Congressional Hearings
AIR QUALITY IMPACTS OF WILDFIRES: MITIGATION AND MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES
Congressional Hearings
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| AUTHORITYID | CHAMBER | TYPE | COMMITTEENAME |
|---|---|---|---|
| hsif00 | H | S | Committee on Energy and Commerce |
[House Hearing, 115 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
AIR QUALITY IMPACTS OF WILDFIRES: MITIGATION AND MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 13, 2018
__________
Serial No. 115-165
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Printed for the use of the Committee on Energy and Commerce
energycommerce.house.gov
__________
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COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE
GREG WALDEN, Oregon
Chairman
JOE BARTON, Texas FRANK PALLONE, Jr., New Jersey
Vice Chairman Ranking Member
FRED UPTON, Michigan BOBBY L. RUSH, Illinois
JOHN SHIMKUS, Illinois ANNA G. ESHOO, California
MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee GENE GREEN, Texas
STEVE SCALISE, Louisiana DIANA DeGETTE, Colorado
ROBERT E. LATTA, Ohio MICHAEL F. DOYLE, Pennsylvania
CATHY McMORRIS RODGERS, Washington JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
GREGG HARPER, Mississippi G.K. BUTTERFIELD, North Carolina
LEONARD LANCE, New Jersey DORIS O. MATSUI, California
BRETT GUTHRIE, Kentucky KATHY CASTOR, Florida
PETE OLSON, Texas JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland
DAVID B. McKINLEY, West Virginia JERRY McNERNEY, California
ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois PETER WELCH, Vermont
H. MORGAN GRIFFITH, Virginia BEN RAY LUJAN, New Mexico
GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida PAUL TONKO, New York
BILL JOHNSON, Ohio YVETTE D. CLARKE, New York
BILLY LONG, Missouri DAVID LOEBSACK, Iowa
LARRY BUCSHON, Indiana KURT SCHRADER, Oregon
BILL FLORES, Texas JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, III,
SUSAN W. BROOKS, Indiana Massachusetts
MARKWAYNE MULLIN, Oklahoma TONY CARDENAS, CaliforniaL RUIZ,
RICHARD HUDSON, North Carolina California
CHRIS COLLINS, New York SCOTT H. PETERS, California
KEVIN CRAMER, North Dakota DEBBIE DINGELL, Michigan
TIM WALBERG, Michigan
MIMI WALTERS, California
RYAN A. COSTELLO, Pennsylvania
EARL L. ``BUDDY'' CARTER, Georgia
JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina
Subcommittee on Environment
JOHN SHIMKUS, Illinois
Chairman
DAVID B. McKINLEY, West Virginia PAUL TONKO, New York
Vice Chairman Ranking Member
JOE BARTON, Texas RAUL RUIZ, California
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania SCOTT H. PETERS, California
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee GENE GREEN, Texas
GREGG HARPER, Mississippi DIANA DeGETTE, Colorado
PETE OLSON, Texas JERRY McNERNEY, California
BILL JOHNSON, Ohio TONY CARDENAS, California
BILL FLORES, Texas DEBBIE DINGELL, Michigan
RICHARD HUDSON, North Carolina DORIS O. MATSUI, California
KEVIN CRAMER, North Dakota FRANK PALLONE, Jr., New Jersey (ex
TIM WALBERG, Michigan officio)
EARL L. ``BUDDY'' CARTER, Georgia
JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina
GREG WALDEN, Oregon (ex officio)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hon. John Shimkus, a Representative in Congress from the State of
Illinois, opening statement.................................... 1
Prepared statement........................................... 3
Hon. Paul Tonko, a Representative in Congress from the State of
New York, opening statement.................................... 4
Hon. Greg Walden, a Representative in Congress from the State of
Oregon, opening statement...................................... 15
Prepared statement........................................... 16
Hon. Frank Pallone, Jr., a Representative in Congress from the
State of New Jersey, opening statement......................... 27
Witnesses
Herman Baertschiger Jr., Senator, Oregon State Senate............ 6
Prepared statement........................................... 8
Answers to submitted questions............................... 198
Mary Anderson, Mobile and Area Source Program Manager, Air
Quality Division, Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.... 17
Prepared statement........................................... 20
Answers to submitted questions............................... 202
Sonya Germann, State Forester, Montana Department of Natural
Resources and Conservation, Forestry Division.................. 28
Prepared statement........................................... 30
Answers to submitted questions............................... 207
Collin O'Mara, President, National Wildlife Federation........... 42
Prepared statement........................................... 45
Answers to submitted questions............................... 210
Tom Boggus, State Forester, Director of Texas A&M Forest Service. 50
Prepared statement........................................... 52
Answers to submitted questions............................... 214
Submitted Material
Report entitled, ``Prescribed Fire in North American Forest and
Woodlands,'' The Ecological Society of America, 2012........... 86
Report entitled, ``Prescribed Fire Policy Barriers and
Opportunities,'' University of Oregon, 2018.................... 96
Article entitled, ``The Impact of Anthropogenic Climate Change on
Wildfire Across Western U.S. Forests,'' National Academy of
Sciences, October 18, 2016..................................... 132
Article entitled, ``Future Fire Impacts on Smoke Concentrations,
Visibility, and Health in the Contiguous United States,''
GeoHealth, 2018................................................ 138
Article entitled, ``We won't stop California's wildfires if we
don't talk about climate change,'' Washington Post editorial
board, August 8, 2018.......................................... 157
Article entitled, ``Trump Inaccurately Claims California is
Wasting Waters as Fires Burn,'' New York Times, August 6, 2018. 159
Article entitled, ``Fueled by Climate Change, Wildfires Erode Air
Quality Gains,'' Scientific American, July 17, 2018............ 163
Article entitled, ``Megafires: The growing risk to America's
forests, communities, and wildlife,'' National Wildlife
Federation, October 2017....................................... 174
AIR QUALITY IMPACTS OF WILDFIRES: MITIGATION AND MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES
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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2018
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Environment,
Committee on Energy and Commerce
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 1:15 p.m., in
room 2123, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John Shimkus,
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Shimkus, McKinley, Harper,
Johnson, Flores, Hudson, Walberg, Carter, Duncan, Walden (ex
officio), Tonko, Ruiz, Peters, DeGette, McNerney, Cardenas,
Matsui, and Pallone (ex officio).
Staff Present: Samantha Bopp, Staff Assistant; Karen
Christian, General Counsel; Kelly Collins, Legislative Clerk,
Energy and Environment; Wyatt Ellertson, Professional Staff,
Energy and Environment; Margaret Tucker Fogarty, Staff
Assistant; Theresa Gambo, Human Resources/Office Administrator;
Jordan Haverly, Policy Coordinator, Environment; Mary Martin,
Chief Counsel, Energy and Environment; Sarah Matthews, Press
Secretary, Energy and Environment; Drew McDowell, Executive
Assistant; Brannon Rains, Staff Assistant; Peter Spencer,
Senior Professional Staff Member, Energy; Austin Stonebraker,
Press Assistant; Hamlin Wade, Special Advisor, External
Affairs; Everett Winnick, Director of Information Technology;
Jean Fruci, Minority Energy and Environment Policy Advisor;
Caitlin Haberman, Minority Professional Staff Member; Rick
Kessler, Minority Senior Advisor and Staff Director, Energy and
Environment; Alexander Ratner, Minority Policy Analyst; and
Catherine Zander, Minority Environment Fellow.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN SHIMKUS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS
Mr. Shimkus. I am going to call the committee to order and
make a brief statement before I give my opening statement, is
that we will have the chairman and the ranking member both come
in their due time, and then we will break and allow them to do
their opening statements. At least we can get started on time,
if that is agreeable with everybody, which it seems like it is.
I now recognize myself 5 minutes for an opening statement.
A year ago, we took testimony to examine the air quality
impacts of wildfires with the focus on stakeholder
perspectives. Given the community's jurisdiction over air
quality policies and public health, the goal then, as it is
today, was to develop a better understanding of the health
impacts of wildfires and what should be done to minimize those
impacts.
We return to the topic this afternoon to look closely at
the mitigation and management strategies for reducing air
quality risks from wildfire smoke. In large part, these
strategies involve efforts to reduce the intensity and
frequency of wildfires that threaten communities.
The strategies also involve managing the inevitable smoke
impacts, whether from wildfires or from what is known as
prescribed burning. And they involve ensuring that effective
actions are credited appropriately in air quality planning, air
quality monitoring, and compliance activities, so States and
localities are not punished for taking action that will improve
public health.
Last year, some 10 million acres were burned in the United
States by wildfires, the second worst fire season since 1960.
As of last week, this fire season has resulted in more than 7
million acres burned, with acute impacts of smoke lingering for
extended periods of time throughout California and the Pacific
Northwest.
The urgency for reducing the severity of these fires is
underscored by news reports and reports from this committee's
own members, including Chairman Walden, of the impacts of
wildfire smoke. This smoke can smother communities with high
levels of particulate matter and other respiratory irritants.
