[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 13389-13390]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      WILDFIRES IN WESTERN STATES

  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, in a few minutes, I am going to start 
sprinting to the airport to get home to listen to Oregonians who have 
been clobbered by several megafires unlike anything we have seen in my 
home State of Oregon. On top of that, in addition to the megafires, 
there are numerous other fires.
  Just up the road from my hometown of Portland, the Eagle Creek fire 
has merged with the Indian Creek fire and spread over an area of more 
than 31,000 acres. What we have seen--again, just staggering in its 
implications--the fire jumped the Columbia River into Washington State. 
It is ravaging our iconic Columbia River Gorge. This is a treasure 
beloved by the millions of people who visit every year and the people 
of my home State.
  Next to me is a shot of the fire which has been burning in the 
Columbia River Gorge now for days. Although it appears the first sparks 
of the Eagle Creek fire were ignited by a young man, it is clear the 
inferno was accelerated by the unusual heat in early September. Now the 
lives and the homes of Gorge residents are under threat, and a world-
renowned treasure in my home State has been devastated.
  Sadly, this wildfire devastation this month has rippled across 
Oregon. The Chetco Bar fire in Southwestern Oregon has consumed more 
than 167,000 acres--an area bigger than all of Portland. The Umpqua 
North fire east of Roseburg and the Milli fire in Central Oregon have 
torn through tens of thousands of acres each.
  I could go on. The point is, my home State is getting pounded by 
these fires, and the West is getting pounded by these fires. The skies 
glow orange at night as the flames burn on. Families wake up to ash on 
their windshields. Schools are closed, and people have been warned to 
stay indoors because it is not safe to breathe the hazardous air.
  On the Air Quality Index map from the Environmental Protection 
Agency--which I have here--you can see the effects of the nightmare 
which has settled in over most of Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and large 
parts of Montana. As I speak, there are a million and a half acres 
ablaze across Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, 
Wyoming, Nevada, and Utah. One-third of these burning acres are in my 
home State alone. This year is virtually guaranteed to be the worst 
fire season in history in terms of the total area burnt.
  I served as chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee 
for a time, chaired the Forestry Subcommittee. I have sat in so many 
committee hearings and heard again and again about the dangers these 
fires pose to our States. The fact is, the fires are getting hotter, 
they have gotten bigger, they have gotten tougher to fight, and this is 
a years-long pattern in the West. It gets hot. It gets dry. There have 
been inadequate efforts to go in there and thin out the dead and dying 
material. Then we have a lightning strike in our part of the world, and 
then all of a sudden, we have an inferno on our hands.
  This time, as I indicated, it seems as if some of the problem was due 
to that set of firecrackers, but this is a years-long pattern in the 
West. Frankly, the same warming trends that have worsened the fires 
seem to have added fuel to storms that developed in the Gulf of Mexico 
and over the Atlantic.
  My seatmate, Senator Nelson, has been telling us about what his 
region is faced with. The victims of all these disasters and the 
communities that will continue to face these growing threats need the 
government to come up with smarter policies to try to prevent as much 
of this as possible. That is why I wanted to wrap up my remarks by way 
of talking about the bizarre way the Federal Government budgets for 
fighting fire.
  In the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, I have led a 
bipartisan effort for years now. Senator Mike Crapo, the senior Senator 
from Idaho, and I had 260 groups--forestry groups, scientists, 
environmentalists--join us in the effort. What has happened over the 
years is the Federal Government has shorted prevention, and then, 
because of the conditions being hot and dry and lightning strikes or 
what have you, we have a big fire, and then the Federal Government, to 
put the fire out, borrows from the prevention fund, and the problem 
gets worse. That is what we call fire-borrowing. The reason I call it 
bizarre is that the idea of ripping off prevention, which we need most, 
defies common sense.
  We have a dangerous, worsening cycle known as fire-borrowing. Shoddy 
budgeting today leads to bigger fires tomorrow, and it needs to stop.
  I remember not long ago--because this does so much damage to natural 
resources policy--the distinguished minority leader of the Senate, 
Senator Schumer, signed on to our bill. We all wondered, well, what is 
the situation in New York? It turned out they had a problem with a bug 
and a baseball bat, and the natural resource agencies had trouble 
dealing with that challenge because so much of the funds had been 
frittered away with this broken system of fighting fire.
  That is why I have now called on the President to include a funding 
fix in any request for an upcoming disaster aid package. Several of my 
western colleagues and I--Senators from both sides of the aisle--are 
calling on Leaders McConnell and Schumer today to include a fix in any 
disaster aid package that comes before this body.
  As I said, this battle has gone on for years. I think I mentioned to 
my friend from New Mexico that this issue with respect to fire-
borrowing has been the

[[Page 13390]]

longest running battle since the Trojan War. It has gone on and on and 
each year wastes more and more money on a broken system of funding the 
fight against wildfires.
  Senator Crapo has been an instrumental partner in this effort. He 
also has a proposal that in effect builds on what we have been working 
on for years in the Banking Committee. I support that proposal as well.
  I want it understood that there is a lot that has to be dealt with 
here in the Senate. There have been some horrible disasters--Houston 
and now the South, with what Senator Nelson is going to wrestle with 
this weekend. We have a lot to do. But when we are talking about 
western communities getting hit by a wrecking ball, which is exactly 
what these mega-fires do, I want it understood that we western 
Senators, Democrats and Republicans, are going to be teaming up to make 
sure, as we said in our letter today to Leaders McConnell and Schumer, 
that a fire fix that is based on common sense, sensible practices to 
try to prevent fires to the greatest extent possible, has to be a focus 
of priority business in the Senate. Too many western communities--the 
kind I am going to see this weekend--are faced with destroyed homes, 
businesses, lost recreation dollars, lost timber revenue, cleanup 
costs, and forest and range land restoration efforts.
  The West cannot wait any longer for Congress to break this dangerous 
cycle that defies common sense, shortchanges wildfire prevention, and 
does it year after year. What western Senators are going to do is work 
together in a bipartisan way, which is what you have to do when your 
constituents are faced with these kinds of problems. I can tell you, in 
Oregon or Montana or Idaho, when you have one of these mega-fires, 
nobody is sitting around waiting to hear about just the Democratic 
approach or the Republican approach; they want to know what the Federal 
Government is going to do to help these hard-hit western communities.
  It is absolutely essential that the Senate act soon. I have urged the 
President of the United States, who campaigned as a champion for these 
communities and the workers who live in them--I have said: Mr. 
President, do not ignore the West.
  Democratic and Republican Senators, given all the promises that have 
been made over the years, are going to insist that with fires of this 
magnitude--we have seen plenty of fires in the past, but we haven't 
seen the kind of thing I have just described that isn't very far from 
my hometown and across the State--given the urgency of the situation, 
western Senators of both political parties are making it clear to 
Leaders McConnell and Schumer and the President of the United States 
that we need the Federal Government to act, and we need it to act now.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.

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