[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 126 (Wednesday, July 26, 2017)]
[House]
[Page H6309]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           SALUTING THE FIREFIGHTERS AND AGENCIES OF CAL FIRE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by saluting the more 
than 5,000 firefighters from 40 cooperating agencies that assembled 
under the coordination of CAL FIRE to battle the Detwiler fire that 
threatened Yosemite Valley and its gateway communities.
  I spent Saturday at the command centers in Mariposa and Merced 
Counties, and what I said is what I have seen time and again at so many 
fires we are having these days in the Sierras: cool, calm 
professionalism; selflessness; and devotion to duty.

                              {time}  1115

  CAL FIRE is an agency that works. I want particularly to salute and 
thank Nancy Koerperich, CAL FIRE's unit fire chief for Madera, Merced, 
and Mariposa. She and her operation literally saved several towns, 
including Mariposa and Coulterville, from annihilation last week.
  Sheriff Doug Binnewies of Mariposa County is rightly being hailed for 
his courage and leadership in directing the orderly evacuation of the 
town of Mariposa as the fire bore down upon it.
  You can literally see how the fire burned right up to the town's 
edge. I can't tell you how many homes I saw where firefighters stopped 
it literally within a few feet of their front doors. CAL FIRE Battalion 
Chief Jeremy Rahn told me that the difference between saving and losing 
so many homes was defensible space.
  CAL FIRE has produced a superb phone app to assist homeowners in 
preparing their homes so that if, God forbid, the need arises, 
firefighters will be able to defend them. It also provides fire alerts, 
and anyone in the mountain community should have it. It is free for 
downloading at your phone's app store.
  I cannot say enough about the firefighters who have been working in 
triple-digit heat on 24-hour shifts to battle the flames or the air 
crews that dropped a staggering 500,000 gallons of fire retardant in a 
single day at the height of the conflagration. Their effectiveness can 
be seen by red borders of fire retardant that separate the blackened 
ground of the fire on one side from the landscape they saved on the 
other.
  They not only saved these communities and hundreds of homes, they 
also stopped the fire within just a few miles of the Stanislaus 
National Forest, a forest that is dying because of Federal 
environmental restrictions on forest management. The firefighters 
warned that, if the fire had reached these vast stands of dead trees, 
the fire would have exploded with atomic force. And that is the fine 
point of the matter.

  I spoke with Mariposa County Supervisor Marshall Long and many of the 
other firefighters at the Mariposa command center, and the one thing 
that they stressed time and again is that they need relief from the 
regulations that are making it almost impossible to create firebreaks, 
thin the forests, or remove the excess fuels.
  These policies, imposed 45 years ago through legislation like the 
National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, 
promised to improve the forest environment. After 45 years of 
experience with these laws, I think we are entitled to ask: Well, how 
is the forest environment doing? The answer is damning. These laws have 
made it virtually impossible to keep our forests properly managed, and 
the result has been severe tree overcrowding.
  The Sierra Nevada normally support between 20 and 100 trees per acre, 
depending upon the topography. The average tree density is now 266 
trees per acre. This extreme overcrowding has stressed the trees to the 
point they can no longer resist drought and beetle infestation and 
disease. This has caused a massive tree die-off, and we have entire 
national forests now just waiting to explode with over 100 million dead 
trees.
  The heroic firefighters of the Detwiler fire have kept it out of 
these hazard zones, but the hazard zones are still there. And consider 
this: we are only at the very beginning of the fire season that 
combines fresh brush from last year's rains with millions of dead trees 
that were too stressed from overcrowding to survive the drought. The 
firefighters I spoke with on Saturday bitterly complained that they 
can't even cut firebreaks to isolate these zones because of the same 
so-called environmental laws.
  The House has pending before it the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 
2017 that would allow us to restore good forest management, but we may 
already have run afoul of what Churchill called history's ``terrible, 
chilling words: too late.''
  Mr. Speaker, I call for expeditious consideration of the Resilient 
Federal Forests Act and other legislation aimed at restoring management 
to our forests in the hope that firefighters can hold these fires at 
bay until we restore good management to our public lands.

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