These levels, which are manyfold over normal air quality,
intensify asthma and chronic pulmonary diseases, and impact the
lives of millions of people.
Against this backdrop are a panel of witnesses who can
speak to the complex set of strategies that are needed to more
effectively address wildfires and smoke risks.
We will hear today from two State foresters who oversee and
implement fire management strategies in their States: Sonya
Germann from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and
Conservation, Tom--I hope this--Boggus.
Mr. Boggus. Boggus.
Mr. Shimkus. Boggus. Thank you. Bogus was a word we used at
West Point. Boggus is better, so--the Texas State Forester and
Director of Texas A&M Forest Service.
While the general approaches among State forestry officials
to mitigating risks are consistent, there are regional
differences that affect what is put into practice and can
inform future policymakers.
We will hear a State air quality perspective. Mary
Anderson, who is with the Idaho Department of Environmental
Quality, can help us understand the practical challenges of
managing wildfire smoke and how her agency works to address air
quality risks.
Collin O'Mara, President of the National Wildfire
Federation, has been before the committee before, brings an
environmental perspective, but is also experienced as a former
head of the State of Delaware's Department of Natural Resources
and Environment Control.
And finally, we will hear from Oregon State Senator Herman
Baertschiger from southern Oregon, who has extensive experience
in forestry and wildland firefighting. I am looking forward to
his perspective on what to do and his perspective on the
impacts of wildfires on his constituents.
Let me welcome the panelists. I look forward to
understanding the challenges and the opportunities you face and
what you can do to ensure our Federal air regulations
accommodate these strategies.
And with my remainder of time, I would like to yield to the
gentleman of Texas, Mr. Flores.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Shimkus follows:]
Prepared statement of Hon. John Shimkus
A year ago, we took testimony to examine the air quality
impacts of wildfires, with a focus on stake holder
perspectives. Given the Committee's jurisdiction over air
quality policies and public health, the goal then, as it is
today, was to develop a better understanding of the health
impacts of wildfires and what should be done to minimize those
impacts.
We return to the topic this afternoon, to look closer at
the mitigation and management strategies for reducing the air
quality risks from wildfire smoke. In large part, these
strategies involve efforts to reduce the intensity and
frequency of wildfires that threaten communities.
The strategies also involve managing the inevitable smoke
impacts, whether from wildfires or from what is known as
prescribed burning. And they involve ensuring that effective
actions are credited appropriately in air quality planning, air
quality monitoring, and compliance activities, so states and
localities are not punished for taking action that will improve
public health.
Last year, some 10 million acres were burned in the United
States by wildfires, the second worst fire season since 1960.
As of last week, this fire season has resulted in more than 7
million acres burned, with acute impacts of smoke lingering for
extended periods of time, throughout California and the Pacific
Northwest.
The urgency for reducing the severity of these fires is
underscored by news reports--and reports from this Committee's
own members, including Chairman Walden--of the impacts of
wildfire smoke. This smoke can smother communities with high
levels of particulate matter and other respiratory irritants.
These levels, which are many-fold over normal air quality,
intensify asthma and chronic pulmonary diseases, and impact the
daily lives of millions of people.
Against this backdrop, our panel of witnesses can speak to
the complex set of strategies that are needed to more
effectively address wildfires and smoke risks.
We will hear today from two state foresters, who oversee
and implement fire management strategies in their States. Sonya
Germann, from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and
Conservation and Tom Boggus, the Texas State Forester and
Director of the Texas A&M Forest Service. While the general
approaches among state forestry officials to mitigating risks
are consistent, there are regional differences that affect what
is put into practice and can inform future policymaking.
We will hear a state air quality perspective. Mary
Anderson, who is with the Idaho Department of Environmental
Quality, can help us understand the practical challenges of
managing wildfire smoke, and how her agency works to address
air quality risks.
Collin O'Mara, President of the National Wildlife
Federation, brings an environmental perspective but also
experience as the former head of the State of Delaware's
Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
And finally, we will hear from Oregon State Senator Herman
Baertshiger, from southern Oregon, who has extensive experience
in forestry and wildland firefighting. I'm looking forward to
his perspective on what to do, and his perspective on the
impacts of wildfires on his constituents.
Let me welcome the panelists. I look forward to
understanding the challenges and opportunities you face, and
what we can do to ensure our Federal air regulations
accommodate these strategies.
Mr. Flores. So thank you, Mr. Chairman, for yielding me a
part of your time, and thank you for holding today's important
hearing.
I am pleased to welcome my constituent, Mr. Tom Boggus, to
today's hearing. He is testifying on behalf of the National
Association of State Foresters. Mr. Boggus is a native of Fort
Stockton, Texas, and he joined the Texas A&M Forest Service in
1980. He was appointed as the director and State forester of
the Texas A&M Forest Service in February of 2010, and he has
extensive familiarity with the issue we are going to be
discussing today.
I look forward to hearing from him, along with the rest of
our expert witnesses, on how we can appropriately manage our
forests to minimize wildfire impacts.
Thank you, and I yield back.
Welcome, Mr. Boggus.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his time.
The chair now recognizes the ranking member of the
subcommittee, Mr. Tonko, for 5 minutes.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. PAUL TONKO, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW YORK
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you to our
witnesses for being here this afternoon.
As some of you may remember, this subcommittee held a
similar hearing last year on wildfires and air quality issues.
Since that time, we confirmed that, in 2017, more than 66,000
wildfires burned approximately 10 million acres. 2018 is
proving to be another difficult year. Right now, there are over
80 active fires covering over a million acres and threatening
people's health and safety and property, including the
Mendocino Complex fire, the largest recorded fire in
California's history.
Undeniably, these fires have become increasingly worse in
recent years. Today, we will hear about the consequences of
wildfires to both human health as well as forest health. Smoke,
which includes particulate matter, is harming people, and the
growing number and size of these fires are erasing the gains
that have been made under the Clean Air Act in reducing fine
particulate matter pollution.
We will also hear about the best practices in forest
management, including prescribed burns and other tools, that
can mitigate some of the worst impacts of these fires and
reduce the harm of smoke. While I do not follow this issue as
closely as many of our western colleagues, my understanding is
that historically the method for funding the United States
Forest Service emergency fire response has been a major factor
in limiting funding for more proactive forest management
activities.
In March, Congress passed the fiscal year 2018 omnibus
appropriations bill, which included a fire funding fix that
will take effect in fiscal year 2020. I acknowledge that more
may need to be done to promote better forest management
techniques, but we must see how this fix plays out before
adopting new major provisions that undermine environmental laws
in our national forests.
As we discuss the devastation that can be caused by Mother
Nature, we must also acknowledge our fellow Americans that are
facing down Hurricane Florence. Whether it is hurricanes on the
East Coast or fires out west, we are experiencing more frequent
and costly natural disasters across our country. As with
hurricanes, climate change creates conditions that make
wildfires worse. Droughts, dryer soils, and higher
temperatures, all associated with climate change, are resulting
in a longer fire season and causing an increase in the severity
and frequency of wildfires.
A 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences concluded that human-caused climate change
is responsible for the doubling of the area burned by wildfires
since 1984. In 2017, the National Wildfire Federation, which is
represented here today by NWF President Collin O'Mara, released
a report entitled Megafires, which examined how climate change
and other issues, including the funding issues at the United
States Forest Service, are contributing to this growing
problem.
I appreciate our witnesses being here to discuss the
consequences of wildfires, air quality being chief among them,
as well as some of the potential mitigation options such as
more proactive forest management. But we do ourselves a
disservice if we continue to hold hearings only looking at the
effects of these fires while ignoring the underlying causes,
including climate change that will continue to exacerbate this
problem.
Thank you again, Mr. Chair, and I yield the remainder of my
time to my good friend and colleague, Representative Matsui of
California.
Ms. Matsui. Thank you, Ranking Member Tonko, for yielding.
And I want to thank the witnesses for being here today.
I appreciate the subcommittee is holding a hearing on this
important issue. California has had a historic year for fire.
The Mendocino Complex fire consumed over 410,000 acres, burning
for more than a month, and becoming the largest in our State's
history. The Ferguson Fire took the lives of two brave
firefighters and closed Yosemite National Park for 20 days. And
the Carr Fire destroyed over 1,000 homes near Redding, north of
my district.
While my district was fortunate and did not directly endure
a wildfire this summer, Sacramento residents still had to
contend with the smothering impacts of wildfire smoke. We had a
record-breaking streak of 15 consecutive spare-the-air days
when air quality was so poor that our air district encouraged
people to stay inside and reduce pollution in any way possible.
If we don't take meaningful steps to reduce the risk and
intensity of wildfires, then we will continue to face these
overwhelming health, safety, and environmental challenges. That
means we must adopt a sustainable approach to wildfire risk
reduction. Management policies must recognize the impacts of
climate change and the need to sustainably reduce the fuel load
in our forests, ultimately moving their condition towards the
pre-fire exclusion baseline.
