[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 118 (Wednesday, September 18, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8701-S8708]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT,
2003
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the
Senate will now resume consideration of H.R. 5093, which the clerk will
report.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
A bill (H.R. 5093) making appropriations for the Department
of the Interior and related agencies for the fiscal year
ending September 30, 2003, and for other purposes.
Pending:
Byrd Amendment No. 4472, in the nature of a substitute.
Byrd Amendment No. 4480 (to Amendment No. 4472), to provide
funds to repay accounts from which funds were borrowed for
emergency wildfire suppression.
Craig/Domenici Amendment No. 4518 (to Amendment No. 4480),
to reduce hazardous fuels on our national forests.
Dodd Amendment No. 4522 (to Amendment No. 4472), to
prohibit the expenditure of funds to recognize Indian tribes
and tribal nations until the date of implementation of
certain administrative procedures.
Byrd/Stevens Amendment No. 4532 (to Amendment No. 4472), to
provide for critical emergency supplemental appropriations.
Daschle motion to reconsider the vote whereby cloture was
not invoked on Byrd Amendment No. 4480 (to Amendment No.
4472).
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Montana.
Mr. BURNS. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Miller). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I rise to support the amendment introduced
by my colleagues, Senators Craig and Domenici, that I feel is critical
to the survival of many forests in Wyoming and across the rest of the
United States.
This amendment gives the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior the
ability to recognize emergency conditions that exist on many of our
forests
[[Page S8702]]
and then allows land managers to act to protect them from the extreme
threat of wildfire, specifically in those areas suffering from drought
and high tree mortality resulting from insect infestation, disease,
invasive plant species, or other catastrophic natural events. In other
words, it allows our land management agencies to clean up their tinder
boxes before they explode.
Wyoming is currently suffering its third year of drought, and our
neighbor to the north, Montana, is in its fifth year. Colorado, to the
south, had the driest 6 months on record from December to May. And
South Dakota had the driest June on record.
More than half the United States is considered to be in drought
conditions, and some estimates place this drought in the West to
eventually be worse than the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.
When these dry conditions combine with the dense fuel loads that
exist in our National Forest System, we get a fire season that sets new
records for intensity, for severity, and for extent. In fact, things
are so hot and dry in Wyoming, we have considered outlawing corduroy
pants.
Already, the 2002 fire season has burned more than 6,418,362 acres,
or, in other words, 10,032 square miles, or--to put it a little
differently--a 4-mile-wide strip from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles,
CA. And that is packed into the Western States. This has already cost
our Nation millions of dollars, and it will cost us millions more
before the fire season is over.
Earlier this year, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth was forced to
notify his forest supervisors that his agency expects to meet--and I
would suggest it could even exceed--fire suppression costs spent during
the historic 2000 fire season, where more than 8.4 millions acres
burned, and we spent more than $1.3 billion. As was noted earlier, 2002
has already exceeded 2000's year to date acres burned. And in one
recent fire--the Rodeo-Chediski fire in eastern Arizona--the Department
of the Interior and the Federal Emergency Management Agency spent $8
million per day--$8 million per day--at its peak to fight it.
Forests need to be controlled locally. The local forester has the
best idea of what is going on, and should have more control over the
decisions. Local forester decisions is recognized in the Daschle
emergency military spending amendment.
Forests have vast differences. Eastern forests are particularly
different from western forests. People who have only seen eastern
forests cannot rationally comment on health in a western forest. People
of the East cannot understand how little moisture we get in the West.
Wyoming gets about an average of 16 inches of rain a year. I think we
get that much per month out here, sometimes, in Washington. They do not
understand the difference between drought in an arid area and drought
in a rain forest. Because we have less moisture, the undervegetation is
different and is dry. It is often pine needles and pine needles easily
combust.
The West is mostly pine trees instead of hardwoods. The ground is
steeply sloped. We have real mountains out in Wyoming, not the rolling
hills we call mountains here in the East. So the ground is steeply
sloped and it has ravines; those are small canyons. Some of them are
pretty good-sized canyons.
Pines ignite easier than hardwoods because they are more porous and
are dryer. The trees have needles instead of leaves. When bark beetles
infect a pine tree, they kill the pine, but the needles do not drop off
like leaves would drop off a normal tree. They dry out. They turn a
rust color. And they stay on the tree for at least a year. They ignite
even easier on the tree because the air can get to the needles. Even
the bark on the trees is different. Hardwoods have a denser bark, which
is harder to ignite. Pines have a bark that makes really good tinder.
It peels off the tree pretty easily. Even controlled burns, prescribed
burns--the burns that we set intentionally in the forests--can kill
trees; and they do. Many of the prescribed burn fires that we have get
out of control. These are such tinder boxes that they get out of
control; they race through and kill the trees, not just the underbrush
they are supposed to kill. And a lot of it has to do with the
difference in trees.
If a beetle-killed pine is at the bottom of a hill, it easily fires
up all the trees upslope from it. Fire burns up. The fire even creates
a wind that moves the fire faster. If the tree happens to be in a
sloping ravine--one of these canyons--the ravine creates a wind tunnel
that amplifies the speed of the wind. The ravine provides a chimney
effect that further dries the trees and warms them so they are more
combustible, so they can explode.
To fight the fires, it is necessary to get the firefighters to the
fire. If the fire starts to move fast, it is also necessary to be able
to get the firefighters out quickly. We are eliminating roads in our
forests, and we are definitely not building any new ones. Roads cannot
be built during the fire, particularly in mountainous country.
