[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 16608-16609]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     WILDFIRE DISASTER FUNDING ACT

  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, across the West, 2017 will be long 
remembered as the year when fire was seared into our collective 
consciousness and ash rained down on homes and cars. There were mass 
evacuations, and scores just lost their hopes and dreams.
  Devastating fires have hit my home State of Oregon, but Idaho, 
California, Washington, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and more all were 
hit by fires that always seemed bigger and hotter and more powerful 
than what we have seen in the past.
  These are not our grandfathers' fires. There are a whole host of 
reasons behind this, and today I just want to talk a bit about what 
happened, what it has meant, and at least a commonsense approach that 
Senator Crapo and I have advocated for moving forward on a bipartisan 
basis.
  The fact is, in the West, dozens of lives have been lost. Entire 
communities have been wiped out. An iconic national treasure in my home 
State, a place that Oregonians have always regarded--a special love for 
our Columbia River Gorge is practically in our chromosomes--it was 
burned over this year.
  This month, a huge part of Northern California was burned. We talked 
to our colleagues Senator Feinstein and Senator Harris about that. It 
is not just rolling hills and unoccupied land; the fires swept through 
entire cities. Some of the stories about those whose lives were lost in 
California just break your heart. School has been disrupted for more 
than a quarter million children. In some cases, it could be weeks 
before classes are back up and running.
  In my home State, more than 600,000 acres were burned, nearly a third 
of that in the Chetco Bar fire that burned through southwestern Oregon. 
I was there to visit with folks in the community and the volunteers. 
There were volunteers from all over the country who were stepping up to 
help us deal with these fires. It sure was needed because, nationwide, 
almost 9 million acres burned. It is an area bigger than the size of 
eight States in our country--all of it up in flames. Compare that to 
the 1980s and the 1990s, when an average of around 3 million acres 
burned per year.
  A brandnew report is out from the Department of the Interior 
forecasting how much the cost of fighting these fires is going to climb 
in the near future. The agency predicts a jump of 20 percent from 
fiscal year 2018 to 2019, and they believe that is a conservative 
estimate. If conditions are dry and temperatures are high, it could be 
even worse.
  I am of the view--and it is something Senator Crapo and I have worked 
on together for years now. Sometimes we believe it is the longest 
running battle since the Trojan War. It is based on the proposition 
that Congress should no longer sit back and accept that these fires can 
only get larger, cost more, and that somehow the Forest Service is not 
all that big a problem. We just call it the fire service, which is the 
way a lot of people describe it in our part of the world.
  Now, the way the Federal budget works for these fires is a broken, 
commonsense-defying policy, and it literally adds fuel to the fires and 
in effect disrupts not just the West but the rest of the country 
because the consequences of this broken budgeting process for fighting 
fires takes a toll on communities across the country.
  A few years ago, I came back from Oregon for a visit, and I learned 
that our colleague and friend, the distinguished senior Senator from 
New York, Mr. Schumer, had signed on to legislation that I am going to 
describe shortly that Senator Crapo and I have been working on. When I 
heard Senator Schumer had signed on to it, I, of course, was very 
pleased to have someone of his influence. I said to my colleagues: What 
am I missing here? I don't remember there being a lot of Federal 
forests in Brooklyn.
  Well, it turns out that at that time, Senator Schumer, because he 
goes all over his State, was I believe in Upstate New York. There was a 
company that made baseball bats. As a result of this broken system of 
fighting fire, when Senator Schumer's constituent had a problem with 
the baseball bats because there was an invasive species that was eating 
its way through these baseball bats, the local Forest Service folks 
didn't have the money to help him deal with this economic issue.
  It might seem like a small thing to some people, but when you are 
talking about these smaller communities, if they don't have the 
resources because they are victims of this broken system of fighting 
fire, this is a problem. It is a problem that Senator Crapo and I have 
taken on now to ensure that, once and for all, we substitute common 
sense for a system that is everything but common sense.
  What I am going to describe now is something called fire-borrowing. 
It starts like this: Over the years, prevention, which everybody talks 
about--Smokey is the symbol of prevention. Prevention gets short 
shrift. It gets hot and dry in our part of the world in the West, and 
if you don't go in there and do the preventive work, if you don't thin 
out the forests and it gets hot and dry, and then all of a sudden you 
have a lightning strike on your hands, you will have what amounts to an 
inferno. It just whips through the area. It knows no boundaries. 
Federal land is affected. Private land is affected. State land is 
affected. There are bigger and more expensive fires, and I can tell you 
that what we have seen are unprecedented fires.
  In our Columbia River Gorge that I mentioned, we saw a fire leap the 
river. It used to be that rivers were a break. They were a break to 
ensure that the communities were safe. Now, in my home State, we have 
seen a fire actually leap the river.
  So what is happening is, as prevention gets short shrift, these big 
fires break out, the Federal Government borrows from the prevention 
fund to put the fires out, and the problem just gets worse. Common 
sense is defied. There is absolutely irrational budgeting that ripples 
not just through the West but through communities all across the 
country, producing what I think most colleagues would say they would 
never expect, which is forestry

