[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 126 (Thursday, August 2, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10772-S10773]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             BUDGET INFERNO

  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I would like to take 10 minutes to talk 
about a situation that is happening in the West. I thank my colleagues 
for giving me that opportunity.
  I spoke last week, and the background of my speech was this graph 
called a Budget Inferno. I was en route to Idaho to look at a fire 
complex known as the Murphy Fire Complex. That is now under control. In 
other words, a perimeter is around the fire. It happens to be 1,038 
square miles of fire, nearly 700,000 acres, and $6.6 million spent. 
Type 1 teams, 2 of them; 24 crews, 1,230 personnel; 120 engines, 5 
helicopters, 27 water tenders, and 10 dozers.
  The firefighters who went in harm's way to work and stop this fire 
were gallant and I honor them. As I speak, there are literally 
thousands of young men and women out on the fire line in Idaho and 
Montana and parts of Nevada and elsewhere standing in harm's way to 
stop raging wildfires that are devastating the West.
  This was the largest fire Idaho has had in literally decades. It is 
now the largest single fire this year in total acreage. Why did it 
happen? Is there a reason? Was it simply the hot weather or are there 
other reasons that are creating these huge infernos of wildfire across 
the West as we speak?
  Last year, 10 million acres burned. This year, it appears we are on 
schedule to have an even greater fire season than we had last year. A 
month ago, I put a half a billion more dollars in the Interior 
appropriations budget to fight fire. My guess is when we get back in 
September, I and others will be on the floor asking for supplemental 
spending to pay for more wildfire devastation.
  The good news, in the great tragedy of the Murphy Fire, was that no 
one was killed. There were four firefighters injured, there were 
hundreds of cattle burned up, hundreds of sheep, probably hundreds of 
wildlife that we simply do not know about.
  But we have this huge area, some 600,000 acres that will be of no use 
to anyone, including cattle grazing, including wildlife, for a period 
of several years. It is totally burned out. I flew over it in a 
helicopter with our Governor and Senator Crapo. None of us has ever 
experienced anything like that. You fly for half an hour at 100-plus 
miles an hour across a firescape, and all of it is black, the hilltops, 
the valleys, no trees, nothing left.

[[Page S10773]]

  Here is what happened a few years ago. Here is what is happening now 
in the West. We ought to be doing something about it. Two years ago, 
there was a fire out there, 200,000 acres right in the same area. We 
rehabbed it. We grassed it, and the BLM said you cannot graze it for a 
couple of years now. Cattle might damage it.
  Then there was another fire last year, 60,000 acres right beside it. 
We rehabbed it. We seeded it. You cannot graze it. At least that is 
what the scientists say. That is not what those who have lived out 
there for a hundred years say. We left it alone and the fuel built up.
  Then we had someone sue us to protect the sage grouse habitat and the 
slickspot peppergrass, and a judge ruled. So we stopped grazing on half 
of that area, and the fuel built up.
  Now, we are in a fire scenario, with temperatures in the West that we 
have never seen. So we had 3 weeks of 100-degree temperatures in the 
Boise Valley, and the dewpoint dropped to nearly zero. You know the 
rest of the story because I told you that story.
  An unprecedented fuel buildup because a judge, and what I now call 
ecoterrorists, are destroying the landscape by not allowing reasonably 
managed, multiple-use approaches to our management. That is why the 
fire destroyed what it destroyed.
  An unprecedented fuel loading is on the grasslands of our country. 
Now, because it is a little hotter, it is a little further into the 
summer, our timberlands are starting to burn. They, too, are loaded 
with fuel, and they will burn at unprecedented rates as they did last 
year and the year before and the year before that.
  Here we are spending billions of dollars and destroying millions of 
acres of wildlife, watershed, wildlife habitat, all of those things 
combined. Our courts are saying: Get the people off the land, get the 
livestock off the land, rule in the favor of single-use management, 
here, there, and everywhere, tying the hands of our managers at the BLM 
and the Forest Service level, denying them the right to use their 
knowledge, use their scientific understanding for reasonable 
flexibility in the management we so desperately need.
  That is the story of the Murphy Complex; that is the story of nearly 
700,000 acres of total destruction; $6.6 million, and by the time we 
are done rehabilitating it, it could go to nearly $8 million.
  Is there something we can do about it? Well, there will be interest 
groups who will rush back here, and in the name of the environment say 
do nothing--in the name of the environment.
  Please, let us do something. Because the habitat the judge and the 
ecoactivists argued for to save the sage grouse and the slickspot 
peppergrass is no longer there. The enemy, some were the cattle that 
were grazing, they are no longer the enemy. The fire has become the 
enemy and that which they who ruled sought to save is now gone.
  That story that I have related to you, whether it is played out in 
the Murphy Complex in Idaho and Nevada, or whether it is in Northern 
California, or whether it was in the Tahoe Basin this year, or whether 
it is in Eastern Oregon, or whether it is in the mountains of Idaho, 
will be played out and millions of acres will burn and billions of 
dollars will be spent and homes will be destroyed and we will say: Gee, 
I think we got a problem.
  Congress will fail to respond and act to give our managers the 
flexibility, and we will continue to allow judges in the Ninth Circuit 
and environmental interests to game us and create these single, unique 
special kinds of management units that are impossible in any way to 
manage.
  I wanted to relate to you this story. The State BLM director, our 
Governor, myself, and my colleague, Mike Crapo, flew over this 
devastation. In the terms of a cowboy who has lived out there all his 
life and his father before him and his father before him:

       Senator, you ain't never seen anything like this one.

  And, boy, we have not. The great tragedy is, more will come, and more 
is burning now. Several fires are burning in Idaho. We are already 
nearly over a million acres in my State alone. Yet our hands are tied 
by a bureaucracy that is strangled by court decision after court 
decision because Congress will not act in the name of the environment.
  We have been scared into environmentalism instead of good and 
reasonable management. We are allowing our courts and our activist 
organizations to create the wildfire which has become a budget inferno.
  So the reason I give this speech now is because we have entered the 
fire season. August is our fire season. September is our fire season. 
My guess is I will be returning as one of the members of the 
Appropriations Committee and the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee 
saying: Please, my colleagues, could we have a couple billion more 
dollars to fight these fires? Because we are burning up out there, and 
there is not much we seem to be able to do about it because we have 
decided to allow public land management to be turned over to the 
activists and the judges instead of the professionals.
  Idaho burns tonight. Montana burns tonight. Nevada burns tonight, 
California, parts of Oregon, parts of Utah. I think it is important you 
hear this story and try to begin to understand that when we talk about 
balance and flexibility, you help us get there so we do not have to 
spend our budget in a useless and irresponsible way.

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