Thank you, and I look forward to hearing the testimony from
our witnesses.
I yield back.
Mr. Tonko. And I yield back our remaining 8 seconds. There
you go.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his time.
The chairman is running over here. The ranking member, I
can see, is still on the floor. So we will begin with our
witnesses and then interrupt as we can.
We want to thank you all for being here today, taking the
time to testify before the subcommittee. Today's witnesses will
have the opportunity to give opening statements followed by a
round of questions from members. Our witness panel--and I have
already announced the panel. So I would like now to turn to Mr.
Baertschiger, Oregon State Senator. And I am sure Congressman
Walden from Oregon will get here for most of your opening
statement.
You are recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF HERMAN BAERTSCHIGER JR., SENATOR, OREGON STATE
SENATE; MARY ANDERSON, MOBILE AND AREA SOURCE PROGRAM MANAGER,
AIR QUALITY DIVISION, IDAHO DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL
QUALITY; SONYA GERMANN, STATE FORESTER, MONTANA DEPARTMENT OF
NATURAL RESOURCES AND CONSERVATION, FORESTRY DIVISION; COLLIN
O'MARA, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION; AND TOM
BOGGUS, STATE FORESTER, DIRECTOR OF TEXAS A&M FOREST SERVICE
STATEMENT OF HERMAN BAERTSCHIGER JR.
Mr. Baertschiger. Thank you, Chairman Shimkus, Ranking
Member Tonko, and members of the committee. Thank you for
letting me have the opportunity to testify before you today
about wildfires and their impact on my constituents and the
people of Oregon.
The lingering effects of smoke and large fires impact
thousands of people in my State every year. Immediate
suppression of wildland fires during peak fire season would
alleviate the impacts to our communities. In exchange for a
suppression model, we must be conscious of the fact that our
forests still need management, and fire is one of those
management tools. But this can be accomplished outside of fire
season by controlled burning. Smoke from controlled burns is
far less impactful to my constituents than these large fires
during the summer months.
Other management activities, including commodity
production, logging, fuel reduction, are also effective in
reducing the risk of severe fire.
My name is Herman Baertschiger, and I am an Oregon State
Senator representing southern Oregon. My background is in
forestry and wildland firefighting. In more than four decades
of firefighting in the west, I have never seen a catastrophic
high-intensity wildfire benefit our forests. However, I have
seen many examples of low-intensity fire benefit our forests.
Fire has always been with us, and that is not going to
change, likely. Large fires have affected the American people
throughout our history. The fires of 1910 in Idaho, Montana,
and Washington that burned 3 million acres changed how the U.S.
Forest Service addressed fires. In Oregon, the Tillamook fires
that occurred in the coast range four times between 1933 and
1951 forced Oregon also to address wildland fires. This
approach is what, at times, is having us fighting large fires
rather than suppressing small fires.
The aggressive fire suppression model changed about 30
years ago with the U.S. Forest Service. It changed from a fire
suppression to a fire management. The comparison of fire
suppression against fire management is best shown in a
comparison of firefighting divisions of Oregon Department of
Forestry and the U.S. Forest Service.
Oregon Department of Forestry has always employed an
aggressive initial attack and suppression approach. The
comparison of lands managed shows a shocking disparity between
the two styles of firefighting. The U.S. Forest Service
protects about 17 million acres of Oregon forestlands. And so
far in 2018, 300,000 of those acres have burned. Oregon
Department of Forestry protects about 16 million acres of
forestlands in Oregon, and so far, only 70,000 of those acres
have burned.
The two agencies protect about the same number of acres in
Oregon but are having very different outcomes.
Also, the human factor can't be ignored. With over 300
million people in this country, we should expect more human-
caused fire starts. Some people say that 9 out of 10 fires have
a human element.
Due to severe wildfires, the lack of forest management and
the different approach to firefighting, our communities have
suffered weeks from toxic smoke. This year's citizens in
southern Oregon endured 34 days of unhealthy air quality, and
Travel Oregon estimated last year that $51 million was lost
from smoke in tourism dollars. The Shakespeare festival in
Ashland has lost over $2 million this year; Hell's Gate
excursion, $1.5 million. Smoke has led to cancellation and
delays of school activities, church activities, and other
events.
To provide our citizens with relief from catastrophic
wildfire, Congress should take action to promote active forest
management and provide oversight and assure accountability over
the U.S. Forest Service.
Managing fire during peak fire season to treat fuels is no
longer acceptable. We cannot manage our forests during peak
fire season with fire at the expense of the health and welfare
and the economic viability of our communities. We have got to
do something else.
I appreciate this opportunity to testify, and I welcome any
questions that you may have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Baertschiger follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his name.
The chair now recognizes the chairman of the full
committee, another Oregonian, Chairman Walden, for 5 minutes.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. GREG WALDEN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OREGON
Mr. Walden. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I apologize
for being a little late. We had the WRDA bill on the floor
where a number of our provisions, including Safe Drinking Water
Act and some provisions for drought relief in the Klamath Basin
were before the House, so I needed to speak on that before
coming here.
I want to thank you for holding this hearing, and I want to
thank our witnesses for being here.
Today's hearing focuses on this topic that you have already
heard from the Senator about, of great concern to Oregonians
and those across the west who are experiencing terrible air
quality. Hazardous, dangerous, unhealthy air quality smoke from
these wildfires is literally choking people to death.
In my home State of Oregon alone, we have already seen over
700,000 acres destroyed by fire. These fires have left
communities in my district blanketed with smoke and with the
worst air quality in the world, period. Stop. Medford, Oregon,
experienced the worst run of unhealthy air quality since the
EPA began making such determinations in 2000.
The leading offender is particulate matter. An article in
the New England Journal of Medicine in March pointed out the
robust evidence linking exposure to particulate matter to
cardiopulmonary mortality and issues with asthma and COPD. I
heard from a woman yesterday on a tele-town hall: COPD. She was
just getting out of the hospital all as a result of this smoke.
According to EPA research, premature deaths tied to
wildfire air pollution were as high as 2,500 per year between
2008 and 2012. Other research out of Colorado State University
suggests it could be as high as 25,000 people per year die
prematurely because of this smoke. This is a life-and-death
matter in the west.
Making matters worse, it is hard to escape the smoke even
in your own home. Curt in Eagle Point dropped off his air
filter from his CPAP machine. I have got a picture of it up
there. That filter is supposed to last for 2 weeks. That is, I
believe, 2 days. You can see it up there and how dirty it got
within 2 days inside his home during these fires.
Or take this car cabin air filter. It was replaced after 2
months during the fire season. You can see up on the screen
what a new one looks like. Two months, that is what it looked
like in his car.
Nearly three decades of poor management have left our
Federal forests overstocked with trees and vegetation that fuel
increasingly intense fires. Stepping up active forest
management practices such as thinning, prescribed fire, and
timber harvest, one of the best ways we could reduce the fuel
loads and, therefore, the impact of the smoke from wildfires.
Sadly, bureaucratic red tape, obstructionist litigation by
special interest groups, it has all added up to make it very
difficult to implement these science-based management
techniques that we know work. And we are left to choke on the
resulting wildfire smoke.
In 2017, the number of fires started on lands protected by
the Oregon Department of Forestry and the U.S. Forest Service
Land were split nearly 50/50. Forest managed lands, however,
accounted for over 90 percent of the acres burned. So that is
the Federal ground. This is partly due to forest management but
also how fires are fought.
As fires are managed rather than suppressed and back burned
acreages increased, there is a clear impact on air quality and,
therefore, on the air quality and health of our citizens. These
agencies need to do more to take this into account when they
make their decisions.
As devastating as it is in the summer months, fire can also
be a management tool. We know that. Prescribed fire, after
mechanical thinning, can help reduce fuel loads and reduce
emissions by up to 75 percent, if it is done at the right time
and the right way. State smoke management plans set the process
for these burns with an aim to protect public health, but also
limit the work that gets done. According to Forest Service
data, smoke management issues limited between 10 and 20 percent
of their prescribed fire projects last year in Oregon.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today about
your perspectives on these issues and how we get the right
balance. I also want to thank Senator Baertschiger for joining
us from Oregon. He is the co-chair of the bipartisan fire
caucus in Oregon, has nearly 40 years of experience in wildland
fire and forest management both. So thanks for flying out to be
here.
And just to conclude, I would like to share a message I
received from Jennifer. She is a mother in Medford, Oregon.
Jennifer said: As a native Oregonian, living in southern Oregon
my entire life, I write to express my extreme frustration with
Oregon's lack of forest management. This is now the third or
fourth year that we are hostages in our own homes, that my
children are robbed of being able to play outside. I absolutely
hate that nothing is done to prevent this from happening.
Well, we are here to help the concerns I hear from people
like Jennifer and families across my district who have one
simple message: Something needs to change.
