with a number of the
Westerners last night again, and he is being very helpful and
supportive. I have great confidence that this administration is
going to replace the funds, over $600 million, hopefully in
this next tranche, so that we can get the money back into the
account for the Forest Service.
But you are spot-on. Every year, we repeat this stupid,
stupid cycle of robbing the accounts that would do the forest
thinning to pay for the firefighting while the fires are going
on. So we don't do the preventive work because you have to pay
for the fire. Then we replace the money when it is too late to
do the preventive work because winter has set in. And then we
repeat it. It makes no sense. It is four to five times more
expensive to fight fire than to do the treatment.
And while prescribed fire is very important and a subject
of our hearing--and I know the CDC and the EPA are looking at
studies on the effects of prescribed fire smoke versus wildfire
smoke, and I think we are going see it is dramatically
different because you can manage it. We can do even better than
that by thinning out the forests and getting them back in
balance.
So we are trying to solve the fire borrowing issue. We are
trying to solve the fire funding replacement issue. And, again,
I think the Trump administration is fully on board to do that.
But we need the management tools to be expanded in the proper
way.
You mentioned the Ashland Watershed Project. That is, I
think, being done under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act,
which I helped write, I don't know, a number of years ago. And
I have been up on that project. It is expensive to do, but it
is incredibly important to do to save that watershed above
Ashland.
But I want to go to our forestry professor from Oregon
State University, because I would like you to answer about
stand densities. We have talked about the fuel loads. But some
of these stands on a given acre on the east side of Oregon
should have how many trees in a dry forest environment versus
what they have today?
Mr. Bailey. It would cover a spectrum. The driest end, the
ponderosa pine with a little juniper underneath, might be as
low as 20 trees per acre, so truly a savannah or a woodland
instead of a forest.
Mr. Walden. And on those sorts of forests today that have
been left untreated and unburned, how dense is that?
Mr. Bailey. Some of them that I have gone into are a
thousand stems per acre.
Mr. Walden. A thousand trees per acre where it should be
20. This is the fuel loading. And every year some of those die,
the growth continues. It is like just adding more gas into
another can. And you just wait.
We get dry lightning in the West. Here, you get these
thunderstorms and it rains and washes everything. We just don't
get the rain. It shuts off. We went, I don't know, 88, 90 days
with no rain this summer. It is not abnormal, a little
abnormal. And temperatures are rising, the climate is changing,
I get all that. But we have this building fuel load that we
need to deal with.
And on the west side, in terms of overstocking, what
forest?
Mr. Bailey. Well, similarly, there is less of a frequent
fire history on the west side. The Douglas fir forest,
including down into your part of the country, probably we had
surface fire in there maybe every 40 to 70 years or so,
historically. But those stands also are more dense because we
have been excluding fire longer than that.
Mr. Walden. Yes.
I want to quickly, in the remaining few seconds I have--Mr.
Marshall, thanks for being here, first of all. From your
perspective, there was a lot of discussion about how fires are
fought on Federal land, within certain designations on Federal
lands, versus state lands, county lands, tribal lands, and
private lands. What did you see this summer? What should we
know?
Mr. Marshall. There is a little bit of a perception, I
believe, that we need to understand fire and understand its
healthy impacts, but my perception is we are seeing that that
really has a window, just like we are seeing the window of
these fires blowing up and being, in my opinion, truly
catastrophic.
So I heard a lot about healthy fire, healthy fire from the
agencies where, on the lands that you referenced that are
Federal, we are seeing initial attack, stop the fires, mitigate
the risk.
Mr. Walden. You are also doing active management then.
Mr. Marshall. And we are actively managing, so we see
ground fire, so my perception is that there is a little bit of
an understanding that we need fire, but it isn't understood
when that time is, and so the Federal agencies are backing off
a little more regularly than we see the other agencies, and the
fires are getting bigger, faster, and more severe.
Mr. Walden. Thank you.
Mr. Shimkus. The chairman's time is expired. The chair now
recognizes the gentleman from California, Mr. Peters, for 5
minutes.
Mr. Peters. Thank you. I want to just start by thanking
Chairman Walden for his comments about wildfire funding. In the
113th and 114th Congresses, I supported the Wildfire Disaster
Funding Act and even led a discharge petition to bring the bill
up on the floor, because we don't want to be spending
prevention money on fighting fires, and we do that, as I
understand it, because of a fealty to this year-by-year
scoring, and it is the silliest thing to say we are going to
save money this year, but we know that it is going to cost us
more next year. We ought to just understand, make a decision
like a business or a family would here, and spend money on
prevention to save money later. And so, I would say to the
chairman I would love to work with you on that. There are a lot
of nonsensical things that we come across here, but I think
that is just idiotic.
I know that the Nature Conservancy has done some work on a
carbon offset program, and that is a California kind of thing.
We have a cap and trade system there that is not the Federal
Government's approach, and I understand that in California,
that the trading of offsets has been able to reduce emissions,
but I would like to ask maybe Dr. Bailey and Dr. Topik in
particular, can you tell me what Federal policy is missing? If
you could change three things, what would you change? I will
start with Dr. Bailey.
Mr. Bailey. So could you ask the question again?
Mr. Peters. What is Federal policy missing? So I hear a lot
of violent agreement about the need to deal with forest fires.
Where are we falling short? What would you like to see us
change? You are talking to the decisionmakers in the Federal
Government, what would you like to see done differently? Or
more or less?
Mr. Bailey. Yes, so the forest service, sometimes we are
guilty of criticizing the forest service for not doing this or
doing this. But they are a great group of individuals, and they
are doing as best they can with the laws, the rules, the
administrative rules and policies and case law that drives them
to this situation where they have a hard time doing their job
as foresters in my opinion.
So we are probably overdue for an overhaul that updates the
sets of rules that they operate under, now that we have a
better understanding of the role of wildfire.
Mr. Peters. So the rules that govern the forest service are
too restrictive in terms of allowing them the freedom that they
need to do their jobs.
Mr. Bailey. To do their jobs.
Mr. Peters. Dr. Topik?
Mr. Topik. I am going to cheat a little bit here, but the
first thing is really getting serious and implementing and
funding the National Cohesive Strategy for Wildland Fire
Management. There we have a well-thought-out plan that has been
agreed to by the League of Cities, by the National Association
of Counties, by the states, by the tribal organizations and all
the Feds, and it calls for some really important action. And so
the strategy can make a big difference. So that is one thing.
Secondly, I mentioned before the fire suppression funding
fix. I would love to see that in the next disaster relief bill.
And then, I think, the third thing is the social engagement,
the small amounts of money to fund people to help bring
communities together so that they can learn and bring science
together with collaboration at a local level.
