[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 160 (Thursday, October 5, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6346-S6348]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Wildfire Funding

  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, 4 weeks ago, I stood here on the floor of 
the Senate and called for increased funding to fight the wildfires. 
This is just one of the dramatic pictures of Oregon ablaze. It is 
thousands and thousands of acres.

[[Page S6347]]

  I had the experience of driving roughly 350 miles in my State and 
never escaping the smoke from the fires that were in every single 
corner and in every quadrant of the State of Oregon. We have seen the 
challenge of Mother Nature at work this year with Hurricanes Harvey, 
Irma, and Maria hitting in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. But let's 
not forget the incredible damage being done in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, 
and Washington by these extraordinary fires.
  Over the last decade, we have seen an average of 50,000 fires in 
America each year. They destroy and burn up more than 5 million acres, 
but this year the count is well over 8 million acres and counting. In 
Oregon, we normally have fires that burn, on average, about 500,000 
acres, but this year we are well over 600,000 acres and counting.
  As a result of these raging fires, we have many communities that have 
been so powerfully impacted and so many forests destructively impacted. 
We should stop and ask: What can we do better in terms of our forests 
and our communities? That is why I am taking to the floor right now.
  The first thing we need to do is to end fire borrowing. This is where 
the U.S. Forest Service, in order to pay for fighting these fires, 
proceeds to borrow from every other account. This has become all too 
common. What are those other accounts? They are the hazardous fuels 
funds, forest management funds, forest restoration funds, forest 
conservation funds, road maintenance funds, and funds that are designed 
to prepare for future timber sales.
  All of that does a lot of damage to the preparation. So the fires are 
more resilient and aren't susceptible to this type of firefighting. We 
have seen, on average in the last decade, a cost of fighting fires 
across the country of about $1.6 billion. But this year, we are over $3 
billion--almost double. So even though the Appropriations Committee had 
wisely put in a buffer of several hundred million dollars to prevent 
fire borrowing, those funds were long ago wiped out.
  So there we were 4 weeks ago. I was working to say that now that we 
are over the allotted funds for the year, let's immediately get more 
funds that can be used to backfill this shortage in September. I thank 
all of my colleagues for the fact that those funds were included in the 
continuing resolution. We successfully provided a bridge so that 
firefighting could continue and so that the fire borrowing was quickly 
repaid.
  But that is not a permanent solution--to try to legislate or to 
backfill on a rapid basis. Indeed, when we have these kinds of fire 
seasons, it is like other natural disasters. It is like tornadoes and 
hurricanes and floods. So we need to have a FEMA-style backup for those 
worst ever fire seasons. That is what my colleagues Senator Wyden and 
Senator Crapo--bipartisan teamwork--have been putting forth. It is 
called the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act of 2017. It says that when we 
reach a certain level of funding for fighting fires, the balance will 
go to a FEMA-style fund. That is exactly the way it should be done.
  It has been estimated in the past that if just the top 1 percent or 2 
percent of the worst fires were funded in FEMA-style fund, we would 
never have had fire borrowing in the past. But the most relevant kind 
of crisp and clean way to do that would be to adopt this bill Senator 
Wyden and Senator Crapo have put so much work into and which I am 
certainly pleased to cosponsor. That would be very useful, and we 
should do that now.
  We should respond while the memory is fresh and, actually, while 
fires are still burning in State after State--certainly burning in my 
home State of Oregon. Then we should recognize, too, that this terrible 
fire year has done so much damage to so many communities. We have 
communities where the roads have been cut off. We have communities 
where the tourists disappeared because of the smoke, or other economic 
enterprises had to shut down for an extended period.
  So as we assist those communities hit by Harvey and hit by Irma and 
hit by Maria, let's also help those communities that were hit by this 
year's extraordinary fires. That would mean strengthening the Small 
Business Disaster Loan Program. That would mean taking the additional 
funding for the USDA Emergency Community Water Assistance Program, and, 
certainly, it would mean making additional community development block 
grants available to the communities impacted by these fires. Let's not 
forget those communities as we provide assistance in funding to the 
communities affected by the hurricanes.
  Then we also need to address the fact that many assets in our forests 
were scorched by these fires. There are trails that have to be 
repaired, roads that have to be repaired, watershed repairs to avoid 
landslides, facilities that were scorched and burned, and wildlife and 
fish management restoration, including critical sage grouse areas.
  I was up visiting the incredible waterfall, the Multnomah Falls. They 
were explaining that several of the trails have bridges--there are so 
many bridges on the trails in Oregon--and that the fire had burned some 
of the understructure. So from above it looked like the bridges were 
safe, but they weren't safe. They can't reopen those trails until they 
get support to do all these repairs. The Forest Service has estimated 
that it will take $150 million to restore the damage done to the Forest 
Service's infrastructure.
  So we should make that happen as part of this bill. Then, we should 
turn to forest fire resilience. We have 2 million acres in need of fire 
prevention efforts in Oregon. Actually, we have far more of that in 
need of fire prevention, but we have nearly 2 million that have already 
passed through environmental approval for work to reduce the hazardous 
fuels that are on the floor of the forest, and we need to thin these 
forests.