Another difference with crown trees is they have a crown as opposed
to the hardwood canopy of leaves. When a pine tree catches on fire, the
flame burns to the point of the tree just like a candlewick. The last
several feet of the tree is called the crown of the tree. When a wind
is created by the burning trees, and the crown catches on fire, the
crown can be separated from the tree and thrown. The wind will throw
this crown a half mile to a mile, where it ignites another tree,
usually at the top already, with that crown being thrown, and so on. So
these fires can move extremely rapidly and set multiple fires in
multiple areas.
There have been changes in western forests. Landscape comparisons,
where we compare old photos with the same locations today, show us
there are many more places with trees today than there were 50 and 100
years ago. And where there were trees, there used to be 50 trees to the
acre--an acre is about the size of a football field--and, today, that
same forest area has an average of 200 trees, and sometimes as many as
1,200 trees.
Trees are like most plants. If you plant too many, and you do not
thin them, the growth of all of them will be stunted. Foresters have
also found that pine beetles are more likely to attack trees that are
always in shade.
Mr. President, 1,200 trees on an acre--the size of a football field--
are going to be in shade just about all the time. Even 200 trees on an
acre will be in shade all the time. Pine beetles like that. Trees
always in shade are weaker and more susceptible to disease. And they
are not as useful. They do not provide protection. And should we ever
allow any to be cut down, they do not provide nearly the wood, either.
Trees are also alive. They have a lifespan. It is a tree lifespan,
not a human lifespan, so it is often considerably longer, but not
always. If we only keep old-growth trees, the forest will die of old
age, and nothing will be left because they will all die at the same
time, or approximately.
Why do we have more trees now? Because we do not have as many forest
fires. Why don't we have more forest fires? Because we have more
structures to protect. Why shouldn't we let fires that are distant from
homes, then, burn to get rid of the excess trees?
First, it is a waste of product that could keep the price of homes
down and even provide homes for people who never thought they would be
a part of that American dream.
Second, an isolated fire that is allowed to burn becomes a huge
wildfire and then is very difficult to put out. I will talk about that
a little bit later. The bigger the fire, the harder it is to contain
and the more dangerous it is to the lives of those fighting it.
Third, when ``let it burn'' really worked was only when the western
population lived in tepees. They started a lot of fires. They started
fires to make meadows for the wild game and to produce some plants that
need more open space. But they lived in tepees. And when a fire
started, they folded up their home and they moved out of range. When
the fire was over, they found more beautiful land and they started
again.
Today there isn't that flexibility of moving or of land availability.
No one wants their home burned down. In fact, no one even wants to save
their cabin if the only view they will have for the next 20 years is
charred and limbless trees. Not only is the view ruined by a fire, but
on the slopes we have out West, erosion starts.
A woman who owns a Montana logging firm--I love this--does the
accounting and runs the skidder. That is
[[Page S8703]]
small business, when you do all ends of the thing. She owns a Montana
logging firm. Two years ago, during those terrible fires we had in
2000, she testified at a special hearing that Senator Burns and Senator
Craig held in Billings, MT. One of the big points she made was that
there is a difference between what she does and what Mother Nature
does, and it is primarily that her firm respects the rule banning
timber activities within 400 feet from a stream. A fire burns right
down to the stream, and so the erosion can go clear to the stream.
She also brought in a little bit of a sample of some wood. I should
have brought it this morning--except we are not supposed to have three-
dimensional items on the floor--to show what some of these diseased
trees are like. It is a core of wood about that big around. It has pine
beetles in it, but it still would make homes.
So the big difference between having a conscientious firm do the work
and Mother Nature do the work is that the firm respects the 400 feet
from the stream.
I recently ran across a book called ``Fire on the Mountain.'' It is
by John N. Maclean. Some of you are probably more familiar with his dad
who wrote a book that became a movie called ``A River Runs Through
It.'' It has some great pictures of the West in there and some great
fishing pictures as well. I recommend ``A River Runs Through It.'' But
for knowledge of fires, I recommend to everybody, even in cities, that
they read ``Fire on the Mountain,'' which is very well done. It is from
5 years' worth of research about a fire on Storm King Mountain in
Colorado. It was in the south canyon and in sight of the I-70
interstate and Canyon Creek Estates. It happened on July 3, 1994, and
resulted in the death of 14 firefighters, professional firefighters,
ones who had heard about the fires like the one at Mann Gulch. These
are people who know how fast these things can go but still have trouble
believing it.
I want to read a couple of excerpts from this book because it will
give us a little bit of an idea of what it is like when one of these
pine forests catches on fire:
Bryan Scholz, the foreman, felt a pinprick of apprehension.
He had seen the same thing a few weeks before, a routine
brushfire on a steep slope, and that time the fire had
exploded.
Further on:
``I told them what was going to happen,'' Scholz said.
``The folks on the other crews were looking at me like I was
some sort of knucklehead. And it happened. The fire made one
huge run from bottom to top in a minute, probably a good
half-mile square.
This is a drought year, Scholz told the crew. ``Learn the
lesson now, when we don't have to pay the price.''
Another example of how these things work:
A backwash of embers swirled above the flames. If sparks
from the backwash eddied down the slope and reach the
opposite side of the western drainage, there would be fire on
both sides of the gulch. That kind of fire creates its own
wind. It turns small flames into a giant fireball, and the
fireball races up the gulch faster than a man can run. That
had been the story forty-five years earlier in Mann Gulch: A
fireball had chased the smoke jumpers.