Mr. Peters. When a community comes up against science and
doesn't agree with the science, what do you do then?
Mr. Topik. It is pretty amazing. What I have seen in
practice, for instance, in Bend, Oregon, in the Nature
Conservancy, we have a guy who is just so good at doing GIS,
geographic information systems, so in real time, you can sit
down and have the scientist with people do what-if scenarios.
And so that is not free. It takes time. So I think that is the
kind of thing we need to invest in, so that the science is
directly understandable and displayed to people.
Mr. Peters. Do you disagree with Dr. Bailey's assessment
that the forest service's hands are tied by political
constraints?
Mr. Topik. Well, I would like to see them do a lot more,
and I know they want to do more, and I think, once again, if
you look at the real buying power, I was one of the, I hate to
admit it, so long ago, I was one of the authors of the National
Fire Plan back in 2001 and we did an initial rapid increase in
funding for the engagement, including hazardous fuel reduction
and community engagement and restoration. And then it just
waned. And the real buying power has dropped dramatically, and
so that is a big problem. When you have Federal agency staff
you have merged countless numbers of ranger districts where I
used to work anyway.
Mr. Peters. OK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My time is
expired.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman's time is expired. The chair now
recognizes the gentleman from Mississippi, Mr. Harper, for 5
minutes.
Mr. Harper. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to each of
you for being here, and certainly what difficult times we have
had in certain places in our country, particularly in Oregon,
and you look back and certainly we can come up with the causes
and reasons why this was worse. But would it be safe to say
that each of you agree that if we actively manage forests, that
that significantly reduces the risk and severity of wildfires.
Does everybody agree with that?
Mr. Bailey. Yes.
Mr. Topik. Yes.
Mr. Marshall. Yes.
Mr. Harper. OK. Obviously how we go forward is going to be
most important, because there are other spots just waiting for
another tragic wildfire that impacts a community. So what I
want to ask each of you, and if you can just briefly, if you
could say what would be maybe the top regulatory or legal
impediment to forest management? Is there something that just,
Hey, this is it, this is the top thing, and we could start with
you, Mr. Bailey.
Mr. Bailey. In my experience in working with the
collaborative groups, that is where the action is going to be
in the future, is the NEPA process itself is applied at such a
small scale, individual projects of just a couple acres, it
still needs to go through this involved NEPA process that I
think is well beyond when that law was written and what NEPA
was intended for, and we tend to just over apply it for
relatively small, meaningless activities.
Mr. Harper. So, Dr. Bailey, if we were able to speed up
that timeline and not make it on every small thing, that is
going to have a positive impact?
Mr. Bailey. The process and the timeline it is very
important it is going to be hard to speed it up, but we don't
need to apply it on a 20-acre thinning. We can apply it on a
50,000-acre landscape management plan.
Mr. Harper. All right. Thank you. Mr. Karels?
Mr. Karels. I think I am pretty close with Dr. Bailey.
Allowing those larger landscape scale projects, that
categorical exclusions allow them to implement some of these
practices that reduce the fire threat. An example with putting
a state agency in a state forest and a national forest beside
each other, and we can implement the same project in one month
on a state forest, which may take 3 to 5 years on a national
forest. And it is not because they don't want to do it; it is
because, as has been said, their hands are tied of going
through that very intensive process, and then sometimes the
legal battles that come out of it.
Mr. Harper. And so those impediments, as you are saying,
differ between Federal, state, and privately owned lands. So
that creates different time frames is what you are saying.
Would that be correct, Mr. Karels?
Mr. Karels. Correct, yes.
Mr. Harper. OK. And, Mr. Marshal, tell us what we can do?
Mr. Marshall. I agree completely with my two colleagues. We
have a problem with the planning and the NEPA process. We see
successful instances throughout the west where this moves
quickly, and we get good products where we have, for lack of a
better term, a social license within the community, because the
community is well-educated to Dr. Topik's point. What doesn't
still insulate us from the success of those projects is
somebody coming in and sticking a cog in the spokes of the
wheel and stopping the whole project. So we still see great
projects moving forward. Things are getting done. But then we
move to another region where there is a negative view of
restoration efforts, and it can just stop with a lone legal
challenge.
Mr. Harper. And having unmanaged, how should we say,
surface fuel is going to be a problem to deal with if we don't
solve it. Dr. Topik, I would to hear your view.
Mr. Topik. Just to change the theme a little bit, we do
need to invest some money in this activity in getting people
together and getting the communities together. So I think we
have to be serious, also, about providing funds so local
communities can work together and get projects done at big
scale, like the others have said.
Mr. Harper. Thank you all for being here. My time is almost
expired. I yield back. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman yields back his time. The chair
now recognizes the gentlelady from California, Ms. Matsui, for
5 minutes.
Ms. Matsui. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank all of the
witnesses for being here today. Already this year we have seen
many natural disasters hit communities across the United
States: hurricanes, flooding, tornados, and hail, have taken
lives and destroyed property. Unfortunately, we can add
devastating wildfires to this list. These wildfires have burned
more than 8 million acres of land, have serious consequences.
They degrade drinking water quality, destroy wildlife habitat,
and limit outdoor recreation. And as we have learned from our
witnesses, they impact our air quality.
I have repeatedly highlighted for this committee how the
Sacramento region in California, in my district, struggles with
air quality, and in the summer, wildfire smell contributes to
our air quality challenges. I call them ``challenges'' because
we view poor air quality as a problem that can be solved. I am
pleased that our witnesses share that view that there are
proactive and environmentally friendly steps we can take to
reduce fire risk and improve air quality.
Dr. Topik, in 2014, the King Fire burnt over 97,000 acres
in the American River Watershed near Sacramento. The fire
caused particulate matter pollution to reach unhealthy and
hazardous levels over the large region in Northern California.
I understand The Nature Conservancy has partnered with
environmental groups, local agencies, and the forest service to
speed watershed restoration in the American River Watershed
under the French Meadows Forest Resilience Project.
Dr. Topik, how does this project and other Nature
Conservancy collaborations help us better manage our Federal
lands to approve the health of our forests and protect our air
quality?
Mr. Topik. Thank you. I am not an expert in that specific
project, but I have been nearby to other places. I think the
key there, as in many places, is getting people together to
have a joint vision, and actually implementing it. And so in
French Meadows and nearby--elsewhere are studies in the
Mokelumne River, which provides the water for East Bay. We have
done analysis that shows getting in and helping treat these
areas pays, just like the full committee chairman has said, it
pays. So I think that is a key.
Last week, as part of the forest climate working group, I
heard some fascinating work in California regarding forestry
and the use of carbon offsets that Mr. Peters had talked about.
And so there, I think, State of California alone is committing
$200 million for all kinds of forest-resilient treatments, and
I think getting that kind of cooperative work is vital.