And in conclusion, I just got an email from a friend of
mine in Medford, who is on the Shakespeare board, the Oregon
Shakespearian Theater board in Ashland. And they said: I have
exciting news. Our safety, health, and wellness manager sent
this update. We are officially closing the smoke watch that
started back on July 18 and returning to normal operations.
I believe they had to cancel 25 outdoor plays at the Allen
Elizabethan, and one for the Bowmer, for a total of 26
cancellations for performances. And so this is a real bad thing
for the economy. It is bad for our health.
Mr. Chairman, I appreciate your holding this hearing, and I
thank the witnesses for being here. And I yield back.
[The prepared statement of Chairman Walden follows:]
Prepared statement of Hon. Greg Walden
Today's hearing focuses on a topic of great concern to
Oregonians and those across the West who are experiencing
terrible air quality and choking on smoke from wildfires. In my
home state of Oregon alone, we've already seen over 700
thousand acres destroyed and the fires are still burning.
These fires have left communities in my district blanketed
with smoke and with the worst air quality in the world.
Medford, Oregon experienced the worst run of ``unhealthy'' air
quality since EPA began recording in 2000.
A leading offender is particulate matter. An article in the
New England Journal of Medicine in March pointed out the robust
evidence linking exposure to particulate matter to
cardiopulmonary mortality and issues with asthma and COPD.
According to EPA research, premature deaths tied to wildfire
air pollution were as high as 2,500 per year between 2008 and
2012. Other research out of Colorado State University suggest
it could be as high as 25,000 people a year.
Making matters worse, it is hard to escape the smoke, even
in your own home. Curt in Eagle Point, OR dropped off this air
filter from his CPAP machine. He had to replace it after 2
days--it is supposed to last 2 weeks.
Or take this car cabin air filter that was replaced after 2
months during fire season. A new one looks like this. You begin
to realize what people are suffering through.
Nearly three decades of poor management has left our
Federal forests overstocked with trees and vegetation that fuel
increasingly intense fire seasons. Stepping up active forest
management practices, such as thinning, prescribed fire, and
timber harvests, is one of the best ways to reduce the fuel and
the impact of smoke from wildfires.
Sadly, bureaucratic red tape, and obstructionist litigation
by special interest groups has made it difficult to implement
these science-based management techniques. And we're left to
choke on the resulting wildfire smoke.
In 2017, the number of fire starts on lands protected by
the Oregon Department of Forestry and those on U.S. Forest
Service land were split nearly 50/50. The Forest managed lands,
however, accounted for over 90 percent of the acres burned.
This is partly due to forest management, but also how fires are
fought.
As fires are managed, rather than suppressed, and back
burned acreages increase, there is a clear impact on air
quality and our health. These agencies should do more to take
that into account.
As devastating as it is in the summer months, fire can also
be a management tool. Prescribed fire after mechanical
thinning, can help reduce fuel loads and reduce emissions by up
to 75 percent. State Smoke Management Plans set the process for
these burns with an aim to protect public health, but also
limit the work that gets done. According to Forest Service
data, smoke management issues limited between 10 and 20 percent
of their prescribed fire projects last year in Oregon. I look
forward to hearing from our witnesses today on whether these
plans properly balance the risk from prescribed fire with the
risk of far more intense wildfire.
I also want to thank Senator Herman Baertschiger for
joining us from Oregon. Senator Baertschiger is co-chair of the
bipartisan fire caucus in Oregon, and has nearly 40 years of
experience in wildland fire and forest management. Thank you
for your participation and sharing your knowledge with us
today.
Just to conclude, I'd like to share a message I received
from Jennifer, a mother in Medford. Jennifer said, ``As a
native Oregonian living in Southern Oregon my entire life I am
writing to express my extreme frustration with Oregon's lack of
forest management. This is now the third or fourth year that we
are hostages in our own homes, that my children are robbed of
being able to play outside. I absolutely hate that nothing is
done to prevent this from happening.''
We are here today to help address the concerns I hear from
people like Jennifer and families across my district who have
one simplemessage: something needs to change.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his time.
The chair now would like to recognize Ms. Mary Anderson,
mobile and area source program manager, Air Quality Division,
Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.
You are recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF MARY ANDERSON
Ms. Anderson. Thank you for the opportunity to provide some
insight into how wildfires are impacting Idaho citizens.
Wildfires are the single largest air pollution source in
Idaho. In the past, Idaho would experience severe wildfire
season with heavy localized air quality impacts every 3 to 4
years. Now, we are seeing heavy regional air quality impacts
every year from large, sometimes catastrophic wildfires in
Idaho, central and northern California, Oregon, Washington,
Nevada, and British Columbia. These catastrophic wildfires
caused by fuels that have cumulated as a result of active fire
suppression, drought, and climate change.
In 2017, wildfire smoke caused widespread impacts starting
in early August. And by the first week of September, smoke
thoroughly blanketed all of Idaho, exposing many Idaho citizens
to potentially serious health impacts.
About 700,000 acres were burned in Idaho in 2017. Idaho is
also surrounded by wildfires, meaning wind from any direction
brought smoke into the State. Nearly 5.5 million acres burned
in neighboring States and British Columbia in 2017. All of
these fires had direct impacts on Idaho residents at one time
or another throughout the wildfire season. We are seeing
similar impacts this year.
What I have described above is now the new norm. The public
now experiences smoke impacts throughout the summer every year,
with periods of very unhealthy to hazardous air quality
conditions. To deal with the smoke impacts, the public wants
information so they can make decisions to protect themselves
and, in the case of schools, those they are responsible for.
Telling them to remain indoors and limit exposure is no longer
sufficient. In many cases, the air quality indoors is just as
bad or worse than the air quality outside.
Responding to wildfire smoke impacts requires significant
resources from DEQ and other agencies throughout Idaho. To
properly respond to wildfires and mitigate health impacts from
smoke, the communities that are repeatedly hard hit from
wildfire smoke must be made smoke ready before the smoke event
occurs. This means working with communities to identify tools
citizens can use to protect themselves from the smoke.
An example of a smoke ready community action is identifying
the sensitive population, such as elderly people with lung or
heart issues, and purchasing a cache of room-sized HEPA filters
prior to the wildfire season so they can be distributed at the
start of the emergency. Establishing a smoke ready community
must be done prior to the wildfire season in order to respond
to the emergency in a timely manner.
To be effective, smoke ready communities require funding
similar in the way--similar to the way firewise programs are
funded. Funding for both these programs would allow communities
to prepare for wildfires from both the fire safety and public
health aspect.
We agree that prescribed fire is an important tool in
reducing fuels that contribute to catastrophic wildfire, but
prescribed fire also causes smoke that needs to be managed.
When prescribed fire is being discussed as a way to mitigate
wildfire impacts, it is important to remember that reasonable
and effective smoke management principles and decisions must be
used to truly lessen smoke impacts and not simply move smoke
from one time of the year to another.
To manage smoke impacts from prescribed burning, the
Montana/Idaho Airshed Group was created. This group implements
a smoke management program for organizations that conduct
large-scale prescribed burning and the agencies that regulate
this burning.
Burn decisions in Idaho are very much driven and limited by
the weather. Northern Idaho is very mountainous. Smoke from
prescribed burning can sink into the valleys and impact
communities. Using best smoke management practices requires
good weather that will allow the smoke to rise up high into the
atmosphere and disperse so as not to impact the public. The key
to this airshed group is coordinating burn requests and
approvals to looking at the regional picture, not just burns on
an individual basis.
The Airshed Group uses a meteorologist to provide a weather
forecast specific to prescribed burning. A coordinator
evaluates all burns that are proposed, other burning, and
emission sources occurring in the area, current and forecasted
air quality, to determine if and how much burning can be
approved. This process helps to ensure that smoke does not
accumulate in valleys and impact the public.
DEQ works closely with the airshed group during the active
burn season. We review the weather forecast, air quality data,
and proposed burns, and provide recommendations to the airshed
group on a daily basis.
There is no short-term quick fix. We need to address all
causes of wildfire and look at new innovative solutions and
mitigation strategies to address the matter. The key to success
will be working in partnership with all stakeholders, air
quality agencies, State and Federal land managers, large and
small private prescribed burners, the general public,
environmental groups, and others who use burning as a tool. The
only way to make progress is to have an open, honest, and
trusting dialogue based on facts and science.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Anderson follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Shimkus. And the chair thanks the gentlelady.
The chair will now recognize the ranking member of the full
committee, Congressman Pallone from New Jersey, for 5 minutes.
OPENING STATEMENT OF FRANK PALLONE, JR.
Mr. Pallone. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for
letting me--I know--I was on the floor with our chairman.
It has been a year now since this subcommittee last held a
hearing on wildfires. And since that time, the same regions of
the country are suffering due to the large number and size of
forest fires, causing tremendous damage. And this is, once
again, particularly destructive to Western States.
We have all seen the devastating images of lives lost and
homes destroyed. These extreme wildfires are also creating poor
air quality in States far away from the fires.
