[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 188 (Tuesday, October 26, 2021)]
[House]
[Page H5912]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               BETTER MANAGEMENT FOR OUR FEDERAL FORESTS

  (Mr. LaMALFA asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. LaMALFA. Madam Speaker, I just wanted to point out, as a result 
of the over 2 million acres of fire that have happened in California, 
the next thing that happens is when the winter comes, and the rains 
come--like we are having so much now--the deluge of rain caused after 
the forest fires because of unmanaged forests the erosion that we are 
seeing here.
  This example here is Highway 70 running through Butte County and 
Plumas County. The rockslide you see here is part of the fire scar. So 
when we lose all that foliage, you get erosion.
  What does erosion mean? Not just the highway being closed, but this 
washes into, in this case Feather River, on down into Lake Oroville, 
which is a water source for 25 million people in California.
  So why is this important? Because we have to do a much better job of 
managing our Federal forests, our Federal lands, and we are not doing 
that. We are not doing it speedily enough because we have so much to 
catch up on, yet every year millions of acres of forest land burn. This 
is just one of the results here.
  The lost transportation. The water quality that affects so many 
people is going to be negatively affected by this lack of action. We 
need the Forest Service to move rapidly towards not only mitigating the 
fires from this year with erosion, but also manage these lands so we 
don't have these horrific fires.

                          ____________________