I wanted to--I didn't mention in my statement, but a really
good comprehensive research summary paper by Scott Stephens,
Brandon Collins, Eric Biber, and Peter Fule has a very good
discussion of air quality in the San Joaquin Valley, and I
encourage you to take a look at that.
Ms. Matsui. Thank you. Dr. Bailey, as you say in your
testimony, you have had a tough fire season throughout the
west, including in California. In California, we have already
had 230,000 acres impacted by wildfires. This is 30,000 acres
above the 5-year average, despite the fact that we have had one
of the wettest winters on record.
Dr. Bailey, how much of impact does winter precipitation
have on the strengths of summer fires and the length of the
fire season?
Mr. Bailey. Yes, it is a little counterintuitive. And
actually, when I talk to students, I usually explain the great
old adage that if it is a dry winter and a dry spring, all of
us firefighters are going, oh, yes, it is going to be a good
fire year because it is dry and the fire season starts early.
And if it is a wet winter and a wet spring we go, oh, it is
going to be good fire year because it grows all of those fuels,
and particularly those fine fuels, they become more abundant
and more continuous than they typically are. And so when it
does inevitably dry out, as it does in Oregon and California,
and they inevitably catch on fire, it burns very continuously.
So either way, and that is part of the lesson of the wildfire
being inevitable. Either way, we get a fire season.
Ms. Matsui. So a wet season we are going to have fire.
Mr. Bailey. Always have, 10-, 15,000 years.
Ms. Matsui. All right. Sacramento County has a large
population of approximately one and a half million people
located near many Federal and state lands.
Dr. Topik, have you seen any unique challenges with
addressing wildfires are in close proximity to large urban
centers?
Mr. Topik. It is really hard to convince people that
suffering from smoke from controlled burns is worth it, and so
I understand that and realize that and have seen it, but that
is why we need to get better tools and get people together to
actually see that they can have benefits. And I referenced, in
my statement, a comprehensive science review paper on air
quality and smoke, and they are saying that controlled burns
are going to produce perhaps as little as one-tenth the amount
of smoke as wildfires. And so convincing people and bringing
people into that conversation is absolutely essential.
Years ago, I was in Florida where they have to do
controlled burns constantly for longleaf pine every 4 years,
and the people with their rows of $1-million houses with
swimming pools next to the state park, they were just told
ahead of time when they were going to do a burn, and everybody
covered their pool up, but that didn't happen overnight. It
took a lot of people.
Ms. Matsui. Education is necessary. Thank you very much,
and I yield back.
Mr. Walden. The gentlelady's time is expired. The chair now
recognizes the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Olson, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Olson. I thank the chair, and welcome to our four
witnesses. This is a very important hearing for me. My wife
spent a lot of time as a young girl in Sun Valley in Ketchum,
Idaho. She loved it so much, last Thanksgiving we bought a
small condominium in Ketchum, a fire zone in Idaho. We have
spent the last half year calling our landlord every 2 weeks to
make sure our condo is not threatened by fire.
My home State of Texas doesn't have much public land, so we
don't have the problems of mismanagement by the Federal
Government. We can have some big fires. The fire on the screen
was historic Bastrop County, Texas, September through October
of 2011. This image is from our state capital, Austin, Texas.
It is 33 miles east of Bastrop. The Gulf Coast surface winds
tend to blow from the southeast so that smoke blew over Austin,
Texas and probably San Antonio. Higher up, the jet stream takes
that smoke to the east. It came over my home town of Sugar
Land, Houston, Texas and probably Dallas and Fort Worth, as
well.
Also, right there by Bastrop is a very special part of
Texas. It is unique. It is called the Lost Pines. Those pine
trees are 150 miles, many of the pine trees in Texas. Somehow
they settled around Bastrop. They were threatened by that fire.
That fire put most of my state out of compliance with the Clean
Air Act. My state asked for an exceptional events exception.
They were denied by the previous administration multiple times.
Look at that photo. Is that massive wall of fire and smoke
unexceptional? No. That is very exceptional. That is rare.
So my question, Mr. Karels, is can you talk about what your
work could do to actually improve air quality before we have a
fire like that?
Mr. Karels. I don't think, from our end, we have the
ability to improve air quality to start. What we do try to do
is reduce the fuels ahead of time, so that do we tend to have
less of those catastrophic events. I was there. I have seen
your Lost Pines and the homes that were lost in that Bastrop
fire. But doing the reduced fuel efforts, active management,
prescribed fire, reduces the catastrophic events that we tend
to have.
Now working very closely with EPA and with your States from
my end, it is our State DEP, which is our State EPA, working
closely with them, having smoke management plans and dealing
with it, knowing the context for those exceptional events like
that is the key in trying to, I think, reduce the impact,
because, yes, I agree with you, that was very much an
exceptional event, but we are forced, then, to come back and
say we got to approve that. But with a wildfire that size, that
should be something that should be done, should be something we
should be able to easily approve.
Mr. Olson. Any change you want from EPA to help you out
with this effort to stop those fires like that that Bastrop
county had in 2011?
Mr. Karels. Could you repeat that?
Mr. Olson. Any questions, something you would like EPA to
do that they are not doing now to help you avoid something like
we had in Bastrop?
Mr. Karels. I think EPA, in at least some regions of the
country, is better in recognizing that there are issues like
prescribed fire that do cause particulate matter and do cause
smoke, but it is needed to reduce the catastrophic events. So
in some areas, they are starting to recognize that. That is
what we want to do is recognize that doing treatments on the
land is important to prevent these really bad days, air-
pollution days that big wildfires cause.
Mr. Olson. Thank you. I am running out of time. One other
question for the record about the Western States Air Resources
Council and the comment to the EPA's proposed revisions to the
exceptional events rule and their quote was, ``Ideally, EPA
should work with State and Federal fire reporting agencies to
develop a database of their emissions of significant
wildfires.'' And so, I would like to submit it to you guys. Is
that a good idea? Is that working? So we can get some
intelligence beforehand how, we can stop these fires from
getting out of control. Thank you. I yield back.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman yields back his time. So he is
going to submit that question for you for response, and we will
do a statement at the end of the hearing to tell you how many
days. If you would do that, we would appreciate it.
The chair now recognizes Congressman Ruiz for 5 minutes,
Dr. Ruiz, I should say.
Mr. Ruiz. Thank you. I appreciate it, Mr. Chairman.
Wildfires are a longstanding and frequent threat to western
states, particularly California, and have only increased in
intensity and frequency over the years. While wildfires present
a clear threat to property and public safety, they also
significantly affect, as we know, the air quality by increasing
the number of toxic particulates in the air. The effects of
smoke range from eye and respiratory irritation to more serious
conditions like bronchitis, stunted lung development in
children, increased asthma attacks, and even for some,
premature death. So we need to find solutions to mitigate these
public health risks before they become worse.