This is the progression of the fire. Incidentally, from Canyon Creek
Estates they could see this little plume of smoke up the mountain that
was just a little plume of smoke for 3 days. Nobody paid any attention,
except to worry that it could turn into a big fire.
Continuing with an excerpt:
A jet of flame shot upward and then another, seeming to
spring from nowhere. Piles of dead brush, branches and tree
trunks ignited. Living brush, tinder-dry from drought, took
fire. Darts of flame transformed into bonfires, which merged
into a single, expanding flame front. A booming wind raced up
the western drainage and struck the flames, pressing the
telltale smoke column nearly flat to the ground.
Muscular strands of scarlet flame appeared through the
smoke. The fire drew back to renew itself, taking in oxygen,
and the smoke covered the flames; then the fire surged
forward, and again ribbons of flame came into view.
The rapid transition of a fire burning in debris and litter
to one involving all available fuel, from the ground to the
tops of trees. But this falls short of describing the majesty
of the occasion.
A blowup is one of nature's most powerful forces,
equivalent to a mighty storm, avalanche or volcanic eruption.
It can sweep away in moments everything before it, the works
of nature and of humankind, and sometimes humankind itself.
It is destructive, but neither good nor evil; it goes where
wind and terrain take it.
Blowups happen every fire season across the West when wind,
fuel, dryness and terrain come together in the right
combination and meet with a spark. The blowup stokes itself
by creating its own wind, the hear drawing cooler air by
convection. If it happens in a gulch, as is common, the sides
of the gulch--in this case the western drainage--act as a
chimmey and compress its energy. The flaming tempest can send
a smoke column to a height of forty thousand feet or more.
The blowup may die out once the gulch is burned or move on
and reduce thousands of acres to ash. The blowing-up, in any
case, is over in minutes.
Flames also made downhill leaps as wind eddies scattered
sparks toward the bottom of the V. The eddies carried aloft
fistfuls of burning duff, decayed leaves, that is, twigs and
other matter.
. . . the gorge of the Colorado River, a natural wind
funnel, in a phenomenon known as a venturi effect, named for
the nineteenth-century physicist G. B. Venturi, who
discovered that a throatlike, constricted tube actually will
increase the velocity of fluids--
That is what these ravines do and what the river adds to.
The transition from a ``normal'' fire to a blowup took
seconds.
I have to tell you, when the fire was out, the trouble wasn't over.
The fire happened in July. In September--September 1--a motorist was
driving through heavy rain on I-70. That is the interstate visible from
where the fire was, the fire that killed 14 people who were not able to
get out of the way of how fast that fire raced through this tinder dry
fuel.
On September 1, a motorist, driving through heavy rain on I-70 past
the foot of Storm King, heard ``a whoosh like a real strong wind going
through the mountains.'' Hundreds of tons of mud, blackened trees, and
scorched brush, loosened as a result of the fire, slid down gullies,
spilled across I-70, and poured into the Colorado River. The mud
engulfed 30 vehicles. Traffic on I-70 was backed up for 4 miles.
Several people and vehicles were swept into the river. Two
people were injured, but [fortunately] no one was killed.
That is the aftermath effect of a forest fire. That is another reason
we are trying to stop forest fires, particularly in these mountainous
areas. They destroy the mountain.
Now, so far we have been lucky that some of our most dangerous areas
haven't caught fire. We have not been lucky in deaths caused by the
forest fires. I think we are up to 22 deaths so far caused by the
forest fires this year alone. Not all of those could have been avoided,
but many could have been avoided by having healthy forests.
We really need a discussion in this country about what a healthy
forest is. We have to move away from thinking one side wants every tree
cut down and the other side wants no trees cut down. We have to get to
where we are thinking about the health of the forests and the beauty we
want our kids to be able to see in several years.
One of the areas I am particularly concerned about is just east of
Cody, WY, on Shoshone National Forest. It lies right next to
Yellowstone National Park. This is an area considered critical habitat
for wolves, grizzlies, whooping cranes, elk, bison, mule deer, and
several other animals that spend their time living in Yellowstone
National Park when the snows get deep in Wyoming. The area is also home
to a very severe pine beetle infestation that threatens to ignite and
cause extreme damage to the park, the forest, and the surrounding
communities.
This summer, the National Forest Foundation--these are individuals
who believe in putting their money where their mouth is. They put money
into a foundation and, occasionally, they get matching money. They do
pilot projects that allow experiments to be done in forests to make
them as healthy as possible. I want to challenge any environmental
group out there to share with me their numbers on how much of the money
they collect goes to actually solving the problem they are talking
about--not going into court actions to stop other people from doing
anything, but actually working on the problem they are talking about. I
highly congratulate the National Forest Foundation for putting their
money where their mouth is. I got to see some of these projects which
have created habitat, primarily for elk, and where most importantly
they were able to drive down the fire danger, making some beautiful
areas in Wyoming, getting rid of these rust-colored abominations that
we have.
[[Page S8704]]
A year ago there was a fire in Yellowstone Park. I went to that fire.
I wanted to see how the new fire plan was working. I have to tell you
that every firefighter I talked to was thankful that we have a policy
now of stopping the burn as fast as we can. We used to have a policy of
let it burn, and then when it started getting in the area of
structures, we started to worry about it. Often the flames were maybe
as high as 150 feet, and we could not do anything about it. So they
really like this new policy. It is much safer for them to go in as soon
as the fire starts and put it out.
