Volume 163, No. 144 covering the 1st Session of the 115th Congress (2017 - 2018) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“WILDFIRES IN WESTERN STATES” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the Senate section on pages S5038-S5039 on Sept. 7, 2017.
More than half of the Agency's employees are engineers, scientists and protection specialists. The Climate Reality Project, a global climate activist organization, accused Agency leadership in the last five years of undermining its main mission.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
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 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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