I work in the emergency department in the desert, and
sometimes when patients come in with smoke inhalation, or if
there is a wildfire, people with allergies, they come into the
emergency department and not only it affects their own personal
health, but as you can imagine, the economic burden for a
community, for a family, and for society is really high.
In California, we all know that climate change has
exacerbated severe weather patterns, and we are seeing more
intense and more frequent fires. There are other factors that
dry up or kill these vegetation and make them prone to burning
as well. But there is more and more abundant fuel that make
conditions ripe for uncontrollable wildfires, and that is
exactly what has happened. Wildfires are more severe than ever
before, forcing thousands of Southern California residents to
flee their homes, putting at risk the lives of our men and
women who are our heroes who go out to put out the fires.
In my area in the south coast, air quality management
district, which manages the district I represent, has issued
frequent smoke advisories this year, warning residents of the
harmful air quality from the smoke and ash. Smoke that wafts
over from wildfires in San Diego and Santa Barbara fills the
sky of Coachella Valley, that is the Palm Springs area in
Southern California, endangering the health of my constituents.
And although most wildfires occur in western States where the
fires are large and numerous enough, the small particulates can
be carried thousands of miles, and those small particulates, as
you know, can cross the lung-blood barrier, so you breathe it
in. Whatever goes in there goes straight into your blood. That
can be very harmful for individuals across the Nation.
So without a doubt, the number and size of wildfires will
continue to grow, so we have to consider more adaptive
solutions and strategies.
Mr. Topik, you mentioned in your testimony that relatively
small investments in our community's ability to prepare for and
respond to fires has resulted in reduced negative impacts to
the lives, health, and prosperity of our citizens. Can you
expand on these small investments and their beneficial impacts
on the public health, and also, the economic impact that we are
saving?
Mr. Topik. Thank you. I think the answer is predicated upon
this science that suggests controlled burns are going to have
less harmful smoke than smoke would happen from wildfires. And
so, given that, the kind of community activities--I had the
unfortunate experience of going almost every year in the
previous decade to Southern California during the fire
disasters, including the time, 1 million people were evacuated
in San Diego County and a score of people died, and so these
are terrible situations. But getting communities, and in that
case, some of the richer communities, Santa Fe, they had fire
safe zones--they hadn't been able to plan ahead, and they had
the resources to do it. Other places, we saw places where
people just didn't have the resources. So getting the
communities together, and I wanted to mention for Texas, the
Austin area is one of the members of the Fire Adapted
Communities Learning Network. And I think that is really
important.
Mr. Ruiz. Can I ask you all some technical questions? There
are different ways that we can prevent or mitigate future
fires, but how about the wildfire resistant vegetation, how
does that work, Mr. Karels? Planting these resistant
vegetation, what are these resistant vegetation? How much of an
impact does that make?
Mr. Karels. And you are able to get it in each state, look
at, they will put a brochure out, and some vegetation burns
readily and is very dangerous to be close to your homes, and
other vegetation doesn't, and that is what they call fire-
resistant vegetation, just types of vegetation that doesn't
readily burn. They also incorporate that in with defensible
space, and that means moving the vegetation that does burn away
from your homes a minimum of 30 feet, ideally more than that,
to prevent home loss. So that is kind of what that fire
resistant vegetation is. State of California would give you
those plants that are less likely to burn that are good around
your homes.
Mr. Ruiz. Thank you.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman yields back his time. The chair
now recognizes the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Johnson, for 5
minutes.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the
recognition. Important topic that we are talking about today.
Mr. Karels, the EPA has tightened national ambient air
quality standards for ozone and particulate matter in the last
few years. Do lower air quality standards make it more
difficult for fire managers to pursue effective fire management
policies?
Mr. Karels. They can. However, if ahead of time, you have
your partners, you do in your state--and this is a state-by-
state issue, even though we are dealing with EPA--it is a
state-by-state issue. If you have your smoke management plan
that you worked with your state EPA, and from our end we also
work with our state highway patrol because of the safety issues
of smoke on the highway. And we developed together those three
agencies' smoke management plans that EPA then approves, and
with that approval, that brings everybody together in that
partnership.
Fire doesn't know any boundaries, so just about everything
we do to reduce the threat, whether it be air pollution or a
threat to our forests or communities has to be partnerships
from the Federal, state, and local.
Mr. Johnson. All right. So how can wildfire emissions
affect an area's ability to comply with these national air
quality standards?
Mr. Karels. If a wildfire would exceed those air quality
standards, you have exceedance, and then you have, as a state
agency, as a state, you have to then go to EPA and say this was
a wildfire event and prove that that reason that air quality
had an exceedance, or in other words, a bad air quality day,
was because of those wildfires. But you have to work with EPA
and your local state environmental protection to deal with that
exceedance issue.
Mr. Johnson. OK. And maybe you just answered this, but if
they cannot comply for whatever reason, what then happens? Are
they fined? Is there some penalty?
Mr. Karels. If they can't comply, and what EPA then--and I
am not the expert on this, I have to be very careful--one of
the three of you are any better at it? I am more than willing
to give it.
EPA can come in and say this is an impact area. I am
forgetting the terminology they use. That then makes you adjust
what smoke and what air quality issue you have in that area. So
if it is a wildfire, you always want to come back, and if it is
a wildfire that exceeds EPA's requirements for air quality, you
want to come back in and work with them to not put this as an
area that then has future economic issues with all air quality
issues.
Mr. Johnson. OK. All right. Well, you note that--and I
quote out of your testimony, ``The task for wildfire managers
is to manage the risks to communities and ecosystem values in
both the short-term and long-term by implementing a coordinated
and science-based program of fuels reduction, fire suppression,
and community planning.'' Tell me more about community
planning.
Mr. Karels. As I said earlier, fire knows no boundaries, so
whether that fire comes from state jurisdiction or Federal
jurisdiction, it comes into that community, that community has
to be prepared, too. Just like you want under the national
cohesive strategy for wildfire, you want fire-resilient
landscapes. You also want fire resilient communities,
communities that are prepared for fire, especially in the west
where it is something that you see significantly. They are
prepared for fire. They know they have a plan. They have the
strategic boundaries to treat strategic fuel breaks. They know
what to do in the way of evacuations. They have defensible
space. All of that is fire planning, as well as the suppression
effort. The local fire department, the state jurisdiction, and
the Federal jurisdiction are all working together ahead of time
so they have a good response. That is that community planning
that helps to reduce that threat to the community.
Mr. Johnson. OK. In the short amount of time, would any of
the other panelists like to comment on community planning?