On the Storm King fire, as I mentioned, they noticed flame from these
Canyon Creek Estates on July 3, and it was 3 days later before anybody
went to take care of the fire. It was just a small plume of smoke quite
a ways from homes. In a matter of a few minutes, it turned and became a
danger to those homes. People living at the bottom of one of these
areas are not very pleased to have a fire going alongside their homes,
even if it is quite distant.
They showed me some of their maps and, from where we were, we could
actually see what they were talking about. They were concentrating 80
percent of their fire suppression efforts on one small part of
Yellowstone Park, right at the edge of the park. The reason they were
doing that was there was this big pine beetle infestation next to that.
If the fire were to have jumped from Yellowstone into the infestation,
it would have taken out the lodges and homes and the Boy Scout camp
between there and the reservoir near Cody. They had meetings with
people in the lodges and in the homes and made sure they had an
evacuation plan.
If you are a tourist in a lodge, and the owner of the lodge is
explaining the forest fire evacuation plan to you, it doesn't make a
very relaxing vacation. When you go home, you don't say: There is this
great place outside of Yellowstone I would like you to visit, but you
have to watch out for forest fire evacuations.
At any rate, the firefighters there wanted to know what I was going
to do about removing those pine beetle trees because they are a huge
danger to the forest. Nobody wants to drive through charred trees to
get to Yellowstone Park. There are trees that need to be taken out.
They run through some ravines. What I talked about could actually
happen with the area just outside of Yellowstone Park. Fortunately, we
have the National Forest Foundation making some headway at getting a
little bit of corrective work there. But it is nothing compared to what
we need.
Another example can be found in the Black Hills National Forest,
where forest managers have been extremely lucky not to have to deal
with fires in the Beaver Park roadless area or the Norbeck Wildlife
Preserve. These areas are suffering from severe storm-related damage
and a mountain pine beetle infestation that has left acres of dead and
dying trees. When trees are filled with dense and now dry underbrush,
it creates a terminal condition for the entire ecosystem should
something happen and a fire start in either of these areas. As I said
earlier, we have been lucky these areas have not already caught fire.
One fire did get close. The Deadwood fire came within a mile and a
half of these areas. It also burned down some structures. I have to
give you a report on that because, most recently, there has been a huge
mud slide there. Mother Nature didn't observe some of our federal rules
limiting erosion.
Fortunately, the Senator from South Dakota, Mr. Daschle, was able to
include language in the emergency supplemental military bill that will
allow the Black Hills National Forest to address this situation. If we
are lucky, it will be done in a timely manner and before it is too
late. I only hope we can provide that same kind of protection for the
areas in Wyoming and the other Western States.
Back when I was a Boy Scout, one of the requirements I had to
complete to earn the rank of first class on my way to earning the Eagle
Scout Award was to start a campfire using not more than two matches. I
became very good at starting campfires and was well known for winning
water-boiling contests at scout camporees. There are a number of tricks
people develop in starting campfires. I had my own system that helped
me to win. But no matter who you are, or what your trick may be, there
are three basic elements to every fire--oxygen, fuel, and heat.
Oxygen comes from the air and is readily available. Fuel is found in
the wood, particularly dry wood that burns easily when enough heat is
applied. Heat comes from a spark, match, possibly friction--not
corduroy pants, however. We cannot do anything about oxygen. The fuel--
we can do and should do something about fuel. Usually, we cannot do
anything about heat unless it is manmade.
The best way to apply enough heat to start a successful campfire is
to properly organize the wood in a way that allows flames to climb from
the bottom of the firepit where you put the smaller, quick-burning
sticks and tinder--to the larger, longer burning logs in much the same
way as someone would climb a ladder one rung at a time. Some of you
have fireplaces. That is the way you do it. You put in the small tinder
and then bigger and then the logs, which you like to see burn--you
don't if it is a forest fire.
To start a successful fire, I began by carefully putting the wood
shavings at the bottom of the fire--this would be my light tinder, or
the first rung of the fire ladder. I then built a small teepee of
sticks over my tinder--about the same as a ravine--and I added larger
sticks, which is what catches fire when everything else happens. The
larger pieces of wood go on the top. They draw the heat from the flames
of the intermediate sticks below them. If you did it correctly, you
would start your fire and boil a can of water before anybody else.
What does this have to do with our national forests? If you go out on
the ground now and look at the density of our national forests, they
are laid out just like the campfires I was trained to build when I was
a Boy Scout. At the bottom of every forest lies a collection of small
dried out brush, leaves, and fallen bark. Over this pile of tinder is
the next rung, which is made up of small to intermediate trees. These
intermediate trees are then crowded in between the larger and older
trees that make up the top rung, or crown, of the forest fuels ladder.
This problem wasn't always as bad as it is now. There was a time when
Mother Nature and the Native Americans took care of thinning the
forests by regularly starting wildfires. Because the fuel loads weren't
allowed to grow as dense as they are today, the fuel ladder didn't
reach all the way to the big trees. Fire would burn up the tinder and
thin out the intermediate and dead and dying trees. This promoted
biodiversity, kept the intensity of the forests down, and in times of
drought the competition for limited water resources was dramatically
less than it is today.
We now have forests that historically had 40 or 50 tree stems per
acre that are now over 200 stems per acre. That is a 300-percent
increase.
