Washington, D.C.- U.S. Senator Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., spoke on the Senate Floor this week about the wildfires that are ravaging the West. He said current management practices being mandated from Washington are doing harm and should be changed to reduce the likelihood of the kind of catastrophe we have seen this summer.
A statement from Senator Enzi follows.
FOREST FIRES (Senate - September 05, 2000)
Mr. ENZI. Madam President, I rise to join in this elaboration on the damage and devastation that is going on in the West. It has been a tradition in the Senate that when disasters happen, Senators come to the floor and they ask emergency measures be taken, both to stop what is happening and to make up for some of the economic loss that is a result of the emergency. That is what we are doing today. Just as importantly, we are here today suggesting that there are changes the Federal Government can make so that we do not have these problems again. Prevention is better than pain. Prevention is better than the pain that is caused by the forest fires that devastate homes, jobs, and recreation.
Senator Thomas and I have been traveling around Wyoming. We are downwind from Idaho. We are downwind from Washington. We are downwind from Montana. In the daytime, one cannot see the mountains or the fires for the smoke. At night, you can see the fires as you drive down the roads, and people prepare their evacuation plans to get out of their homes, to abandon their homes to flames. It is a terrible situation.
It can be prevented, but we are going down the wrong road right now. I rise to express my deep concerns over the mismanagement of the National Forest System that has led to one of the worst fire seasons in the history of the United States of America. There is no question that fire is a part of the natural world. No one knows this better than the men and women in the Western United States who have risked their lives during the last 4 months to protect and save homes, lives, property, and the environment from the terrible threat of the catastrophic wildfires.
As of September 4, the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, ID, reports that 6.6 million acres of Federal public lands have been burned this year alone. In comparison, in 1996, we suffered what was up until then the worst year on record for fires in the continental United States. At that time, we lost 5.8 million acres. We have already exceeded that loss by almost 800,000 acres, and it is growing.
What makes this tragedy so terrible is that most of this threat could have been prevented had our Federal land management agencies not been stymied by the Washington, DC, one-size-fits-all-based policies that sacrificed forest health for political gain. Rather than implement policies that would have made our forests more fire resilient and would have made forest communities safer from the threat of catastrophic wildfires, these agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service, have adopted practices from Washington that have allowed our forests to grow denser and denser without establishing the proper safeguards, such as defensible fuel profile zones and mechanically thinned forests that can incorporate fires into the natural management.
For more than 60 years, our Nation has placed an emphasis on aggressive fire suppression programs which have removed fire as a mitigating factor in maintaining forest health. As a result of these well-meaning efforts, many of our forests now suffer from an unnatural accumulation of vegetation on the forest floors. Dense undergrowth, combined with increasing taller layers of intermediate vegetation, has turned Western forests into deadly time bombs.
Unlike healthy fires of the past that thinned out the underbrush and left the large trees to grow larger, modern wildfire quickly claims the dense vegetation like a ladder until it tops out at the uppermost, or crown, level of the forest and races out of control as a catastrophic fire . Because of their high speed and intense heat, these crown fires leave an almost sterile environment in their wake. After a crown fire , nothing is left behind--no trees, no wildlife, and no habitat--with few micro-organisms left to rebuild the soil.
Vegetation manipulation, including timber harvests, is therefore necessary to restore our forests, particularly in the West, to conditions that are most resistant to catastrophic disturbance and that are within acceptable ranges of variability. Good stewardship, scientific studies, including the Sierra Nevada ecosystem project report, state that timber harvest is a tool that can be used to enhance overall forest resilience to disturbance. The SNEP report states, for example, that `logging can serve as a tool to help reduce fire hazard when slash is treated and treatments are maintained.' If conducted on a large enough scale and in a controlled manner, timber harvests can restore our national forests to a point where large catastrophic fires are much less likely. In other words, we can harvest the trees instead of burning them down. We can make them into boards that will keep that CO2 they have absorbed over a lifetime intact in a home instead of going up in smoke as CO2. The Forest Service has recognized this threat and in April of this year stated that `Without increased restoration treatments . . . wildfire suppression costs, natural resources losses, private property losses, and environmental damage are certain to escalate as fuels continue to accumulate and more acres become high risk.'
The Clinton-Gore administration, however, has chosen to ignore its own experts and has proposed new programs that would combine with current planning efforts, such as the Sierra Nevada framework, Interior Columbia Basin ecosystem management project, the roadless initiative, and the Federal monument proclamations, will only make the situation worse by removing our access to forests and by taking away some of our most effective forest management tools. Instead, the administration wants to rely on the extensive use of prescribed fire which will further exacerbate the risk of catastrophic wildfires on the Federal land throughout the West and proposes to prohibit all forms of commercial timber harvest, regardless of the objective.
Those prescribed fires get out of control, as I am sure the Senator from New Mexico will point out in a little while, in one of those damaging winds. In Wyoming, prescribed burns get out of control, and if you cannot get to the fire, you cannot put out the fire. We are talking about a roadless initiative in the United States right know.
This is a map that shows the forest system in Wyoming -- not the grasslands, not the Bureau of Land Management-controlled lands -- the forest system. Wyoming has about 400 miles on a border. If we take away the roads in any of those colored areas, how do we get in to fight the forest fire while it is still a small fire? That is when we want to take them on. That is when we need to be able to get to them. If we wipe out the roads--and they are referred to sometimes as ghost roads because they are not roads one takes a normal car over, but they are roads from which fires can be fought.
Madam President, I draw your attention to another sign that has appeared in Montana. This is actually addressed to all of us, but it is a little more pointed than that:
To the firefighters: Thank you for all your efforts. To the U.S. Forest Service: Everything that we love is gone . . . up in smoke. The mismanagement of our forests has turned our beautiful valley into an ash heap. To Bill Clinton and Al Gore: Because of your environmental policies, the jobs are gone, the way of life is gone, and now the beauty is gone. What's next? Shame on you. If we do not do anything about it, shame on us.
In the interest of protecting the integrity and posterity of our forest and wild lands, wildlife habitat, watershed -- if there is a forest fire and it wipes out all the trees, next year North Dakota will have more floods because more water will make it into the stream--air quality, human health and safety, and private property, the U.S. Forest Service and other Federal land management agencies must immediately enact a cohesive strategy to reduce the overabundance of forest fuels which place these resources at high risk of catastrophic wildfire.
While this strategy must include increased timber sales, however, there is no reason these sales cannot be structured to improve forest health by including in the terms of the contracts a requirement to thin out the underbrush and leave our forests in a healthier, more sustainable condition.
I have concentrated on forest fires. There are grassland fires happening on BLM lands, private lands, and there are some lessons to be learned on taking care of those, too. It is not as dramatic to talk about a grass fire as a timber fire, but on those lands where there is good stewardship, the fires will stop. Where there is bad stewardship, the fires will blow across at a rate animals cannot even run.
The catastrophic wildfires not only cause damage to forest and other lands but place the lives of firefighters at risk, pose threats to human health, personal property, sustainable ecosystems, and air and water quality.
We must call to task the failed policies and move forward with better proactive policies that protect the West and the United States from the overriding threat of catastrophic wildfire.
I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of our time.