Mr. Bailey. I will always take an opportunity to talk. When
we came back to this idea of fire-resistant vegetation and all
that kind of stuff, the only thing I would add to that is,
fire-wise construction of the actual homes that are in the
community and getting the community on board and supporting
each other to do that work, because often, if you can bring in
one dump truck and get rid of a bunch of things that will get a
bunch of neighbors together to clean their gutters, all the
weeds underneath their deck and all that kind of thing, because
as often as not, I see houses catching fires and burning up the
vegetation, rather than the vegetation catching on fire and
burning the house.
Mr. Johnson. Got you. OK. Well, thank you. Mr. Chairman, I
yield back.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman's time is expired. We have a lot
of Californians on this committee, so another Californian,
Congressman Cardenas, from Los Angeles, you are recognized for
5 minutes.
Mr. Cardenas. Thank you very much. Can one of you gentlemen
help clarify if this statement is true, that the States are not
penalized in the event of a wildfire because of EPA's
exceptional events rule, and as well, are exempt when there is
a controlled burn as long as there is a smoke management? Is
that afforded to the states? Is that an accurate statement?
Mr. Bailey. It is outside of my area. I know that when the
exceedances, or when you apply for that extraordinary event
kind of thing and it is denied, it becomes an exceedance, and
they somehow accumulate and all that kind of stuff. The
problem, in my mind, is that the wildfire smoke is largely
unregulated, whereas the small amount of prescribed smoke is
regulated. And so if that is the only thing that you can
regulate, including like your child's behavior, if there is
only one little thing that you can do, that is what you crank
down, and yet all this crazy other stuff is going on that you
have no control over.
Mr. Cardenas. So apparently, the exemption exists. It
doesn't mean if you applied that you are going to get it. That
is the issue. OK.
I constantly think about our responsibility as a community,
whether it is private-public sector, et cetera, private
property, public property, is pay now or pay later. I think
that this dialogue that we are having today, there is a dynamic
of pay now or pay later. If we can do prevention and
intervention, et cetera, whatever government it is, whether it
is local government or assistance by the Federal Government to
help with that prevention, I think that what we will have is
less wildfires, less catastrophe, less need to ask for an
exemption by the EPA, et cetera.
So I think that the question begs is have we had, in recent
time, in the last 10 or 15 years, any decent or expansive cost-
benefit analysis at the Federal level? And/or have we seen any
really good studies at the state or local level that we can
actually apply across jurisdictions, so we can actually, maybe,
start encouraging and/or helping with best practices?
Mr. Bailey. I think most of the studies are going to be a
smaller scale. It is not something you would call a
comprehensive national assessment of whether the National Fire
Plan money or the Hazardous Fuel Reduction Act paid for itself
or so, I haven't seen that, but certainly, I have seen the
smaller-scale analyses.
Mr. Cardenas. So it sounds like some jurisdictions have
taken upon themselves to try to figure out if they can get at
some best-practice proof, but it sounds like, from what your
answer is, that at the Federal level, we haven't funded a nice,
comprehensive study, at least in our lifetimes of considering
these issues?
Mr. Bailey. Or I haven't seen it. I don't know, Chris?
Mr. Cardenas. That is what I am saying. There is a lot of
collective knowledge here at the table, there is not an
absolute answer, but it sounds like we really haven't seen that
sponsored from the Federal level, again, by the collective
folks that we have in front of us.
Mr. Topik. Just briefly, I think we need more of that
study, but there is some really good work done at Northern
Arizona University Ecological Restoration Institute that was
done directly for the OMB to help address some of these
questions looking at the successful impacts of hazardous fuel
reduction, and so, I commend the work of those folks. It is
quite pertinent to this.
Mr. Cardenas. Mr. Topik, can you explain the process for
cleaning up fuel loads on private lands, and also on Federal
lands? And what about companies' utilities that have easements
on public lands? What is the climate like right now when it
comes to that activity?
Mr. Topik. With respect to the utilities, that is really
important. It is exciting to see, for instance, in Colorado,
Xcel Energy partnering with the forest service and other large
landowners to get work done on a broader scale, not just under
their rights of way, but areas near their rights of ways. And
so, those kind of partnering, Denver Water, helping commit
monies to protect--there is so much room to also then bring
together corporate money, and new financial instruments. There
are people developing resilience bonds for impact investing. So
there is a lot of things that are out there, but there is a lot
of need for more of that.
Mr. Cardenas. So you just described some good practices of
pay now rather than pay later. For example, when it comes to
utilities aren't down power lines the cause of sometimes some
tremendous fires, because of downed power lines? And with all
due respect, if that utility is screaming bloody murder like,
Hey, can we please get in there and actually cut back so we
don't have that incident occur, and if they are thwarted, then
oops, we may have a wildfire that could have been prevented,
correct?
Mr. Topik. I definitely support utilities having ready
access to keep control.
Mr. Cardenas. Thank you. I yield back my time.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman's time is expired. The chair now
recognizes the gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Hudson, for 5
minutes.
Mr. Hudson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for
calling this very important hearing. And thank you to all the
witnesses for excellent testimony. This is certainly an
important issue, not just for the west, but all across the
country, and, back home in North Carolina, we like to talk
about common sense, and I think this really just boils down to
the Federal Government allowing commonsense practices and then
the kind of things that you have talked about. Mr. Karels, did
I say that correctly?
Mr. Karels. Karels.
Mr. Hudson. Correct me. Karels. I am sorry. You mentioned
in your testimony the Good Neighbor authority. You talked about
the Good Neighbor authority allows states to engage in work on
Federal lands, including increasing the opportunities for the
Federal forest management activity by using state resources. In
my district in North Carolina, we have the Uwharrie National
Forest, and we have seen, in the case of our forest, many of
the roads have degraded significantly, and with travel, age,
elements. I have seen, firsthand, this is more than just a
headache for residents that have to use the forest road to
access their homes, but it is a real safety issue, because fire
trucks and ambulances can't get down these roads when we have
major rainstorms. So it is a real safety issue for us.
And my understanding is the Good Neighbor authority
currently is limited because there is a prohibition on all
roadwork, even repair and maintenance and reconstruction
activities on existing forest service roads, which, as you
know, are key parts of forest management activities. What kind
of real-world problems have you encountered in your state
because of prohibitions of roadwork with the Good Neighbor
program?
Mr. Karels. In our state we signed the Good Neighbor
authority agreement with both the national forest in Florida,
and actually the national forest in Alabama. We are a little
bit oddball that we would sign with adjoining state, but they
butt up against a very large state forest we have.