When a fire starts in forests this dense, it quickly climbs the fuel
ladders and races out of control. These crown fires are all but
impossible to stop. The heat generated from all rungs burning at once
sterilizes the soil and leaves nothing but desolation in its wake. This
is only made worse with the added factor of drought.
By adding to the mix stands of dead trees that are as dry and
volatile as the tinder on the forest floor, one can imagine the threat
this kind of fire can have on the forests and their surrounding
communities, and there are more and more communities, more and more
homes, more and more structures.
It is a much better conservation practice, therefore, to step in and
duplicate the effect historic, healthy fires had on our forests by
using what we call mechanical thinning. This is a practice where our
land management agencies hire experienced timber companies to remove
the dense underbrush and carry out the smaller and intermediate trees,
thereby leaving a forest that is healthy, more biodiverse, more fire
resilient and that has a better mix of older and younger trees so the
whole forest does not die off at once.
The alternative is to allow Mother Nature to step in and conduct one
of her catastrophic clearcuts, and when Mother Nature does a clearcut,
as I already mentioned, she does not care about riparian zones or
raptor nesting sites.
[[Page S8705]]
Another factor that must also be considered, now that we are fighting
the war on terror, is that these catastrophic clearcuts we are
suffering in the West also pose a serious threat to our national
security. It requires an extreme amount of resources and time to fight
these fires and often includes military support. The Air National Guard
facilities in Wyoming have been detailed as a support base for
dispatching air tankers, and a lot of our Nation's airspace is now off
limits to anyone but firefighting aircraft.
We also have a report that the fires pose a serious threat to our
Nation's communications facilities and to the power grid. There is no
way to build an extensive communication and power system in the West
without putting some of it on Federal public lands, including forests.
The Federal Government is the largest landowner in the West, and we
have rights of way crossing all over it. When we have fires such as we
have this year, they are, at one time or another, going to threaten our
Nation's utilities.
We cannot afford in this day and age to surrender our Nation's
greatest assets in fighting the war on terror; namely, its
technological advantage created by our extensive energy and
communications networks.
In closing, I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this
amendment and in giving our Federal land managers the tools they need
to decrease the serious threat of fire on our forests caused by the
dangerous combination of drought and infestation. It is a very limited
bill. I would even hesitate to call it a pilot project. But it is
essential to get started and to get started now. If we can establish
some good examples, we can show there can be healthy, beautiful
forests, the way we envisioned them and dreamed of our kids and our
grandkids and our great-grandkids being able to see them. We have to
have better stewardship of our forests than what we are doing right
now, and it does include cutting some trees.
I thank the Chair. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a
quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, for the last good number of minutes, I have
been listening to the Senator from Wyoming talk about forest fires in
the making. I must tell you, it was not only fascinating but an issue
he and I, as westerners who live in forested States, have grown to
develop some knowledge about over the years.
I liken Senator Enzi's speech to Forest Fire 101. It was appropriate,
and it well defines the great problems we face, not just in the West
today, although conifer trees--or pine trees, fir trees, all that the
Senator was speaking about--have a different characteristic in fire
than do the broadleafs.
What is fascinating to me now is that in January, February, and
March, which oftentimes are the dryer seasons on the Eastern seaboard,
we are beginning to see more and more fires in our broadleaf forests
because of the fuel loading that is occurring. It starts in the brush
and in the leaf flora and goes to trees that are not yet leafed out and
green.
The point I make, and why we are talking about this as a national
fire policy and why it is important for the Senate to stop, as we have,
to focus on the need to reshape public policy in this critical area, is
it is now of national importance and a magnitude we have never seen
before.
We are not used to allocating $2 billion a year of taxpayers'
resources to fight fires. That is approximately what we are going to be
doing this year. It is what we did last year and the year before. The
American public ought to be scratching their heads a bit and asking a
fundamental question of their policymakers: Is that justifiable? Can
we, as a country, spend $2 billion a year to fight fire in our national
forests? Why are we doing it?
As I have mentioned several times, it is not any longer just to put
out fires that are burning trees and watershed and wildlife habitat. It
is to protect an ever-growing number of homes that are built near or in
these forested areas because that has become an extremely popular place
to live for the average American over the course of the last number of
years.
In 1998, we had some very severe fires in Idaho, and in an area with
which I am very familiar--which is where I grew up--in the McCall-
Cascade area of the national forest--the forest supervisor of the
Payette at that time told me--and I think we lost 200,000 to 250,000
acres in two or three fires that joined together that year--that the
greatest concern he had and the most resources he used was to keep fire
away from homes; that while the fires had to be left to burn elsewhere
because they simply did not have the manpower to put them out, they
focused on protecting homes.
We now call that the urban wildland interface. Over the course of the
last several years, we have tried to shape fire policy around that and
direct resources toward the thinning and cleaning of forests in the
immediate areas around these lovely homes that are being built out in
the wooded areas.
Is that a national responsibility, is that a Federal responsibility,
or is that the responsibility of the homeowner? The homeowner builds
his or her home next to a national forest anticipating that forest is
cared for and is not going to erupt in fire and, therefore, will not
place their home at risk. So this is a public obligation, in part, to
sustain a healthy forest, not just for wildlife habitat and watershed
but to assure that fires will not sweep across private land and destroy
private property. There is, at least arguably, a liability factor there
if the forests are not properly maintained.