Last month, the National Weather Service found that smoke
from western wildfires has spread as far as New England. And
these wildfires are tragic, but they should not be a surprise.
For years, scientists have warned that climate change was very
likely going to contribute to the increased fire intensity and
frequency that we are seeing now. That is exactly what we are
seeing, and we are not going to improve the situation by only
looking at forest management or timber harvesting practices.
If this Congress wants to truly address the increase in
extreme wildfires, we must act to slow the global warming that
is driving changes in climate and weather patterns.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration and congressional
Republicans refuse to address climate change and have instead
pushed policies that will exacerbate our climate problems. Here
is my list of President Trump's most significant climate
actions.
First, he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement,
giving up our spot as a global leader and turning his back on
our allies. Then he proposed to replace the commonsense Clean
Power Plan with a dirty power scam that lets polluters off the
hook. The EPA even admits this proposal will result in 1,400
more premature deaths every year. Third, President Trump
proposed to relax standards for fuel efficiency in vehicles,
hurting consumers and ensuring more climate changing substances
are emitted into the air. And fourth, he doubled down on a
loophole in the Clean Air Act that allows more efficient and
polluting heavy duty trucks on our roadways.
And then just this week, Trump relaxed controls on methane
pollution from oil and gas operations and landfills. The
President has also blocked all Federal agencies from
considering or acknowledging the costs associated with climate
change when making decisions, and he has proposed to cut funds
for energy efficient programs and support for renewable energy.
And finally, he continues to threaten to abuse emergency
authorities to subsidize the oldest and least efficient coal
plants in the country.
President Trump and his administration are doing everything
possible to increase emissions and block any attempt to slow
the rate of climate change. The result is rising seas, extreme
weather events, severe drought and, of course, extended and
intense fire seasons. And these are costing lives, destroying
property and infrastructure, and costing us billions in
disaster assistance.
And as we sit here, the southeast is about to be hit by
another powerful hurricane devastating more communities. A new
report from the researchers of Stony Brook University and
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory finds that hurricane
Florence is about 50 miles wider as a result of climate change.
That means that hurricane can result in 50 percent more
rainfall. Yet Republicans refuse to address climate change.
Even here today, the focus is not where it should be. How
many more of these events do we need before Republicans join us
in taking decisive action to combat climate change? When are
Republicans going to stop actively pursuing policies that make
the problem worse?
If we are serious about stemming the terrible growth of the
forest fire season as well as these other natural disasters, we
need to abandon the disaster that is the Trump administration
climate policy, and we need to do it immediately.
And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back. And thank you
for the time.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his time.
The chair now recognizes Ms. Sonya Germann, State Forester,
Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation,
Forestry Division, on behalf of the National Association of
State Foresters.
You are welcome and recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF SONYA GERMANN
Ms. Germann. Thank you, Chairman Shimkus, Ranking Member
Tonko, Full Committee Chair Walden, Ranking Member Pallone, and
members of the subcommittee. It is a true honor to be before
one of the Nation's longest standing committees to discuss
wildfire impacts to air quality and strategies we are
undertaking to mitigate those impacts.
My name is Sonya Germann, State Forester of Montana. And
like Mr. Boggus, I am here testifying on behalf of the National
Association of State Foresters. I am also a member of the
Council of Western State Foresters, which represents 17 Western
States and six U.S.-affiliated Pacific islands. I have spent my
life in Montana in the past 12 years in forestry, with an
emphasis on active forest management, and I am honored to share
the Montana perspective with you here today.
The 2018 fire year has been challenging, not only in
severity and duration, but most importantly in the number of
lives lost. There have been 14 fire-related fatalities, a
devastating loss to families, the wildland firefighting
community, and the greater public. Across the Nation and
particularly in the west, wildfires are growing more intense
and so large we are now calling them megafires.
In Montana, our fire season is, on average, 40 days longer
than it was 30 years ago. And as the chairman suggested, more
than 7 million acres has burned since January 1 on a national
scale. And let me put that in perspective for you.
In the past 16 years, we have surpassed the 7 million acre
mark eight times and the 9 million acre mark five times. In the
10 years prior to that, we reached 7 million acres only once.
Although the 2018 fire year in Montana has thankfully been
relatively moderate, our citizens and wildland firefighters are
still reeling from 2017, which was our most severe season on
record since 1910 with over 1.2 million acres burned, which is
an area roughly the size of Delaware.
With severe fire years comes intense smoke. And according
to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, the air
quality standards for particulate matter have been exceeded 579
times for wildfire over the past 11 years, with 214 of those
occurring in 2017.
Fire is a natural part of our ecosystem. What is not
natural are the unprecedented forest conditions we are facing.
Nearly a century of fire exclusion has led to excessive fuel
loading and changed forest types. These factors, in addition to
insect epidemics, persistent drought, and climate change have
resulted in a disproportionate amount of Montana's fire-adapted
forests being at significant risk of wildfire. Today, over 85
percent of Montana's forests are elevated wildfire hazard
potential.
As land managers, we understand the connection between
fuels, wildfires, severity, and smoke. Consequently, we make
concerted efforts to work with key partners to reduce fuels
that in turn reduce wildfire risk and smoke-related impacts.
Treatments like prescribed fire mechanical fuels reduction will
not prevent wildfires from occurring but can influence how a
wildfire burns. Experience shows that actively managed forested
stands often burn with less intensity and produce less smoke
than stands with higher fuel loading. Additionally, active
fuels reduction can create safer conditions for wildland
firefighters and may also offer crews opportunities to keep
those fires smaller.
Along with our key partners, we endeavor to get more
prescribed fire and mechanical fuels reduction work done on the
ground. And as Ms. Anderson described, we are a part of the
Montana/Idaho Airshed Group. This group assures coordinated
compliance with regulatory agencies and strives to help us
accomplish more prescribed burning while complying with air
quality standards.
In Montana, proof is in the air quality data. Over the past
11 years, prescribed fire has exceeded air quality standards
only four times compared to 579 for wildfire. This group has
been recommended as a model for other States to follow.
And lastly, with over 60 percent of forested land in
Montana managed by Federal agencies, we strongly support
authorities that facilitate fuels reduction projects and allow
them to be completed more quickly through collaborative action.
The Good Neighbor Authority and categorical exclusions for
wildfire resilient projects represent two such authorities.
We strongly appreciate and value Congress' efforts to make
authorities like these available to our Federal partners.
In closing, my written testimony has been made available to
you, and I look forward to answering any questions you may
have. Again, thank you for the opportunity to testify before
you today.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Germann follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Shimkus. The chair thanks you.
The chair now turns to Mr. Collin O'Mara, President and CEO
of the National Wildlife Federation.
You are recognized for 5 minutes. Welcome back.
STATEMENT OF COLLIN O'MARA
Mr. O'Mara. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Tonko, Chairman
Walden. You have my prepared testimony.
I actually want to have kind of a real conversation today,
because I really appreciate the topic and actually focus on the
health consequences. But the external debate on this issue has
become a little ridiculous, right?
One side is saying it is all about logging and, frankly,
just kind of cutting everything down. The other side is saying
it is all about climate. We need to actively manage and we
actually have to address the climate stressors that are causing
this system. And this is a more complicated conversation. It
doesn't fit into the normal kind of right-left debate.
You are going to have almost unanimous agreement on this
panel on 80 percent of the recommendations. That doesn't happen
before this committee all that often, having been in the room
with the chairman a handful of times.
One of the missed opportunities in the fire funding fix
this year, and I am so grateful because so many of you played a
constructive role in it, was delaying the funding for 2 years,
to not have it take effect until 2 years. We need that money in
Oregon right now. We need that money in California right now.
And I get it. But leadership, when they jumped in, they
didn't listen to some of you, and Congressman Simpson and
others. It is billions of dollars of missed opportunity to do
restoration work.
And, look, the appropriation minibus is already moving. It
is probably too far down the line. But there has to be a way to
get a slug of money, because the Forest Service is basically
out right now. They have hit the caps they would have hit at
the end of the month. And if we don't get these projects on the
ground, we are going to continue to have more and more of this
kind of restoration deficit, if you will, that we are trying to
undo. Because we have basically starved ourselves for 40 years,
right? At least the last 25.
And you are talking about a lot of funding. There are great
reports. There is a great one just put out by Oregon State
looking at how to get more prescribed burns on the ground.
Look, there are things we need to do, like making sure that
the ambient air quality standards aren't overly prohibitive and
making sure that we are accounting for the impacts of
prescribed burns in a way that is actually rational, and not
discounting natural kind of anthropogenic emissions in a
different way than we are treating manmade ones, especially if
the manmade ones are going to save us 90 or 100 percent of
emissions compared to the alternative.
But most of the problem here is actually funding in
collaboration. And Secretary Perdue put out a great report just
a few weeks ago talking about shared stewardship, talking about
how to use some of these tools that all of you put together in
the last fire funding package and actually trying to get more
projects on the ground. And there are things around good
neighbor provisions that we absolutely have to fund. There are
stewardship contracting provisions we have to fund. There are
some mechanical issues that we could work through and actually
use your help trying to make sure that the good neighbor
provisions have the right accounting behind them so States are
incentivized to do the work.