If you are going to do activity in the forest, fuel
reduction, forest thinnings, any of that, you have to maintain
the roads. For us in the south, those roads are sandy. Those
log trucks will quickly sink down, and if you are not able to
at least keep them to a minimum standard to move equipment back
and forth, you can't accomplish the task. So that is a
limitation. It is very much a limitation in the west. This Good
Neighbor program is an excellent program, and it is growing
over--I think over 30 states have signed in. A lot of projects
are starting. But we can continue to improve it, and your
thoughts are right online in the ways that we can improve it
with the next farm bill, or whatever that may be.
Mr. Hudson. So in your opinion, if we can do a legislative
fix to allow roadwork to be part of that, that would be an
improvement?
Mr. Karels. At least maintaining those roads, yes.
Mr. Hudson. Anybody else want to jump in on there? I am
seeing nods.
Mr. Marshall. I would definitely agree. We see
circumstances where the roads potentially have even been
abandoned, and it makes it very difficult to put a full-front
attack on stopping a fire, especially even in the instance
where it could be a community or, public or private resource is
impacted. So certainly, that would help a lot to be able to
address the roads and have that part of the Good Neighbor
authority.
Mr. Hudson. I appreciate that. And even beyond the safety
interests, if you are concerned about erosion and the impact,
and even particulate matter in the atmosphere. In many cases,
being able to pave a road is better than having a gravel road
that is deteriorated and you have got lots of environmental
impact. So anyway, I appreciate your thoughts on that.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman yields back his time. The chair
recognizes the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Walberg, for 5
minutes.
Mr. Walberg. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks for having
this hearing. I had the good privilege to be out in Montana and
Wyoming in August, and performing a wedding ceremony of one of
my staffers out there, and with a backdrop of West Glacier a
little hazy, a little hazy. Two weeks later, they closed it
off. Heading down a few days after that to Yellowstone and the
Grand Tetons, and out to the Big Horns and seeing still all of
the haze there from the fires and smelling the smoke in certain
places, very concerning.
I have seen too much of that happening, and if there are
ways that we can get a handle on it, and use appropriate
forestry tactics to make sure that the forests grow well, and
we have the resources continued, that is a great thing, but it
just seems like that we are seeing these resources subdued by
fire and other things. So I appreciate this hearing today.
Some states seem to be doing better than others in reducing
the risk, and, Mr. Karels, is this due to differences in the
way states approach management? And are there lessons from
states that have lower wildfire risks that can be applied to
states with higher risk?
Mr. Karels. Any state can have a high risk, whether it be
Michigan, Florida, or Oregon, depending on a given year. Some
of the benefits are the state laws that are in place that allow
you to do these treatments on a larger scale, and I really look
at it on a larger scale, landscape scale to make a difference.
So the laws that are in place many times are one of the key
issues of being able to implement those treatments on a
landscape scale size. States and regions are very different. I
can say Florida does a lot of prescribed fire, and they do. And
saying Oregon should do the exact same thing is all but
impossible because of the different geographic areas, the
different mountainous terrains and all that, but the laws that
allow you to do it at the right time are critical in each of
those states, and go back to that partnership issue. It takes
the efforts of all the agencies coming together. I was in
discussion with California not that long ago on this same issue
of how do you work to increase your fuel reduction with
prescribed fire, and what laws do you have to have in place to
make this effective? And it really takes all those agencies
involved in a partnership to do this.
Mr. Walberg. Let me jump on that a little bit. You know
that culture fire suppression has led to the buildup of
hazardous fuels to historic levels. If you could snap your
fingers and change Federal policies, get to us, reduce red tape
and improve coordination, how long would it take to see
meaningful reduction in the wildfire risk? And I open this up
to the others on the panel, too, but, Mr. Karels, I will give
you first shot on it.
Mr. Karels. If I could snap my fingers and say we can do
everything we possibly can right now, we are going to get
better, but it is going to take years. It is going to take
years. It is going to take education with the citizens in those
areas. But the opportunities to reduce that threat are
significantly there. I want to give you a quick example.
About 33 years ago I worked on the Black Hills National
Forest in South Dakota, and we had a very active forest
management program, and we had an active fire program, and we
did a fair amount of prescribed burning in that Ponderosa Pond
ecosystem. I went back there 2 years ago, the first time in 33
years, 31 years later, and I could not believe the difference
in that forest in the density and the fuels, and a lot of that
is active management. It has taken us 31 years to get there in
that case. If we could snap our finger, maybe we could start
turning the corner in 5 to 10 years, but that would just be my
estimate.
Mr. Bailey. It is a big backlog. It is a big debt to pay
back in terms of the biomass accumulation across the landscape
and the smoke that is hidden in that biomass that is going to
be released, so it is going to be a big effort. I have been
involved in a big, comprehensive modeling effort that looked at
even quadrupling the rate of treatment, which I would do if I
were made king, but it is still going to be years, decades to
pay back that debt.
Mr. Walberg. Well, I appreciate that, and I know my time is
expired, but those are resources we sometimes forget about, and
hurricanes and all that go on are a tragic loss, but I think of
all that went on out west this summer as well that we didn't
hear all that much about, but it was impacting our country, its
citizens' enjoyment of those resources, et cetera, for an awful
long time. So hopefully we can get it taken care of. Thank you.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman yields back the time. The chair
now recognizes the gentleman from West Virginia, Mr. McKinley,
for 5 minutes.
Mr. McKinley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for
this particular panel and this hearing, because numbers of us
have been talking about the effect that deforestation has on a
climate change, and you have heard some from the other side
make that comment about climate change, and NPR just made a
statement the other day that said, again, it is kind of
axiomatic, but they said that deforestation is a major
contributor to climate change.
I think a lot of us would agree Al Gore's book talks about
25 to 30 percent of the anthropogenic global warming is
contributed from the deforestation around the world, 25 to 30
percent. Interestingly enough, putting that in perspective,
that is five to six times the percent contributed from fossil
fuels, from coal. So instead of dealing with this deforestation
and forest fires, Congress has been spending the last 10 years
fighting coal.
So I am delighted that we are having this adult
conversation about our forests, and how we can protect them. We
know in the Amazon, in 2014 they had 1,900 square miles they
deforested. The next year they increased 24 percent. They went
up to 2,300, and this last year they went up another 29
percent, and there is where that deforestation is taking place
in one of the major areas after almost 3,000 square miles is
being deforested.
But in America, we are still attacking fossil fuels rather
than addressing this larger issue. And then, I am trying to
avoid for West Virginia the fires like you are seeing in all
the photographs here have been about Oregon. And we have the
Monongahela National Forest in the southeast portion of the
state that has been considered by some, it has become a nursing
home for trees, because for whatever has happened over the
years, the forester division has not been thinning that out.
