[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 85 (Monday, June 24, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5945-S5947]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FOREST FIRES IN ARIZONA
Mr. KYL. Madam President, I rise to speak on the crisis pending
before the whole State of Arizona.
Arizona has never had a tragedy like this Rodeo fire. It has now
consumed an area 10 times the size of the District of Columbia. It has
burned at least 200 homes, probably more. We can't go back into areas
that have been burned because it is still too hot. It has destroyed a
lot more buildings than that, and animals, both domestic and a lot of
the animals that populate our beautiful forests.
People who are not familiar with Arizona might not understand how
there can be a forest fire in Arizona. But the world's largest
ponderosa pine forest stretches from the Grand Canyon into New Mexico,
across a rather wide swath of Arizona at an elevation of about 7,000
feet. It is beautiful country, with pine trees, aspen, fir, spruce,
lakes, rivers--not the kind of environment you would ordinarily
associate with Arizona. It is a place to which many Arizonans repair
during the summer when it is very warm ``down in the valley,'' as we
call it. It contains some of the most interesting and unique habitat in
the United States--habitat, both flora and fauna, which is not
preserved by wildfire but is absolutely and utterly destroyed.
You might be interested to know that an area not far from this--
75,000 acres--burned a couple years ago, and it was the largest black
bear habitat in the whole United States. When you think of Arizona,
think of habitat for an enormous variety of animals, including fish and
birds, that has now been destroyed by this fire. We have the Apache
golden trout, which, at great pains and at great cost, the Apache
Indian tribe and the U.S. Government have tried for years to bring back
to the area of the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation and
surrounding areas. It has been dealt a huge setback because of the fire
that has gone through the area which this trout ordinarily populates.
The erosion that will come from the devastation caused by this fire
will clog the streams, and it is unlikely, I have heard today, that the
Apache trout will be able to make a comeback in this area.
I am sure there are many other species--the gosant, just to mention
one--that will be devastated as a result of this fire.
Yet it is interesting that some of the radical environmentalists in
our country are the very ones who are responsible for preventing the
kind of management of our forests that might have prevented this
devastation. Their view is that man should not touch the forest. As one
of them was reported as saying today: If the price for that is a
500,000-acre fire with an entire town like Show Low, AZ, devastated,
then so be it; that is the way it should be. That is a misreading of
history and science.
A century ago, before we overgrazed the area, and before we employed
a policy of fighting all of the fires, fire regularly burned through
our beautiful ponderosa pine forests. We had, about every 7 years, a
small fire that would burn the ``fuel'' on the ground and a few of the
smaller trees, but it could not hurt the great big, beautiful trees--
maybe 50, or 60, or 70, or 80 per acre. Now we have 3,000 trees per
acre, or more, because we have suppressed the fires and the grazing has
resulted not in more grass growing but all of these seedlings growing.
If you look at a lot of these forests in Arizona today, instead of
the big sequoia trees, which is what the mature ponderosas look like,
you see what is called a ``dog-haired thicket,'' which is a forest so
thick with stunted, little--frankly, ugly--trees and brush that they
say a dog cannot even run through without losing half of his hair. It
is hard to walk through these forests; they are so thick with this
``fuel,'' as the Forest Service people call it.
What happens when there is a lightning strike or a man-caused fire,
as in this case? Instead of burning around the ground, licking at the
base of these big trees--and they shrug it off--it roars throughout the
underbrush and climbs up the ladder of the smaller trees, up through
the higher trees, and finally the superheated structure at top of the
trees explodes into flame, and the flames swirl, creating air currents,
and even affecting the weather. The fire then races across the top of
the forest, devastating everything in its path. The heat is so intense,
the soil is sterilized and the waxes from the needles that ordinarily
don't bother the forest floor melt and literally create a coating on
the floor. The rains that may someday come--although we have not had
any for a long time--will wash the unprotected soil into the streams,
creating huge erosion problems, and it will be a hundred years before
this forest once again looks like it did a week ago.