[[Page 16609]]

personnel--when Senator Schumer visits in New York--having challenges 
paying for local forestry matters.
  Fire prevention programs help thin out dead and dying material from 
forests and clear dried grasses from open landscapes--the kindling that 
goes up in flames when lightning strikes or when a small ground fire 
grows out of control. Those are the very real problems we have in the 
West. The programs we need to deal with this are being robbed because 
of the cycle I just described. Fire-borrowing. Prevention. Short 
shrift. The government borrows from the prevention fund to put the fire 
out, and the problem gets worse. That is fire-borrowing in our part of 
the world.
  You can look at the recent fires in California to see how dangerous 
this is. If fire prevention had gotten a fair shake, lives could have 
been saved, and businesses and property might have been spared. Western 
communities would not be trying to recover from the ravages of summer 
and fall 2017.
  Many of our colleagues of both parties and now 205 groups--timber 
companies, scientists, environmentalists, academics, and people from 
all across the political spectrum--are joining Senator Crapo and me in 
saying that what is needed is a clean fix for the wildfire budgeting 
system and a complete end to fire-borrowing. We have been working on 
this, as I said, for years.
  We know some of our colleagues want to see a variety of other 
policies attached, particularly policies dealing with forest 
management. One of the reasons I wanted to come to the floor tonight 
was to say that I take a back seat to no one when it comes to finding 
the right approach to forest management. I have written bipartisan 
forest management laws. But let's make sure that as we go forward on 
this issue, we understand that we cannot let other matters get in the 
way of stopping the cycle of fire-borrowing once and for all.
  What Senator Crapo and I have proposed is essentially to say that the 
really big fires, once and for all in America, will be treated like 
what they really are--natural disasters. And you can look at that 
relatively small number of fires and say: We are going to deal with 
them through the disaster fund. Then you don't raid the prevention 
fund. And what the government scorekeepers have said in the past is 
that not raiding the prevention fund through fire-borrowing will, in 
their judgment, means fewer fires in the first place; hence, there will 
be fewer natural disasters if you end fire-borrowing once and for all.
  My view is that we are going to go forward this year on the disaster 
relief issue, and I want it understood that I am going to work with 
Senators of both political parties to finally see this matter wrapped 
up and an end to fire-borrowing.
  I think anyone who has kept an eye on the news or has read stories or 
seen reports about natural disasters understands that unfortunately 
disasters have visited too many of our communities--hurricanes flooding 
Houston, violent winds and rain in Florida. Weeks after Maria made 
landfall, millions of American citizens in Puerto Rico are still in 
desperate need of help. Our neighbors to the south suffer with the 
aftermath of a massive earthquake. Tornados are a threat across much of 
the country. In our part of the world, these wildfires are our natural 
disasters.
  The Congress can't get up one day, come to the floor of the Senate, 
and just say: We are going to stop all the hurricanes and the 
earthquakes. There is something that Congress can do about preventing 
so many wildfires. We, with our legislation, want to build a new ethic 
of fire prevention. That is what ending fire-borrowing is really all 
about. It is saying that we are in effect going to take--it is almost 
like an old stage with a dilapidated set on it, and you just pull it 
out because it is outdated. That is what we are talking about with 
fire-borrowing. It is like an old stage that is dilapidated. It doesn't 
make sense for the times. We are talking about replacing fire-borrowing 
with a modern policy so that we can deal with the big fires as the 
natural disasters they are and get back in the business of putting fire 
prevention first and replacing a commonsense-defying Federal budget 
plan that has caused so much harm to folks in the West.
  I hope my colleagues will support the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act. 
Senator Crapo and I want to work with every single Senator in this 
Chamber to get across the finish line. We are not saying that ending 
fire-borrowing is going to mean there will never be another fire in 
this country. What we are saying is that it is past time to replace 
such an illogical, commonsense-defying budget system as that presented 
by fire-borrowing. With that, we can reduce the risk of major wildfires 
to communities across the West.
  With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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