And so I am very curious, I know I am not going to hold you
to the 28 trees per acre up to a thousand, that is just a grab
number, and that is fine. I don't know what the number should
be, but I know that the Allegheny National Forest in
Pennsylvania has dramatically thinned out its crop, but we are
not doing that in West Virginia. We are allowing it essentially
to continue to grow older and older and older, and we are not
thinning that out.
When the answer to Harper's question was timber management,
it could reduce forest fires. If that is the case, to protect
West Virginia's forest, how could I get our national forest to
thin out the MOG? Or am I going to experience a fire like you
are having in Oregon?
Mr. Bailey. It is more complex I think than just asking
them to thin out the forest. It is to get them to view it
comprehensively, including, as a fuel and as a fuel bed for
some potential fire, particularly in an extreme drought year
like the Gatlinburg area got this past year or, of course,
something like that, because that forest will burn. It is
capable of burning, as well. And this is not actually about
deforestation, at least in the United States. Long ago, we kind
of turned that corner and said we weren't going to deforest,
which is a land use change to something else.
We manage our forests extremely well thanks to our laws
here, and deforestation in the U.S. is really different. And
even the wildfires themselves are not deforestation. Even clear
cutting in the history of the Monongahela, that is not clear
cutting. All those areas will be forests again. And so it
doesn't contribute to that part of the message about climate
change and deforestation. And they the best way to go is
sustainable management that is resilient to the fires that are
going to----
Mr. McKinley. I just want to see that we have some timber
management in the MOG. I am trying to find ways how to take
care because otherwise I think we are going to have a real
problem here in that upcoming future. So I thank you and I
yield back.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman's time is expired. The chair now
recognizes the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Carter, for 5
minutes.
Mr. Carter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I want
to thank you for having this hearing. This is extremely
important, as you know, and as I want the panelists to know,
who I also appreciate being here, I represent southeast
Georgia. I represent the entire coast of Georgia and almost
half of the Georgia-Florida State line. The West Mims Fire was
in my district, Mr. Karels, so this is something I am very
familiar with. Help me to understand, not all forest fires are
the same, especially in the swamp, because as I understand it,
and correct me if I am wrong, the peat catches on fire, and it
is underneath, and when you put water on it you can't
necessarily put it out because the water table has to rise
enough to get it out underneath, so it smolders for a longer
time. Is that right?
Mr. Karels. Yes. All the way to North Carolina, Florida,
Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Michigan, you have peat or
what we call muck fires, pocosin fires, and those are organic
soils that are burning. And in the swamp in your district, that
West Mims Fire was the Okefenokee swamp. We have tried for 30
years to suppress fires, and then we figured out going into the
swamp is just throwing money away, and both the Federal
Government and the State government actually figured that out.
And what we have done is put what is called swamp's edge break
around that 600,000-acre essentially wilderness, managed by
U.S. Fish & Wildlife.
The one thing that I think is a shining star there that can
be looked at all across the country is we have what is called
the Great Okefenokee Association of Landowners. That is state
agencies, Georgia and Florida, that is Federal agencies, Fish &
Wildlife, U.S. Forest Service. But the key is that is all the
private timber companies around there as well, and they all are
in this together fighting fire and dealing with this situation
that really expands those partnerships, and in most cases,
works very well. We struggled this year with it, and we are
coming back and looking at how do we improve on it, but that
organization is ideal organizations to implement in the west,
too. Where you bring everybody together and everybody has a
voice.
Mr. Carter. Now, you just mentioned something I want to ask
you about. As I understand it, the West Mims Fire was started
by lightning. It started in the Okefenokee National Forest, and
the Federal Government didn't do anything until it started to
get to the edges where it would impact the private landowners.
They said they wanted it to burn. Is that the policy?
Mr. Karels. It isn't always that they want it to burn, but
it is good for the swamp to burn, but backing, and that is the
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Backing them is that we have,
since the 1980s, tried to go in and put those fires out in the
swamp. You can't get people and equipment in there, so you
mostly are dropping it with expansive air operations, and you
can't put the fire out in that peat with that. So essentially
when those fires start out there, we prepare on the outside
almost like a prescribed burn. We start to build our lines and
begin the suppression effort around the swamp, rather than go
in and try to fight it, knowing that we can't put it out in
that swamp.
Mr. Carter. All right. Two things real quickly. First of
all, you said earlier that the states have the plans for
preventative burning and everything, and they are approved by
the EPA. What about in the national forests like the
Okefenokee, is that still done by the State of Georgia, or is
that done by EPA itself or who?
Mr. Karels. Well, each State is different, but, for
example, in Florida because we implement the Clean Air Act for
our Department of Environmental Protection with EPA, the
National Forest and all the Federal agencies come to us for an
authorization to burn. So we oversee that program even for the
Federal agencies as well, and that is a little bit different in
each State. Georgia does the same thing. So the Fish & Wildlife
if they have got to get a prescribed burn, they go to the State
of Georgia.
Mr. Carter. Did they ever do a prescribed burn in the
Okefenokee?
Mr. Karels. They do on the edges in the uplands on the
edges.
Mr. Carter. But it is such an enormous area.
Mr. Karels. Again, most of the Okefenokee is in Georgia, so
I don't watch it on a day-to-day basis, but what they try to be
careful of is they don't put it into areas where they know that
it may, with weather changes, continue to burn until it becomes
a catastrophic fire.
Mr. Carter. Well, Georgia is the number one forestry state
in the Nation. I mean, this is extremely important to our
state, especially to my district. I don't know if this will
make you feel any better, and it probably won't, but this is
not an uncommon problem that we are dealing with in that
getting funding for preventative measures, almost across the
board, is difficult a lot of times. I am a healthcare expert,
and it is difficult to convince Congress sometimes if we will
just put money toward this, it will save us so much down the
line, and the same thing with the preventative burning and all
the things we can do in forestry. In all fairness to Members of
Congress, we are just trying to put out fires, so to speak,
with our budgets.
Mr. Walden. OK. Time is expired.
Mr. Carter. I just wanted to make sure I got that in, Mr.
Chairman, and I yield.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman's time is expired. So we heard
from the next gentleman early in the hearing, and he has been
here the whole time. Congressman Kurt Schrader was very excited
to be able to attend and participate in this hearing because of
the challenges that the State of Oregon has. I appreciate him
being here the whole time, and now I yield to him for 5
minutes.
Mr. Schrader. I appreciate it very much, Mr. Chairman, and
this is a really important hearing, and I appreciate all the
witnesses making the trek out here, and I love my fellow
Congressman from Georgia, and I would agree that Georgia does a
heck of a lot of timber, almost as much as the great State of
Oregon. And we would like to do more; Georgia has a little
friendlier environment, which I would like to get to on our
side of the continental divide.