That is just the impact on the forest itself. The other fauna--
various varieties of animals, birds, fish, and insects--are destroyed.
That is not to mention the human tragedy. The elderly people who moved
to these communities, because they are retirement and recreation
communities, don't want to leave their homes. A family I heard about
saw the pictures and saw that their outbuildings had been burned, and
they had no idea whether their own home was still standing. The town of
Show Low, with 30,000-plus people, was evacuated. Every one of the
citizens was forced to leave town. The fire is within the town limits,
and it has been there for basically a day now, as the firemen from our
State and from other places in the country are battling to keep it from
totally destroying that town.
Almost as bad, immediately to the south of town there is basically a
clear path of forest, tinderbox dry, all the way to New Mexico that
would literally devastate the entire Apache-
[[Page S5946]]
Sitgreaves Forest, which I consider to be some of the most beautiful
country in the world. Our own summer cabin is in those mountains. I
know the area. I have hiked it. I love it.
It is a tragedy of unspeakable proportion that we have allowed a
condition to endure that created this much devastation. To give you an
idea of the magnitude, a person not from Arizona was asked to describe
it, or try to characterize it, provide an objective description. He
thought for a long time and finally said:
I have seen one thing worse, Mount St. Helens.
Now, could this have been prevented? The answer is, probably so--at
least to the order of magnitude of this devastation. We have known for
a long time that it is possible to manage our forests by going into
these densely populated forests, mechanically thinning them--that is to
say, removing all the little trees I spoke of in the brush, the downed
trees, and so on, mechanically moving most of it; and then during
October and November, when it is cool and wet, you burn what is left
during a prescribed burn, which is very safe, so that the following
spring grasses crop up. And what we have found by research done out of
the Northern Arizona University--primarily by Wally Covington and his
group--is that the number of species of butterflies and birds and
animals of all kinds, by orders of magnitude, return to the area and
the protein content of the grass is great. The antelope, deer, and elk
want to get there to graze. Also, the pitch content of the trees is
improved so the bark beetles cannot get in and cause the trees to die.
It looks so much better. Instead of this tangled mass of little trees
and brush, which I talked about before, you have beautiful, big trees
that, as I say, look like the sequoias in California, and which are
much healthier as a result of the fact that they are not competing with
so many little trees for the nutrients in the water and the soil.
It can be done by thinning and taking out that dead brush and then,
in appropriate cases, doing a prescribed burn as well. After that,
nature can take its course. When you have a lightning strike 5, 6, 7
years later, what happens? It burns along the ground. It will burn the
grass and some of the stumps that are left, but it will not crown to
the top of these trees, creating the devastating fires we have seen.
Why haven't we been able to do that? I am sorry to say it is a
combination of a lot of factors, but most of it goes back to one
central problem: There are radical environmentalists who don't agree
with this. Most mainstream environmentalists understand that this so-
called ecological restoration is exactly what our forests need, and
they are willing to support it. Yes, there are quibbles about, do you
cut 16-inch or 24-inch diameter trees, but the concept is agreed to.
Some of the radicals are so afraid that there will be any commercial
timber operation left standing in this country--and there is none in
Arizona to speak of anymore--but they are so afraid somebody might make
a little bit of money cutting timber commercially that they will do
anything to prevent anybody from getting into the forest to cut trees;
thus, our roadless policy, and thus, 5,000 appeals to Forest Service
actions seeking to go into our forests and provide this kind of
management. Between 40 and 50 percent of the Forest Service budget is
devoted to dealing with these legal challenges.
Think about that for a moment. Talk about a litigious society.
Between 40 and 50 percent of the Forest Service budget is devoted to
these administrative and legal challenges to moving forward with this
management. Part of the fault is Congress. We have written laws that
are so open-ended and unclear that it is very easy for radical
environmentalists to find something wrong and challenge one of these
proposed management programs.