Over time, we have said there is a liability factor if the poor
management of product on one side of a property line causes damage to
property on the other side of a property line. Out West, we say if you
harbor noxious weeds on one side of a property line and they move over
to your neighbor's property, you are liable. County law and State law
says so.
That is why we have dedicated phenomenal resources over the last
number of years, as this fire situation has grown in our forested
areas, to protecting homes. Even as we try to protect the home, as the
Senator from Wyoming has so clearly spelled out, in this fiscal year,
starting in mid-June, we have lost now over 2,100 homes across this
country, mostly along the Rocky Mountain front from the White Mountain
forests of Arizona up through the Rocky Mountain forests of Colorado,
homes in California, a few in Oregon, an entire town almost wiped out
in Arizona, and an entire community threatened in Oregon this year with
severe fire.
It is appropriate, while the Senate would wish to rush on to other
issues, that we deal with this issue in some form. It is a national
crisis. Nowhere can we say that the loss of 6.5 million acres of our
forested lands is anything but a crisis. As I have said, if this had
been Hurricane Andrew--and I am not sure Andrew did much more damage
than that years ago in Florida--we would rush down there with all
possible Federal resources to help the community, to turn the power on,
to rebuild the homes, to clean up the debris.
Here we step back and say--or at least some do--this is all but an
act of nature in a normal sense. It is not an act of nature to see
abnormal fires of the kind the Senator from Wyoming has spoken so
clearly about, with heat intensities in a multiple of hundreds of
degrees hotter than a normal fire, burning everything in its path,
leaving nothing behind. That is not a normal forest fire. That is an
abnormal forest fire that is a creation of public policy that has
disallowed the thinning and cleaning by mankind that was once done by
fire, before we eliminated fire from the ecosystem about 90 to 100
years ago.
We became extremely active in fire management in a post-World War II
era when a bunch of young men came home who had learned how to jump out
of airplanes. They could put a shovel and a pulaski on their back and
file in a Ford trimotor out across the forests of the West and jump off
to a lightning strike and throw a few shovels of dirt on it and put it
out and they became known as smoke jumpers. That was the beginning of a
scenario on our western
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public land forests to put fire out. We got better and better at it
over the years, to the point where we have nearly eliminated the fires,
and in eliminating fire, which was the natural cleanser of our forests
at that time, we did not replace it with a fire-like, man-created
presence.
So the fuels begin to build and the small trees begin to grow and the
brush begins to multiply to the point we have added fuels to the acres
of such magnitude that scientists tell us that they are fuels
equivalent in Btu's to tens of thousands of gallons of gasoline per
acre in explosive character or ignitable capability. That is the
reality of many of these public land forests today.
In the White Forests of Arizona, where 100 years ago stood 25 trees
per acre in a relatively pastoral setting, with grass growing beneath,
wildlife ambling through, large trees scattered across the landscape,
in that very forest this June, instead of 25 or 30 trees per acre,
there were 700 trees per acre--not big trees, little ones, 6 to 8
inches through. A forester would call those weed trees, scrub trees, of
no value, except to do exactly what the Senator from Wyoming said--
create that ignition of fire that starts from the bottom and sweeps
upward to the crown of the tree along the natural coning shape of a
conifer, a fur, a spruce, or a pine.
It is the characteristic of fire that we do not want to speak to
today. We just want to ignore it because some groups have said it is
natural, leave it alone, turn your back on it, walk away. They want to
because they do not want us in there. It has been in the name of the
environment. You cannot call this anything but now an environmental
disaster, a total wipeout of the watershed. You heard the Senator from
Colorado last night talk about it.
Now, in Durango, CO, where the land burned but 2\1/2\ months ago, the
rains have now come and the land is sliding down the mountainside and
blocking the streams and the roads and filling the reservoirs full of
muddy ash and water. That is not natural. Had that watershed in the
Durango area that feeds Denver been allowed to be thinned, cleaned,
alive and vibrant, fire would not have burned it. The rains would have
come. The organic soils would have consumed the water and slowly
allowed them to trickle down that watershed into the lakes and
reservoirs that feed the Greater Denver area and its water systems.
Absent that is nothing but a tragedy. To say that is only a natural
occurrence and that somehow we have to accept it is wrong. To the
environmentalists who make that argument, I say, shame on you. You
ought to become a copartner in working with us to determine how we can
effectively thin and clean and restore the health and vibrancy and
environmental integrity of those watersheds so they can support
wildlife habitat and become the ever-replenishing source of water for
the urban areas of the West or anywhere else in our country.
Our forests are important to our ecosystem. They are great sequesters
of carbon that flows out of the air as a result of the human presence
and great storehouses of water that then feed out over the course of a
year, to be used by all of us for life-sustaining purposes, not to
slide down mountains in the form of mud and ash and broken, burned
trees, of a kind that you will now see all over the West this winter in
those 6.5 million acres that have already burned. It is a disaster that
has happened.
To not stand here on the floor and shout out about it would be a
failure of anyone who represents those areas. It is not natural. It is
a creation or a result of public policy that has allowed that.
I am suggesting we not look backwards and start pointing fingers and
blame, but we look forward. We know the conditions today. We know the
problem. We also know a solution. And every forest scientist will line
up and tell you exactly what to do. Most all of them will agree. It is
not clearcutting. It is not logging. It is not all of the kinds of
things that some accuse us of wanting to do. It is a systematic
cleaning and thinning and restoring of health, and replacing fire with
man's presence in a fire-like way. By that, I mean the thinning,
cleaning process.
