[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the quorum call be rescinded.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

[[Page S8706]]

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,

[[Page S8707]]

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

[[Page S8708]]

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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