Just for the record, the photo I put up, that is 48,000
acres, folks. That is 48,000 acres. And it is only 46 percent
contained, and it is supposed to burn until Christmas. It will
continue to burn until Christmas. The train is so steep, it is
tough to put out, if you will. So this is an ongoing problem
that started on Labor Day, and it will burn for basically 3, 4
months here.
So this is a real big issue, and I am glad the panel is
here and we are attending to it. I would like to reemphasize
the fact that forest mortality is an issue, too. The wildfires
are a big deal, and for short periods of time, they put out
horrible emissions. The chairman himself had a jar full of that
ash that fell over the biggest city in the State of Oregon
called Portland, Oregon, and that brought it home to a lot of
my Portlandia folks that this is real. This is real, and it is
right next door. That fire was next to Greg's home. It is just
a few miles away from Portland at the same time.
Dr. Bailey, prescribed fire, glad to hear that seems to be
unanimous treatment that we should be employing, perhaps more
of. In some areas it is easier than others. In some areas the
overgrowth is pretty thick, and I assume some thinning would
have to be done before we could get to prescribed fires. Is
that accurate?
Mr. Bailey. Yes. And I think, in fairness to Mr. Marshall,
that is going to be primarily Federal lands, where it is longer
rotations, uneven age management, broad management objectives.
Some mechanical thinning, partial harvesting, followed by
prescribed firing is the way I see the solution, and I think
the research supports that.
On private land, really, the opportunity to treat these
fuels is at the end of the rotation and before you start
another one. And so, for them, we are talking about very
effective site preparation burning.
Mr. Schrader. OK.
Mr. Bailey. But that site prep burning has gone away for
many companies in many parts of the Oregon landscape because of
the air quality management rules.
Mr. Schrader. Right, that seem to be backwards, as we heard
here today.
Mr. Marshall, I would like to have you comment a little bit
about the culture of the Forest Service. Apparently, there is
great variation. I know the categorical exclusions we put in
the farm bill were categorically denied by a good friend of
mine in the great State of Washington and has seen little use
in that state as a result. I know our own state forester is not
a fan of categorical exclusions to treat some of the salvage
issues and some of the real problems we have in our state.
And I guess I am worried about the culture of the Forest
Service itself. Have you seen any change, in your experience,
sir?
Mr. Marshall. The culture encompasses a wide spectrum of
philosophy. We do see, within the same region, Region 6, the
most familiar that I am with----
Mr. Schrader. Sure.
Mr. Marshall [continuing]. We see areas where they are very
aggressive, very proactive, very engaged with The Nature
Conservancy and others, and moving forward with good projects,
good outcomes, good outputs, for the industries in those areas.
We do see other areas where it diminishes rapidly.
And it is a tough culture to change, in my opinion. You see
those cultures, and you want support to move them forward. And
we are, through collaborative efforts--I am on the Olympic
Peninsula Collaborative myself--trying to make those
opportunities and educational process to change the culture.
But it is difficult. I am seeing personally, it is easier
to change the culture of maybe some of the opponents than it is
maybe with some of the agencies. We need leadership. We need
the people in this room to direct those leaderships to get
those cultures in line with focusing on good outcomes that all
four of us here agree on.
Mr. Schrader. I would agree. I think there is great
variation. And, hopefully, with the right leadership in the
various regions, we can get to that. I think that would be
critical.
Dr. Topik, constant litigation is the bane of forest
management in the Pacific Northwest. Without changing that, we
are doomed to a cycle of rural poverty the likes of which this
country has never seen before. It is absolutely unconscionable,
what goes on there. Every single project gets sued by some
radical environmental organization--thank God, not The Nature
Conservancy--and it becomes impossible to do the smallest of
projects out there.
It would seem to me that there is some middle ground here,
as you all have talked about, appropriate give-and-take,
judicial review perhaps on the front end of a forest management
plan or a landscape portion of a management plan.
But do you think it is reasonable, after we have gone
through that battle and come to some accommodation, some
collaboration hopefully, that it is fair to litigate on every
single project within that management plan?
Mr. Topik. Well, I certainly don't favor frivolous
litigation and lawsuits, by any stretch of the imagination. I
am nervous about giving special treatment to some areas.
Oregon now has, what, 38 collaboratives underway in eastern
Oregon alone? And you are not seeing the litigation on these.
So I think a little bit of investment would be one heck of
a lot cheaper than dealing with the lawsuits. So that is
something I would like to see us invest in.
Mr. Schrader. Very good.
Before I yield back, if I may, Mr. Chair, there is
legislation out there that is talking about maybe using
arbitration as an alternative to the constant litigation,
particularly once these large forest plans and landscape
management plans have been approved.
We, again, want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to
collaborate and have their 2 cents at the table, but,
unfortunately, there are very unreasonable people still out
there that make it difficult to get to that. And I urge this
committee and others to be thinking about perhaps an alternate
way to get to some accommodation at the end of the day.
And I really appreciate you having this hearing, Mr.
Chairman and Mr. Ranking Member. Thank you so much.
Mr. Shimkus. Dr. Topik, go ahead and respond.
Mr. Topik. Was there time to comment briefly on----
Mr. Schrader. Yes, sure.
Mr. Topik. I want to see negotiated settlements where you
bring parties together and have a judge or an arbiter, whoever,
come up with new and novel solutions. The legislation that I
have seen doesn't allow that. It allows either this or that and
doesn't allow--so I think the concept is sound. I think some of
the details need fixing.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman's time has expired. Thank you.
Thank you, panel, for being here.
Seeing that there are no further members wishing to ask
questions for this panel, I would like to thank you all for
being here.
Before we conclude, I would like to ask for unanimous
consent to submit the following documents for the record: a
letter from the Western Governors' Association; the National
Climate Assessment 2014, chapter 7 on forests; EPA, ``Climate
Change Indicators in the United States: Wildfires''; Climate
Central report, ``Western Wildfires: A Fiery Future''; Climate
Central articles ``Wildfire Season is Scorching the West,''
``With Warming, Western Fires May Sicken More People,''
``Climate Change Behind Surge in Western Wildfires''; Christian
Science Monitor; San Diego Tribune, ``Climate Change Expected
to Fuel Larger Forest Fires--If It Hasn't Already''--you guys
are on this climate change thing, aren't you?--Union of
Concerned Scientists, ``Heat Waves and Wildfire Signal Warning
about Climate Change (and Budget Cuts)"; Yale Environment 360,
``A Warmer World is Sparking More and Bigger Wildfires.''
Without objection, so ordered.
[The information appears at the conclusion of the hearing.]
Mr. Shimkus. Again, we appreciate it. We have learned a
lot. I think I get a college credit now for Wildfires 101 in my
forestry class. So we would like to again thank you.
And the hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:08 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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