No, I am going to be an advocate of green sales, and I will be an
advocate of a logging program as a part of a multiple use base of our
national forests, but that is a different argument and a separate issue
from the issue of forest health. When we have hundreds of millions of
acres of forests across our Nation today, and we know there are over 94
million acres that are in some form of health problems, and there are
nearly 30 million that are at crisis today by big kill of the kind that
the Senator from Wyoming spoke of, by dead and dying trees, by
magnitudes of large fuel loading that creates the kindling of the fires
that swept across and are continuing to burn in the West today, that is
where we ought to focus. That is where we are focusing with the Craig-
Domenici amendment. It is why we have invited all of our colleagues to
become involved and help us work out these problems, instead of simply
saying no, because some special interest group said, tell them no.
This is not an answer today in the West. No means we will continue to
burn. And every year we will burn 5 or 6 or 7 million acres--every year
for the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. That is a magnitude of
environmental disaster of the kind this country has never seen. It is
one of which I do not want to be a part; it is one the Senator from
Wyoming does not want to be a part. It is why we are working so hard to
strike a compromise, to make a small step forward, to change the
thinking just a little bit. It is why the Craig-Domenici amendment
selects urban wildlife interface, municipal watersheds, and an
unlimited number of those 30 million acres of the critical dead and
dying--less than 10 million acres in total.
We have said, let us make this small step forward and watch the U.S.
Forest Service--bring the cameras in--prove we can thin and we can
clean and we can reestablish the health of these forests. And it is not
by someone also's definition of logging. That it is not evil and
clandestine and somehow a subterfuge to get loggers back into the
woods. There is nothing wrong with loggers in the woods, nothing wrong
at all. But this is not that issue. This is a forest health issue. If
we do the right logging in the right areas and we sustain ourselves, we
can always have a healthy forest. But today we ignore it.
The last 3 years I fought the effort of the former President,
President Clinton, to lock up 94 million acres of roadless lands. I
guess it was about 1994. We succeeded in stopping him. But he wanted to
lock it up, again at the advice of some interest groups, and then ask
America to simply turn their back on it and let it sit.
That is where all these fires are starting today. Many of the fires
that started in the roadless class 3 lands today are the ones that
swept out of those, into class 2 and class 1 high-quality forest lands,
and wiped everything out in the process. Because fires of the kind the
Senator from Wyoming spoke about know no bounds. The Senator said it:
All they know is heat, fuel, oxygen. And in a drought-like environment
where humidity is dramatically low, kindling points drop dramatically
and forests literally do explode.
Those who have seen the great forest fires of the West, have seen the
devastation, have seen the plumes of smoke going 12,000, 14,000, 20,000
feet into the air and mushrooming like an atomic bomb, will never
forget what they saw.
When the White Forests were burning this year, I was flying from
Dallas to Denver. Somewhere out over northwestern New Mexico we began
to hit the cloud plume and the smoke rolling off the fires in Arizona.
The pilot came on the intercom--we were at 35,000 feet, and the
airplane was in smoke--and he said to the passengers on the plane: As a
pilot, I have never experienced this before, but we are in the smoke
from the forest fires of Arizona.
We were in smoke from that time, as that plane flew out of New
Mexico, across Arizona, and into Colorado, until we landed in Denver
and then the winds had shifted; Denver had cleared, but from Denver
south, it was all full of smoke.
But to have an airline pilot say he had never experienced that, to
me, is a simple description of the magnitude of these fires, the
intensity of them, the phenomenal fuel consumption, the tremendous
release of carbon into the air, that smoke cloud that literally spread
across the United States at high altitude.
That is the crisis to which we speak. Some would like to rush to
judgment,
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ignore these problems, walk away from them. Shame on us if we do. Shame
on us if we do not work to make one small step toward correcting these
problems. If we then, by that small step, can prove to the American
public that we have done the right thing--and I think we will be able
to--then will they allow us to make another step? I hope that is the
case. That is what we are going to try to get accomplished, and I think
we can get that accomplished today. I hope we can.
What I would appreciate, if we are wrong, is to have the opposition
come speak on the floor and tell us why we are wrong. I have heard no
one come to the floor this year and try to justify the fires that have
burned across America's public forests this year. In fact, they are
cowering in the smoke, wishing not to speak out. They will vote for the
special interests that ask them to vote no, but they will not come out
and openly express that what happened in Arizona and Colorado and
California this year, and parts of Oregon, is all but a natural process
and 2,100 homes and 22 or 25 lives and $2 billion is an acceptable
reality to America's forest environment.
I do not believe that is the case. So, if you can't justify the
current policy and the current policy is creating that kind of damage,
then why not change it just a little bit, enough to prove to the
American people, and to the critics, that what we are advocating is the
right and proper direction? Give us the time to do the programs, turn
the television cameras on, come out and look at it, and tell America
what we are doing. If it is wrong, we will change it. But I think they
will be very surprised, finding out we can thin and we can clean and we
can improve the watersheds and you can save the forests and you can
defuel them and therefore fireproof them--at least from the kinds of
fires the Senator from Wyoming and I have been discussing--and allow
these forests to return, in some instances, to the natural fires of 100
years ago that burned lightly and ambled across the land, thinning and
cleaning but not destroying and not burning large trees or the pastoral
landscape that Europeans first experienced when they landed on these
soils and began to trek across this great continent and through these
marvelous forests from east to west.