Bureaucrats make mistakes. It is always easy to stop a project. It is
very difficult to move these projects forward, as a result of which a
lot of Forest Service people have essentially given up. I have asked
them and they say: Why should we propose any more? We will get stopped,
and we don't have enough personnel to fight this in court or in the
administrative process.
There is plenty of blame to go around. We tried to get more funding
in the Congress, and, frankly, my colleagues have not been all that
supportive. We tried to get support from this administration and the
past administration. Again, we could have had a whole lot more help
than we have received.
To its credit, this administration only had one budget, and I am
hopeful that as a result of this--the Secretary of the Interior I know
is strongly committed to this kind of management, as is the head of the
Forest Service. I am hopeful that as unfortunate as the Rodeo fire is--
and, by the way, the Chediski fire--might stimulate both the
administration and my colleagues in the Congress to support more
meaningful management practices.
I spoke with friends on the other side of the aisle who are anxious
to help in this regard because all the Western States have the same
environment. The ponderosa forest is a little different than other
forests. They have their own nuances but generally the concept is
pretty much the same.
We need to do three things. We need to, first, provide whatever
supplemental funding is necessary to deal with the crisis that is here
today. The Forest Service long ago spent all the money we gave it to
fight fires. We are just entering the fire season. We have to replenish
those accounts and get more money into the Departments of Agriculture
and Interior.
Second, we have to in next year's budget provide adequate funding for
the implementation of a forest plan that provides this management on a
large-scale basis. The General Accounting Office said 3 years ago that
we have to treat 35 million acres in a 15- to 20-year period or these
forests will be lost forever through disease and burning. Now it is
down to about 30 million because about 4 million of those have burned.
But we still have a job and less time within which to do it. We need to
devote the resources that are necessary, and that will mean spending
some money.
Third, we will have to change some of the laws to provide for more
expedited procedures to get these plans approved and to make it more
difficult for frivolous objections to prevail or to slow up the
process. If these plans are done in accordance with commonly accepted
good management practices, then the burden should be on those opposing
the sale to prove why the sale should not go forward.
When I use the term ``sale,'' I want to be very specific. We do not
have enough money in this country to treat these forests without
commercial enterprise. I have gotten a little bit of money each year to
support Northern Arizona University and the research people in Denver
who hire AmeriCorps volunteers and grad students at the university to
go out during the summer and do some of the work by hand. They can
treat a few hundred acres doing that, but they cannot do a large area
treatment that the GAO said is necessary. That is why we are going to
need commercial enterprises to clear the forest of the debris, the fuel
about which we are talking.
Somebody might make a little bit of money doing that, but it is not
going to be by taking out the big trees that all of us want to
preserve. It will be by having enough wood for fiber board, plywood,
and a few poles for cabinet construction, for example. There may be a
little bit of lumber but not very much.
Those are the actions we are going to have to undertake in the next
few days to begin to deal with this situation. The one way we can begin
to repair what has occurred and to keep faith with the people who have
lost their homes and their livelihood, their livestock, and, frankly,
the people of this great Nation who have now lost a tremendous resource
of almost half a million acres in Arizona, one way we can help to make
this right is to see it does not happen again. We can do that by
implementing sound management that begins to restore our forests to the
way God created them and the way they can be preserved if we will but
treat them as we would treat anything that belongs to us in our own
yard or in our own garden.
We would never hope to have a successful garden without ever weeding
it, and there has been a parallel made of our forests to our gardens.
To keep it healthy, one has to weed it every now and then. That is not
unnatural. In fact, it is a very natural way of dealing with our
forests.
[[Page S5947]]
Madam President, I join all who have expressed sympathies and best
wishes for the people who have suffered as a result of this fire. I
appreciate all the comments that have been made to me, expressions of
concern and support. I am absolutely delighted President Bush is going
to be flying to Arizona tomorrow to this little town of Show Low whose
Fourth of July parade I do not think I have missed now in about 15
years. It is a beautiful little town. I know the people of Show Low and
of northeast Arizona will appreciate the President's visit, and I know
it will be on behalf of all of us that he visits there and expresses
our sympathies and concerns and hope for the future as a result of our
ability to join together and engage in sound management practice.