There are some additional tools that folks like Congressman
Westerman are working on, like Chairman Barrasso, and Senator
Carper, some additional little tools on the management side.
But this is one of those conversations, like, let's not
score points on it, right? Folks are hurting right now. I
talked to my friend who is an air director up in Oregon right
now. They are trying to rewrite their smoke plans right now. It
is a good collaborative process. It is a few years too late. I
would have liked to have seen it a few years ago.
The leaders that you have on this panel actually have a lot
of the solutions. And so I am like if you do the talking
points, you can't have this conversation without talking about
climate. You got dryer soils. You got less snow pack. You have
warmer temperatures. The fact that it is not a--I am going to
steal your line, I apologize, that it is no longer a fire
season, it is a fire year.
This is a serious conversation. And I know there are a lot
of other votes going on, but not a lot of folks are here right
now. And so if there are folks that want to have this
conversation in a real way--and it is not just the E&C. It
affects Natural Resources. We obviously have jurisdictional
issues all over the place.
We got to fix the funding issue. That is the first thing.
We have to figure out some of these collaborative measures and
how we basically bolster the collaboratives in a big way,
because the collaboratives are the way to get good products on
the ground. There is huge opportunity there. And there are some
commonsense things that could be fit into the farm bill.
Advancing prescribed burns in a smart way, and there is
some guidance--we don't actually need to change the Clean Air
Act, but there is some guidance coming out of EPA related to
how they actually measure different types of emissions that
have to be fixed. I think Administrator Wheeler could get this
done. I think, frankly, Gina McCarthy would have agreed with
him on some of these things. This is one of those areas, again,
that it is not particularly partisan, and frankly, getting
those products on the ground.
Because right now, it is easier to try to respond after the
fact than it is to actually do the prescribed burn on the front
end. Because it is just a headache. The level of review that is
necessary to do it is complicated. These folks do it better
than most places. The folks in the southeast are probably doing
it the best right now.
But there are models there that we have to figure out how
to actually get off the ground, because the scale of
restoration that we need is massive. We are gone from doing a
few million acres here. We need tens of millions of acres of
your active management across the board. This is a big
conversation we need to have.
We can't have this conversation without talking about
acting on climate. I know it is a partisan issue. It shouldn't
be. We need to figure out ways to reduce emissions, because
they are heating up these systems and making them worse.
There is a big oversight role for all of you too. I do
worry about the fire funding fix when it kicks in. The extra
money needs to go toward restoration. It needs to go toward
active restoration, active management. It can't just go to
other programs. That is going to require some oversight,
because the way the language is written, it doesn't quite do
that.
And then finally, I would encourage, especially folks in
the west, to try to figure out ways to get more members out to
see the impacts. Because right now--I spend a lot of time in
the west. I don't think folks can fully appreciate the level of
devastation in the southern California airshed, in these
States. Breathing the soot for day after day, this is a big
issue. And at a time when we are preparing for massive
hurricanes, this is the time for serious people. And I would
love to work with all of you, because as the great American
poet Elvis Presley said, ``a little less conversation, a little
more action.''
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. O'Mara follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman's time expired.
Defending my colleagues here, I think this is actually a
pretty good turnout. We do have a bill on the floor. We do have
a Health Subcommittee hearing upstairs. So this is not bad,
so----
Mr. Walden. Mr. Chairman, you might point out that this is
a subcommittee too. When we are in full committee, all these
seats are filled, as they were this morning. So just for the
audience.
Mr. Shimkus. I would agree.
Reclaiming my time. The chair now recognizes Mr. Boggus,
the State Forester and Director of Texas A&M Forest Service, on
behalf of the National Association of State Foresters.
You are recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF TOM BOGGUS
Mr. Boggus. Thank you Chairman Shimkus and Ranking Member
Tonko and Committee Chair Walden. I am glad all of you are
here. And I am glad to be here to talk about this important
issue today on air quality and wildfire.
My name is Tom Boggus, and I am the State Forester and
Director for the Texas A&M Forest Service. I am here to testify
on behalf of the National Association of State Foresters, where
I serve on the--member of the Wildland Fire Committee, as well
as the past president of the Southern Group of State Foresters,
which represents the 13 southeastern States.
I have spent 38 years in forestry and fire, and I am
honored to share some of that experience with the subcommittee
today.
The NASF and the regional associations like Southern Group
represent the directors of the Nation State Forestry Agencies.
We deliver technical and financial assistance, along with fire
and resource protection, to more than two-thirds of our
nation's 766 million acres of forestland. We do this with
critical partnerships and with investments from the Federal
Government, including U.S. Forest Service State and Volunteer
Fire Assistance Grants, which provide equipment and training to
the firefighters who respond to State and private land where
over 80 percent of our nation's wildfires begin.
This has been a heck of a year across the country. You have
heard that. And Texas was no exception. We had over 8,000
wildfires burning over half a million acres so far in 2018. The
fire activity impacts responders at local, State, and national
levels.
The first impact is to communities. And what many people
don't understand and realize is that, in Texas, 75 percent of
our wildfires occur within 1 mile of a community. Most of these
fires, historically 91 percent, are suppressed by the local
responders. The other 9 percent, when their capacity is
exceeded, require local, State, and often national resources to
control.
Wildfires affect us all. I don't care whether you are rural
or urban, local or State or national. At the State and national
level, demand to respond does not go away. And you just heard
from my colleague here that in the wildfire community, we have
quit using fire season and we started using fire year, because
it is much more accurate. Because there is a wildfire season
somewhere, and wildfires are happening somewhere across America
at any time.
Fire has always been a natural part of the ecosystem in
Texas, in the south, and, really, a lot of parts of the
country. However, for many reasons, wildfires have become
increasingly detrimental to the forests and communities around
them, including the generation of catastrophic amounts of air
pollutants. That is why we are here today.
So what can we do to address the massive amounts of
wildfire smoke? My State forester colleagues and I put a great
deal of emphasis on proactive prescribed burning. During the
times of year when fire risk is low, you have already seen it,
where fire size and smoke emissions and community notification
can be managed effectively as compared to an unplanned or an
often catastrophic wildfire.
In the southern part of the country, we have a long history
of getting prescribed fire accomplished on the ground. We have
formed a fire management committee in the States consisting of
a fire director from each of the 13 States, and we work
together on shared practices, best management practices. For
example, we created the Southern Wildfire Risk Assessment
Portal, or SouthWRAP. And it is especially important in an
urbanizing State like Texas.
We build and maintain strong partnerships with landowners
and local governments in implementing partnerships with State
environmental quality agencies, Federal land management
agencies to get prescribed burning done and forest management
done collaboratively.
In Texas, unlike the west, 94 percent of our land is
privately owned, and prescribed fire is primarily conducted by
private landowners. Texas is a big and diverse State. And the
reasons for conducting prescribed burning are just as diverse
as our geography.
We recently developed a State smoke management plan to
provide best management practices for our landowners and these
cooperators and certified burners. The plan provides resources
for these professionals to utilize in order to minimize the
smoke from their prescribed burns.
Environmental regulations such as air quality are under the
authority of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the
TCEQ. Now, that is a great conversation in the education
process, but they are a great partner, and they understand and
have said last week at a hearing in the State that we need more
fire on the ground in Texas and more prescribed fire and not
less.
So once again, I want to thank you for this opportunity to
testify and appear before you. I look forward to answering any
questions. And if I can share more expertise that we have in
Texas and the south related to wildfire, hazardous fuel
reduction, and prescribed burning.
Thank you, sir.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Boggus follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Shimkus. Thank you very much.
Seeing no other members of the panel, I would like to
recognize myself 5 minutes to start the round of questions.
And, Mr. O'Mara, I want to go with you just because of your
opening statement. And I think you alluded to a missed
opportunity in the minibus. I know you can fill the space, just
briefly tell me, what was the missed opportunity?
Mr. O'Mara. Yes. In the fire funding fix that was passed in
March as part of a big budget deal, there was a provision that
was snuck in at 3 a.m. that basically moved it from being 2018
fiscal year to 2020 fiscal year. There is no increased funding
through the fire fix for the next fiscal year. So you are not
going to have the additional money that you all passed for 14
more months. There is some supplemental money that folks here
and Udall and Murkowski put in, but the actual tool isn't
available when we are having these horrible conditions.
Mr. Shimkus. Great. Thank you very much.
Let me go to Ms. Anderson and Ms. Germann. Compare and
contrast for me the risk challenges and the environmental
quality aspects of a forest fire and the resulting smoke and
stuff versus auto emissions in coal-fired power plants.
Ms. Anderson. So in Idaho, we don't have any coal-fired
power plants. The next biggest emitter are--we do have quite a
bit of open burning. We have agricultural burning, backyard
burning, a lot of auto emissions. We don't have a lot of
industry in Idaho. So by far, the wildfire emissions are the
biggest air pollution source that we just can't manage. We have
to react to.