It is a legacy. The legacy of today is a legacy of embarrassment, in
my opinion. It is a legacy of misguided public policy that has brought
us to a point of decision. We ought not take it lightly. We certainly
ought to deal with it now rather than later.
I yield.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Stabenow). The Senator from Wyoming is
recognized.
Mr. ENZI. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Idaho for his
kind comments but more so for his leadership he is providing on this
issue. The speech he gave now and the several speeches he has given, I
know they have been extemporaneous and from the heart and contain a lot
of information that people across this country need to have.
I congratulate you for your leadership. I also congratulate Senator
Burns, Senator Domenici, and Senator Allard from Colorado for their
leadership on this.
Yes, it is interesting there are not some speeches against what we
are doing. We had an interesting vote on the floor yesterday. We had a
cloture vote. We had a vote to stop discussion, not on this amendment
but on the one that is just above it in the food chain. The purpose of
that cloture vote was to keep us from getting a vote on having healthy
forests in this country.
I don't want people to think we are filibustering. We are trying to
get a vote. We want a vote. But there are all kinds of tactics being
used to stop us from getting a vote on whether we ought to have healthy
forests, because everybody in this body knows how everybody in this
body ought to vote on healthy forests. They ought to vote for them.
We need a lot more dialog on what a healthy forest is. I admit that.
I want to point out the amendment we are talking about is not even of
significance to be a pilot project. It has virtually wiped out the
chance to really do the job in our forests. But it does give us a
chance to start showing what could be done in the forests. It is a
shame anybody thinks that is worth stopping--just a small, pilot
project.
I did have a couple of other thoughts as the Senator from Idaho was
speaking. We have covered quite a bit about what a waste fire is. It
brings to mind a little controversy that was happening at the time I
came to the Senate, and that was a discussion about timbering. There
was a discussion about how we were doing the timbering in this country
below cost.
I am the only accountant in the Senate. I love looking at numbers. So
when somebody starts talking about below-cost timber sales, that is in
my category, that is something in which I am interested. So I took a
look, to see how much it was costing us, as American taxpayers, to have
timbering in the national forests. I saw some of the greatest
gymnastics of accounting I have ever seen. We are taking corporations
apart right now for their bad accounting--and they should be, if they
are doing it wrong. But, by golly, somebody ought to take a look at the
Government accounting while they are at it. They ought to take a look
at timbering and the terrible accounting that was done on that.
You know, you really should not be able to take all of the costs of a
national forest, which include a whole variety of different things and
are supposed to include a whole variety of different activities, some
of which are recreation. Did you know that recreation has costs? We
provide a lot of services to people who are recreating in the national
forests, and we should. But we should not take those costs of
recreating and charge them to timbering, to show that it is a bad deal.
Let me tell you what kind of a bad deal we have going right now.
Right now, we are talking about hiring a whole bunch of Federal
employees to go in and clean up forests. There is a whole bunch of
people out there who are already experienced at doing this. Yes, if you
go back a few years in the methods they use, you can question some of
those methods. We need to make sure those methods never happen again.
But there is a right way to do it, and there are people out there who
know the right way to do it, and do it the right way. Instead of having
to pay for the whole job and throwing away whatever is taken out of the
forests, they would pay for that right to cut out some of this dead
timber.
Some of this has already happened, over by Rapid City. The forests
come right up over against the city, and they were worried about it
burning the city up, so they hired some people to come in and do some
logging. They hired another crew to come in and clean out the
underbrush. The ones who did the logging were from a little town in
Wyoming. They were from Sheridan, WY. Do you know what they had to say
to me when they found out that a second crew came in to clean out the
underbrush after they did the logging? They said: We could have done
both jobs for almost the same cost because the setting up costs money.
We are doing some really poor stewardship things in this country by
not having a great dialog and getting the people involved who know how
to do the things, because they have done them. There are jobs out there
that could be done with credits for the lumber that might be usable. I
have to tell you a little bit about the lumber that might be usable.
It used to be that you had to have a pretty big tree to get anything
usable for housing. There is an innovative company in Sheridan, WY, I
learned about after the problem over by Rapid City. They are able to
take the core of small trees and laminate them together to make beams
for houses, 2 by 4's for houses, tabletops. They have some phenomenal
ingenuity, and they have some products that will be released shortly--
again, with bits and pieces of very small trees. These are small
businesses.
I am really proud of small businesses in this country because I know
that is where the ingenuity of the Nation comes from. If a company gets
a really good idea, they may be bought out by a bigger company. The
start of these ideas usually comes from one person having a great idea,
being willing to put their money where their mouth is, take on all the
risks for it, and prove that the product will work. We have several of
those very small operations in Wyoming. You can take almost anything
you can call wood and put it to
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use in something that will drive down housing costs and make some
beautiful features. We need to be doing that. As I mentioned, they are
paid to cut the trees, but they are paid to clean up the forests. So if
you want to save a little bit of money, put people to work, and make
sure we don't have the terrible waste because of fires, that is how we
can do it.
I hope everyone will support this amendment. It is not the amendment
I would offer. It is far too small. It doesn't begin to take care of
the problem. But I ask that you support the amendment and consider all
of these things we have been saying. At least give some
counterarguments, if there are any counterarguments. When we do these
cloture amendments which are designed to eliminate this amendment
without a vote, I hope everybody will continue to oppose that too.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
Mr. MILLER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to be allowed to
speak as if in morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
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