I support what he is doing. I regret I cannot join him. I know he
would ask us to do the work here in response to this important Defense
authorization bill.
I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record a Wall Street Journal
editorial of Friday, June 21.
There being no objection, the editorial was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2002]
Review and Outlook
the fire this time
In December 1995, a storm hit the Six Rivers National
Forest in northern California, tossing dead trees across
35,000 acres and creating dangerous fire conditions. For
three years local U.S. Forest Service officials labored to
clean it up, but they were blocked by environmental groups
and federal policy. In 1999 the time bomb blew: A fire roared
over the untreated land and 90,000 more acres.
Bear this anecdote in mind as you watch the 135,000-acre
Hayman fire now roasting close to Denver. And bear it in mind
the rest of this summer, in what could be the biggest
marshmallow-toasting season in half a century. Because
despite the Sierra Club spin, catastrophic fires like the
Hayman are not inevitable, or good. They stem from bad forest
management--which found a happy home in the Clinton
Administration.
In a briefing to Congress last week, U.S. Forest chief Dale
Bosworth finally sorted the forest from the tree-huggers. He
said that if proper forest-management had been implemented 10
years ago, and if the agency weren't in the grip of
``analysis paralysis'' from environmental regulation and
lawsuits, the Hayman fire wouldn't be raging like an inferno.
Mr. Bosworth also presented Congress with a sobering report
on our national forests. Of the 192 million acres the Forest
Service administraters, 73 million are at risk from severe
fire. Tens of millions of acres are dying from insects and
diseases. Thousands of miles of roads, critical to fighting
fires, are unusable. Those facts back up a General Accounting
Office report, which estimates that one in three forest acres
is dead or dying. So much for the green mantra of ``healthy
ecosystems.''
How did one of America's great resources come to such a
pass? Look no further than the greens who trouped into power
with the last Administration. Senior officials adopted an
untested philosophy known as ``ecosystem management,'' a
bourgeois bohemian plan to return forests to their
``natural'' state. The Clintonites cut back timber harvesting
by 80% and used laws and lawsuits to put swathes of land off-
limits to commercial use.
We now see the results. Millions of acres are choked with
dead wood, infected trees and underbrush. Many areas have
more than 400 tons of dry fuel per acre--10 times manageable
level. This is tinder that turns small fires into infernos,
outrunning fire control and killing every fuzzy endangered
animal in sight. In 2000 alone fires destroyed 8.4 million
acres, the worst fire year since the 1950s. Some 800
structures were destroyed--many as a fire swept across Los
Alamos, New Mexico--and control and recovery costs neared $3
billion. The Forest Service's entire budget is $4.9 billion.
That number, too, is important. Before the Clinton
Administration limited timber sales, U.S. forests helped pay
for their own upkeep. Selective logging cleaned up grounds
and paid for staff, forestry stations, cleanup and roads.
Today, with green groups blocking timber sales at every turn,
the GAO says taxpayers will have to spend $12 billion to cart
off dead wood.
It's no accident that two of the main Clinton culprits--
former director of Fish & Wildlife Jamie Rappaport Clark and
former Forest Service boss Michael Dombeck--have both landed
at the National Wildlife Federation, which broadcasts across
its Internet homepage, ``Fires Are Good.''
Fixing all of this won't be easy. After 30 years of
environmental regulation, the Forest Service now spends 40%
of its time in ``planning and assessment.'' Even the smallest
project takes years. Mr. Bosworth has identified the
problems, but fixing them will require White House leadership
and Congressional cooperation.
One solution would be to follow the lead of private timber
companies, whose forests don't tend to suffer such
catastrophic fires. Their trees are an investment; they can't
afford to let them burn. Americans should feel the same way
about theirs.
____________________