[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 117 (Thursday, July 12, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4931-S4932]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                         Colorado Forest Fires

  Mr. GARDNER. Madam President, I come to the floor today to talk about 
fires that Colorado faces right now--some of the most devastating fires 
in Colorado history. As of the writing of our comments this morning, 
there were 40 fires so far in 2018. This is one of them. I think this 
is the 416 fire, which I had the opportunity to visit just a couple of 
weeks ago.
  This past week I was in Colorado, where we were able to see the 
Sugarloaf fire. I drove by the Weston Pass fire. This is some distance 
away from the Lake Christine fire, and obviously, the Spring Creek fire 
in Colorado. As a result of these fires, over 355,000 acres in Colorado 
have burned. That is simply devastating right now.
  Congress has not been inattentive to the needs of our forests. Over 
the past several months, we passed legislation that would fix the fire 
borrowing crisis that had gripped the Forest Service. That was 
something that was forcing them to cannibalize dollars that could be 
used to reduce the next year's forest fires on this year's forest 
fires. We fixed that. We put fixes in place for that.
  We also passed legislation to give our land managers more tools to 
help address dead trees and insect- and disease-ridden forests so we 
could have healthier forests. I hope the work we do on healthy forest 
policies, which we have already made progress on, will continue in this 
Congress. These fires are certainly devastating.
  These communities remain open. No matter where you are in the 
country, if you have a summer vacation in Colorado, I hope you will 
still come. These communities need you now more than ever. They need 
your dollars. They need your resources. They want you to come and 
visit.
  In the meantime, we have to make sure that we provide our 
firefighters--the great men and women on the frontlines of these 
fires--the tools they need to protect our communities and the tools our 
land managers need to make sure they can prevent these fires from 
happening.
  In this Congress we have also considered policies addressing 
categorical exclusions. That is a fancy way of saying that it gives 
line managers tools to reduce the fire risks in certain areas. We have 
helped to provide tools in fire regimes I, II, and III. There are five 
fire regimes: fire regimes I, II, III, IV, and V. They are defined by 
how likely they are to burn and how frequently they are to burn in 
certain conditions. Much of the West, though, is what is called fire 
regimes IV and V. You can see the colors of fire regimes IV and V, the 
orange and reddish color, and the purple color. The green, the light 
green, the yellowish colors are I, II, III.
  We have been able to provide new tools for fire regimes I, II, and 
III, but we haven't provided as many tools in fire regimes IV and V. 
That happens to be a significant portion of the West. That is where 
most of the beetle and other insect kill has occurred in Colorado. When 
a tree is killed by an insect, it creates a significant fire hazard.
  We have also been able to provide the amendments that we filed in the 
farm bill. Unfortunately, they didn't succeed. I hope we can get them 
through to provide help in these high-risk areas of disease and insect-
ridden forests.
  Past management practices have created conditions where we may have 
monoculture forests, where you a forest with the same age of trees. You 
have the same conditions that allow them to be susceptible to the same 
insects and the same diseases, and you end up with thousands of acres 
that are susceptible to catastrophic wildfire.
  Where a lot of Colorado's beetle kill and insect kill can be found is 
also where the headwaters of some of our Nation's most significant 
water sources are. Colorado is the only State in the country where all 
water flows out of and no water flows into. I know the Presiding 
Officer is a beneficiary of Colorado water as well--probably not enough 
of it, she would say. But it is important to Nebraska that we protect 
Colorado forests because the headwaters of the Platte River are in 
Colorado--the North Platte and the South Platte.
  There is work we have to be doing to make sure that we protect these 
watersheds, because what happens when a forest burns is that you end up 
with hydrophobic soil conditions and that runoff from a rainstorm goes 
directly into the water. It destroys the watershed. If you have a 
forest that has four or five times the undergrowth that it should, then 
that takes more water out of what would naturally go to the waterway 
and the watershed, meaning there is less water available for other uses 
downstream.
  I want to talk more about forest management. We had another fire in 
Colorado called the Buffalo fire in Summit, CO. If you have ever driven 
up I-70 through the Eisenhower Tunnel, toward Breckenridge, you go by a 
town called Silverthorne. You can see in

[[Page S4932]]