  You can imagine that when you have clearcuts and those clearcuts are 
replanted, the trees grow back very close together. In a short amount 
of time, those forests are very good for fires and very good for 
disease, but they are neither good for ecosystems nor for timber 
stands. So they have to be thinned, and that thinning can be done, in 
Oregon alone, on nearly 2 million acres already approved through the 
environmental process. The challenge is to get more funds into that 
effort.
  That, too, should be part of this because, whether you talk to an 
environmentalist or talk to somebody who wants sawlogs for the mills, 
they both know that if you thin these forests, you make them more 
resistant to fire. With better timber stands, you have better 
ecosystems, and you supply a steady supply of sawlogs to the mill.
  Let's not reopen the timber wars of the past. Let's work together 
with a win-win.
  I want to show this chart because it indicates the dramatic change of 
what has happened to the Forest Service budget. We can go back to 1995 
and compare it to the year 2015. I want to focus particularly on the 
orange. The orange is the amount of money that was spent fighting 
forest fires, and 20 years ago, it was 16 percent of the Forest Service 
budget. But in 2015--2 years ago--it broke 50 percent. It was 52 
percent of their budget. This year, it has certainly gone up much 
higher than that. So as the amount of funds spent on fighting fires has 
increased, it has dramatically reduced the amount of funds that support 
our maintenance and improvement of the forest. That is what is getting 
squeezed out.
  Let me put it differently. The more you spend fighting fires out of a 
single pot of money, the less money you have to prevent the fires. 
Everywhere I go they say: Can't we do more on the front end so these 
forests are more resilient? If you think about how fire works, it 
really gets going if the trees are close together because one tree 
lights the next tree on fire. If you thin them, you slow that down. The 
fire goes from the ground, where there is brush, to the canopy, where 
there are branches, very easily if the branches are close to the 
ground. So you trim off those branches, separate the trees, thin them 
out, shave off the branches, cut off the branches, and suddenly you 
have a forest that is much more resilient.
  There are those folks who have said: Let's just get rid of the 
environmental rules. Let's just clearcut everything. Let's do 10,000 
acres at a time. That is, by the way, 15 square miles. Let's set those 
15 square miles next to each other. Let's just shave the Earth and wipe 
out the forests. That way, there will not be forest fires. Those are 
the timber wars of the past.

[[Page S6348]]

  What we have seen is that we can bridge the divide between a good 
ecosystem and a good timber stand by thinning the forest, by making 
them more like a natural forest, which is much more fire resilient. In 
the process of thinning, which has to be done periodically over time, 
we are also providing a steady foundation for sawlogs for our mills.
  There is a mill in John Day, OR. I met with the folks there who were 
very worried. The workers there were very worried about that mill 
getting shut down. I was determined to do everything I could to save 
that mill. What ended up happening is that we found we couldn't save 
that mill with a timber sale because a timber sale can't commit to a 
load of logs over a 10-year period. The owner of the mill couldn't 
commit to the cost of new machinery if he didn't know he would get logs 
for an extended period of time. So we discovered that we could, though, 
through a forest health contract--through a stewardship contract--
enable a steady supply of thinned logs to make it to that mill and make 
sure that mill stayed open. Not only did it keep it open, but it added 
workers to that mill. That is the type of win-win solution that we 
need.
  There is another way of looking at the cost of fighting fires. Here 
we see, in 1995, 16 percent of the budget going to fight fires; in 
2017, 56 percent. Let's look into the future. An original estimate was 
that we would reach 67 percent by 2025; now the new estimate, based on 
the changing dynamics in the forest, is that we will get to over two-
thirds of the budget fighting fires by the year 2021--four fire seasons 
from today. That is how big the issue is. That is why we need funds 
from the front end to be able to thin these forests. This is simply 
common sense.
  If you are the private owner of a private forest, you wouldn't dare 
let this forest retain this high propensity for fires and disease. You 
would thin the forest. You would make it a better timber stand; you 
would make it a better ecosystem. And that is what we need to do.
  We have also seen that another way of looking at the changes is how 
the staffing levels have changed over the last two decades. If we look 
at just two decades ago, we can see that in 1998 there were about 
18,000 individuals dedicated to managing the forest lands and just 
5,700 dedicated to going out and fighting blazes. Now we have come into 
the future, and we see now that the number of people fighting fires is 
larger than the number working on all of the other forest programs. We 
have to commit to doing far more on the prevention end. If we let this 
summer's crisis go without securing funding to thin those forests that 
have already gone through the environmental process, we are making a 
huge mistake, and it is going to cost us more because there are going 
to be even more fires in the future. So not only do we spend more out 
of the National Treasury to fight them, but we will have less healthy 
timber stands to fuel our economy.
  Let's end the fire burn. Let's provide the funding to restore the 
fire service assets that were burned, the scourged assets. Let's 
provide assistance through community development block grants and small 
business loans to assist the communities that were scourged by these 
fires. Let's pass Senator Wyden and Senator Crapo's bill, which 
proceeds to create a FEMA-like structure to back up the worst fire 
seasons, and certainly, certainly, absolutely, let's invest in 
prevention on the front end by thinning these forests and getting the 
flammable buildup of forest branches off the floor of the forests. 
Those are positive things we can do.
  At this moment in Houston, in Miami, in Puerto Rico, people are 
thinking, what can we do to better prepare for the next storm surge? 
What can we do to be better prepared for the next hurricane? Well, we 
know for sure that we are going to have fires across the Northwest in 
Montana, in Idaho, in Oregon, in Washington every summer, and they are 
simply getting worse. We must ask ourselves the same question: How do 
we change this rhythm? How do we operate this differently and better? 
That is our responsibility in this Chamber, and that is the set of 
things we can do to have a far better outcome in the future.
  I urge all of my colleagues to support these five efforts as we 
support funding for Texas and Florida and Puerto Rico.
  Thank you.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Blunt). The majority leader is recognized.