Mr. Shimkus. Ms. Germann.
Ms. Germann. Yes. Thank you. I lack the specifics on any
type of coal emissions. But I can say anecdotally, certainly,
wildfire smoke is, by far, the largest polluter within the
State.
Mr. Shimkus. Great.
Let me go to Mr. Boggus. In your testimony, you say that,
``Our forests are currently more fire prone than ever.'' I
think Mr. O'Mara may have alluded to that. Some of the opening
statements would.
Why do you believe that is the case?
Mr. Boggus. We need more active management. And I think
several people on the committee have alluded to that. And I
think when you have a built up of fuel--and what we haven't
even really talked about is the land use changes that have
happened. We have got more people living in and around our
forests, but the fuel loads are increasing every year.
Mr. Shimkus. And when you use that terminology for, the
fuel load is increasing, what are you referring to?
Mr. Boggus. There is more available to burn in the woods
than there ever has been.
Mr. Shimkus. So, Mr. O'Mara, I am not picking on him. He
mentioned the threat of clear cutting. We are not talking about
clear cutting large swaths of ground. We are talking about
what?
Mr. Boggus. No. We are talking about active management,
forest management of the resource.
Mr. Shimkus. Removing some of those fuels.
Mr. Boggus. Yes. That doesn't mean harvesting, that doesn't
mean thinning. But that means keeping forests healthy. And I
have great examples, and we won't have time to get into them,
but examples in Texas where a managed forest, even if you have
severe drought or you have wildfires, the managed forests bear
better and you don't have the catastrophic damage that you do
to wildlife habitat and the resources that you do with
unmanaged forests.
Mr. Shimkus. Let me go to Mr. Baertschiger--Senator, I am
sorry--for that same question.
Mr. Baertschiger. Well, from a fire science perspective,
you always have to remember, you have to have drying of the
fuels to a point where they can be ignited and sustain
ignition, and you have to have ignition. You can have the
driest and even huge fuel loadings, and if you don't have
ignition, you have no fire.
And so when I talk about the human element, that is
something that I have been tracking now for about 10 years of
really looking at it. So we are having more and more of these
fires that are caused by the human element. And when we get
more and more fires, then we spread our resources and we can't
concentrate on putting one out because it is kind of like
whack-a-mole.
Mr. Shimkus. Of the fires we are experiencing,
percentagewise, how much are natural caused and how many are
caused by human intervention, a fire not left, or someone--we
have had some intentional fires set.
Mr. Baertschiger. Yes. When I referred to human cause, I am
not talking about an arsonist. I am talking about it can be a
power line failure, it can be a chain dragging from a vehicle
down the road. It is something that has to do with a human,
that we wouldn't have that fire if we didn't have that human
element into it. And it is getting close to 9 out of 10 fires.
Mr. Shimkus. OK. Great.
My time is close to be expiring. I will turn to the ranking
member, Mr. Tonko, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And again, welcome, to all
of our witnesses. Thank you for your expert testimony.
And, Mr. O'Mara, you made the observation that a great many
of us agree about the severity of the problem and the need to
move forward. And I am hoping that somehow we can be inspired
to come up with solutions that incorporate the professionals
that manage these resources in such an outstanding manner.
I want to start with the big-picture question before we get
into the specifics on forest management. How important is
addressing climate change which we know contributes to
conditions that exacerbate the number and severity of these
fires for a long-term fire mitigation and our forest management
strategy?
Mr. O'Mara. Look, we have to address the underlying
stressors of the system long term. Those aren't improvements
that will happen overnight. There are a lot of things we have
to do in the near term. But if we want to have long-term kind
of sustainable health, we have to bend the curve on the warming
planet.
Mr. Tonko. And in March, Congress passed the fiscal year
2018 omnibus appropriations bill, which included changes to how
we fund the United States Forest Service's fire response
beginning in 2020. And you alluded to that funding.
Does everyone agree it is important to provide greater
funding for more proactive forest management to reduce the
risks of these large wildfires?
Mr. O'Mara. Absolutely. I think the more that we can do, to
my colleague's point, thinking about private lands, State
lands, Federal lands--these are the same landscapes. The
ownership might be different, and I do think providing
additional funding for certain tools like prescribed burns
could be very effective.
I actually don't think that the fix itself is going to end
up being sufficient long term, even just given the scale of
the--we are talking another 10 million acres this year probably
by the time we are done. We are escalating in a pretty
concerning way. And I think you are going to need more money,
frankly; not less.
Mr. Tonko. So is that the additional work that we need to
secure here, or is there something more than just the dollars
that are required as we go forward with the fix?
Mr. O'Mara. From my point of view, I think there are
additional tools that we can provide. I think there are some
very important tools that were provided as part of the funding
fix in March.
A few of the ones that just kind of come to mind, top of
mind, is there is like the collaborative forest landscape
program that is a very effective tool that is in the current
draft of the farm bill, assuming that gets done. There are some
things around funding disease and infestation. There are things
around Good Neighbor Authority, like you mentioned, making sure
that works for everybody, including tribes, including other
partners, counties in some cases that are bigger.
There are some innovation programs for trying to have
markets for some of these products, because one of the worries
I have is that if we don't create robust markets and trade
comes into this, because, a lot of the timber guys are
struggling right now because the markets are closing, in China
in particular. And so there is a bigger conversation with the
economic consequences, making sure they have a place to put
this material into good use.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you.
And based on the recommendations of NWF's Megafires report,
do you have other suggestions on how Congress and the
administration can help reduce the threat of wildfires?
Mr. O'Mara. I would encourage this committee to convene
some of the stakeholders and the agency heads that are
involved. Secretary Perdue and his team have done a really nice
job, Acting Director Administrator Christiansen and Jim
Hubbard.
I think pulling together some folks at EPA and having
conversations about how we encourage more prescribed burns and
the way they are protective of public health, having some more
clear guidance could be helpful. And then also highlighting the
success of particularly the Montana-Idaho collaborative event,
because I do think that is a model that could be replicated in
other places. There is good collaborative in California as well
that could be replicated. But we have to elevate these best
practices in other places, because we are going to see the
impacts get worse over time.
Mr. Tonko. And a few people have mentioned forest
provisions included in the House farm bill, H.R. 2, although
there have been criticisms that they go too far in undermining
environmental laws, including NEPA and the Endangered Species
Act.
Do you have any thoughts on those provision?
Mr. O'Mara. Yes. I am happy to provide additional detail,
kind of point by point on them. I think there is a series of
them that are very bipartisan. I think there are a few that
probably go a little too far in some of the categorical
exclusions. We probably should be using the ones that we have
right now. I think the one that was passed before was the most
important one from March.
And I think the more that those conversations are being
directed by the science, by the experts, the better. But I do
think there is a suite of four or five of them that easily
could move through this farm bill. And I would love to work
with you offline to tell you exactly which ones those are.
Mr. Tonko. Sure. I appreciate that.
With that, Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his time.
The chair recognizes the chairman of the full committee,
Mr. Walden.
Mr. Walden. Thank you again, Mr. Chairman. Thanks to my
colleagues for participating in this hearing and to all our
witnesses for being here today.
I want to talk about some of the issues that we have run
into, some of the data that we have. According to the Georgia
Institute of Technology, when they did a study on this, found
that wildfires burning more than 11 million acres spew as much
carbon monoxide into the air as all the cars and factories in
the continental U.S. during those same months. I am sorry, that
was California Forestry Association. You are probably familiar
with these data points.
And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the
IPC's fourth assessment report on mitigation said in 2007, ``In
the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed
at maintaining or increasing forest stocks while producing an
annual sustained yield of timber, fiber, energy from the forest
will generate the largest sustained carbon mitigation
benefits.''
So, basically, healthy green forests sequester carbon.
Dead, dying, old ones and ones that burn and re-burn actually
emit carbon.
So one of the provisions in the farm bill is something that
we do on those other landscapes you referenced, Mr. O'Mara, and
that is, after a fire, you harvest the burn dead trees where it
makes sense and you replant a new green forest which will
sequester carbon.
Is that one of the provisions your organization opposes or
supports?
Mr. O'Mara. No, no. We have been supportive.
Mr. Walden. Of the House farm bill provision?
Mr. O'Mara. And we just want to make sure we are planting
kind of smartly in terms of what is going to be sustainable in
the long term.
Mr. Walden. Sure.
Mr. O'Mara. Oh, no. Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely.
Mr. Walden. Yes. because it will be the types of trees for
that area and the environment and all that. We got to be smart
about it.
But what I hear, and, Senator, you may want to speak to
this, because you both have been on the forest management side
and had a career on the forest firefighting side, so you have
seen both. Tell me what happens in these fires the second go-
around after the trees on Federal ground have not been removed,
the burned dead ones. What happens there when a fire breaks out
the second time, which often is the case?