Summit County that the Buffalo fire threatened 1,400 homes. So 1,400 
homes were evacuated as a result of this fire. The fire was 91 acres. 
It is about 95 percent containment, but this risk it posed was 
significant because there was a very densely populated area of the 
mountains, a community of homeowners. There were 1,400 homeowners who 
had to evacuate.
  They had a lot of high-risk fuels, but what this community had done 
was something we should brag about all over the West. They actually had 
collaborative efforts with State and local governments in this area. 
They developed fuel treatments to help moderate fire activity.
  This was a challenging fire. We have extreme fire behavior in 
Colorado this year, but because of the collaborative work they had 
done, that helped to reduce the risk, to thin forests, to reduce the 
fuel, and to create the fire breaks. They were able to keep this fire 
from reaching those homes. The fire treatment worked. This is an 
example of a process we ought to be spreading and looking at to help 
reduce hazardous fuels around the West to make sure we don't lose our 
communities when we have these devastating fires. This was just west of 
Silverthorne. These fuel reduction projects helped to create fire 
breaks, and they prescribed burns which contain a fire with extreme 
behavior that could have been devastating. This wasn't too far away 
from the Dillon Reservoir, a key source of water for Colorado.
  I also want to talk about some of the language we have in the farm 
bill. We have language in the farm bill that addresses vegetation 
management. This picture shows what happened after a forest fire. This 
is a power line, obviously. You can see the power lines going through 
it.
  We have risks to our forests, our communities, our homes, and risks 
to our watersheds. We also have risks to our power supply systems. You 
can see that this pole has been simply disintegrated as a result of the 
fire. This has cost at least one utility over $10 million in the Basalt 
area, as a result of the fire.
  We are working on language dealing with vegetation management. 
Senator Bennet and I sponsored language that would allow utilities to 
do work on their own dime outside of the rights of way to prevent this 
fire from impacting our electricity and energy system. The Lake 
Christine fire, which is near Basalt, put a lot of different types of 
electric infrastructure out of commission. This utility, as I 
mentioned, is estimating that it will be millions of dollars for them 
to repair. It makes sense for us to give tools to these utilities on 
their own dime to prevent this kind of damage, because they would be 
creating fire breaks. They would be creating more resilient systems 
that would allow our communities a little bit more security, I guess, 
in knowing that their electricity systems would be protected and safe.
  These kinds of bills that we have been able to produce have had and 
will have great impact on how we can prevent and how we respond to 
catastrophic wildfires. Certainly, a $10 million cost from one fire, as 
well as other costs, will increase rates. It has the potential to 
increase rates dramatically if we can't get a handle on the right kinds 
of policies.
  Finally, I want to turn to another disturbing aspect of what we have 
seen in Colorado with these forest fires. We have seen an uptick of 
drones flying over active forest fires and firefighting areas. If you 
fly a drone and do that without interfering with the firefighter--
following all the rules--then I don't think anybody has a problem with 
it. If you are flying a drone and violating the rules and you are 
flying it over an active fire, stop it. I talked to far too many 
incident commanders who had to call off air tankers because there was a 
drone in the area. There is a video on YouTube where you can see 
footage from the drone taking a picture of the forest, while you see 
the shadow of a tanker on the ground because the tanker went right over 
it.
  The pilots of that tanker were asked: Did you see the drone?
  They said: No.
  What would have happened if that drone had hit that plane, perhaps 
causing an accident, perhaps costing lives, perhaps starting a new fire 
because the plane could have crashed as a result?
  If you call off an air tanker already in the air, that tanker can't 
land with the slurry that it has onboard already. So the air tanker 
gets called off. It then has to dump the slurry somewhere else. That 
could be $10,000 worth of slurry at a time wasted because they got 
called off because somebody decided they would rather fly their drone 
and get videos that they can post on YouTube, instead of allowing 
firefighters to do their job.
  This is what the Forest Service put out: ``If you fly, we can't.''
  You have a 110,000-acre fire in the Spring Creek fire right now. Over 
200 homes are lost. An hour a day without supertankers--without air 
tankers--is a big problem for those communities and the men and women 
putting their lives at risk trying to defend and protect our forests 
and our communities. I hope people will use a little bit of common 
sense and not fly their drones over an active firefighting.
  I introduced legislation with Senator Bennet and Congressman Tipton 
to make it a felony to interfere with a firefighter operation over a 
forest fire if you are flying a drone illegally.
  We met with individuals from Oregon and from all over the West when I 
visited the fire at the incident command center in Southern Colorado 
when we visited the Spring Creek fire. We talked to fire men and women 
who spent their Fourth of July not watching fireworks or picnicking 
with their family but defending and protecting our communities in 
Colorado. We thank them for their work. We thank them for their 
tireless efforts and sacrifice.
  It is dangerous. In fact, just last week, as we were at the fire on 
Friday, we commemorated and recognized the anniversary of the Storm 
King Mountain fire and the 14 persons who were killed near Glenwood 
Springs about 24 years before. This is a very serious fire season. 
Thankfully, we have serious policies in place that are addressing it. 
There is more work we can do.
  I thank my colleagues.