Mr. Baertschiger. Well, on Forest Service lands, they are
not going to replant after a fire. So when you have the first
fire go through, the mortality rate of the live trees is pretty
high. The second time or the third time it goes through, it
takes out the rest of the trees. So there are no trees to cone
out. Cone out means when a tree is starting to die, they will
drop cones and reseed and start all over again. But after the
second or third burn, there are no trees to do that. And so it
changes the entire ecosystem of that forest. You will not have
the same forest that you had. And that is what we are seeing
in--and the dirt. Yes. Catastrophic high-density fire.
Mr. Walden. This is the dirt which remains, which is called
ash.
Mr. Baertschiger. Yes.
Mr. Walden. And on the second fire, doesn't it make it even
harder to maintain any kind of vegetation, frequently, because
it burns the soils, it sterilizes the soil so deeply?
Mr. Baertschiger. Our common terminology is it nukes the
soil.
Mr. Walden. Nukes the soil. How far down will it nuke the
soil on a bad fire?
Mr. Baertschiger. Just depends how hot it gets. And in
southern Oregon, northern California where we have extremely
high fuel loadings, in other words, tons per acre, we have a
very hot, hot, hot fire. We can have 400-foot flames from some
of those fires.
Mr. Walden. Four hundred feet high?
Mr. Baertschiger. Four hundred feet high, the flames. So
depending on the severity, the hotter the fire, the deeper it
is going to go into the soil. It can go pretty deep.
Mr. Walden. Mr. O'Mara, I fully agree with you on the need
to solve the fire borrowing issue. I have been an advocate of
doing that from day one. It makes no sense. I am told there are
statistics that--it costs four to five times as much to fight a
fire as it does to do the kind of work you and I agree needs to
be done on the forest.
I had somebody in region 6 Forest Service at one point tell
me 70 percent of the Forest Service budget for these projects
goes into planning, planning and appeals. And it seems like we
have got a broken process, then, if all the money is going into
the planning and not going to the ground. Do you agree?
Mr. O'Mara. Yes. And I think there are two issues there.
One is that I think there is some redundancy in the planning
process. There are some things they could be streamlining. We
are not bolstering the collaborative enough. If we have to go
through a collaborate process, there should be a way of----
Mr. Walden. I was a cosponsor of that legislation to do
landscape scale collaboratives that we are using in Oregon
today.
And I think you said something too about we got to do
bigger expanses on these collaboratives, right? Or on the
treatment, because we are millions of acres behind.
One of the other provisions in the farm bill would extend
the categorical exclusions out to 6,000 acres. We have got
millions we need to do. Three thousand is currently on the
books, but only on certain forests in certain States have
certain governors identified certain lands.
So in southern Oregon where the Senator is from, our
Governor didn't designate any of those lands. But the
provisions in the farm bill in the House would allow for a
6,000-acre CE where you could go in and begin this catchup
work. And so I am hopeful we can get that into law.
Our committee--while we want to believe we have complete
jurisdiction over every issue on the books in the Congress, and
I think we would be better off if we did, doesn't fully have
Forest Service jurisdiction, but this is our hook, because what
is happening on Federal lands is dramatically, dangerously
affecting the health of our citizens, and that is why linking
to the air quality is so critical.
Do you want to respond?
Mr. O'Mara. Just one thing. Your point on the carbon
emissions, in 20 to 30 percent of the global solution could
come from repairing these kind of natural systems.
Mr. Walden. Absolutely.
Mr. O'Mara. It could be 10 to 15 percent of this country.
When you are talking about the impacts just to the forests for
the last few years, you are talking 36 million cars. Right?
This is one of the most potentially bipartisan ways we restore
our forests, we reduce emissions. It is a win for everybody.
Mr. Walden. And you haven't talked about the habitat, the
water quality, et cetera, et cetera. My time is expired. The
chairman has been very generous. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shimkus. The chairman is always generous to the
chairman. So the chair now recognizes the gentleman from
California, Dr. Ruiz, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Ruiz. Thank you very much. And chairman, I agree with
you, this is a definite public health concern. And there are
two main points: One is that it is a public health concern,
just recently in the fires in my district, I had to give a
warning on social media to anybody who can smell smoke or see
ash, especially vulnerable populations, the older, the young,
and people with lung illnesses, that they should be inside in a
closed air conditioned unit.
The second main point that this tells us is that these fine
particles, particle matter 2.5 microns and substance from a
fire in California can travel clear across the country. So
whether you are in a fire-prone State or not, it is an American
issue and all of our public health can be in jeopardy.
As we sit here today, there are 17 active wildfires burning
across the State of California. The ongoing wildfire season has
resulted in over 1.4 million acres burned, and the worst is
likely yet to come due to climate change. As we know, that
climate change can fuel the severity, frequency and the size of
wildfires by increasing the duration of droughts, causing long
stretches of low humidity and high temperatures, and initiating
early springtime melting, which leads to dryer lands in summer
months. So we need to address and recognize climate change and
do everything possible, or else we are not being as effective
as we can.
In August, the Cranston fire burned over 13,000 acres in my
district outside of the community of Idyllwild. This fire
exposed the residents of those mountain communities to numerous
risks beyond just the flames themselves. While the fire burned,
residents across southern California were subjected to
increased air pollution as the smoke traveled across the
region; these are kids with asthma; elders with COPD; people
with pulmonary fibrosis, et cetera, were having more shortness
of breath, visiting emergency departments, requiring more
intensive care.
The smoke and pollution from wildfires can affect
populations far removed from these fires themselves. The fires
in California can cause vast clouds of hazardous smoke that can
affect the air quality for residents in Arizona, and Nevada and
further east.
So wildfires are regional disasters with national
implications. And earlier this year, my Wildfire Prevention Act
was signed into law, which extended the Hazard Mitigation Grant
Program to any fire that receives a fire management assisting
grant. Previously, this funding was only available to declared
major disasters and not fire. Hazard Mitigation Grant Program
funds may be used to fund projects that will help prevent and
mitigate future fires. Some examples can include receding
construction of barriers, hazardous fuel reduction or
reinstalling ground cover. So Mr. O'Mara, can you speak to
examples of mitigation projects that can be taken in the wake
of wildfires that would be most helpful to preventing a repeat
event?
Mr. O'Mara. This is one of those great examples of an ounce
of prevention would be worth a pound of cause. There are things
you do on the landscape. You talked a lot about prescribed
burns, you talked a lot about active management practices, they
are ecologically sound, but there is also some common sense. We
were building further and further into the wildland urban
interface.
Mr. Ruiz. Right.
Mr. O'Mara. And you get folks that are building up into the
hills. There is some common sense that we are putting people in
harm's way. And I do think there has to be some kind of
accounting for that, and making sure we are not putting
additional folks in harm's way. It is unfortunate in some
cases. These are beautiful places, but we allow people's desire
to live in the middle of the woods.
Mr. Ruiz. What are some specific examples that households
can do and that we can do as policymakers?
Mr. O'Mara. Sure, there are things on building codes,
making sure more fire resistant products and things like that,
and some States have done that, or some local governments.
There are things in siting that can be incredibly helpful.
Making sure climate science is part of your planning process.
There are a wide range of things that have people in less
harm's way.
Mr. Ruiz. Ms. Germann, as a State forester, can you give
examples of how you would use additional hazard mitigation
funds to prevent future wildfire damage?
Ms. Germann. Yes, thank you. I can think of several. And I
will speak specifically to working on private lands. Any
funding that we get through State and private forestry, we are
targeting lands within the wildland urban interface to work
with landowners to reduce the fields in and around their home,
and educate them on things like the home ignition zone. And we
are finding that a lot of fires, homes also burn because of the
expanse around the home, if they are not necessarily going to
be planting fire resistant material, or shrubs, we try to work
with people to educate them on the best type of landscaping
that they can have. So it is going to take a couple of things,
fuels reduction outside of that home and ignition zone and also
work within and around homes.
Mr. Ruiz. It is amazing to see the photos of the houses
that were spared because of what they did around their house to
mitigate the propagation of fires, it works, it definitely
works. I yield back.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back. The chair now
recognizes the vice chairman of the subcommittee, Congressman
McKinley from West Virginia, 5 minutes.
Mr. McKinley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Unfortunately, the ranking member from New Jersey has left.
I wanted to thank him for his opening statement, because it
gave us--those that are here--a little snapshot of what life
could be like after November, if he becomes the chairman, a
diatribe of challenging President Trump for everything on
climate change. It just shows that such a distraction is going
to take place in this committee in the years ahead when we try
to deal with all the matters that come before this committee.
And perhaps it was just meant to be a distraction from the
economic insurgence that has taken place across this country.
And I appreciate you, Senator from Oregon, that you didn't
blame President Trump for one of those nine of ten fought fires
being started. He got blamed for waters rising in the oceans,
blaming Hurricane Florence. It is just inexcusable, but that is
what we are going to see. So it is a little vignette of what we
might be able to see in the future.
My question--further with remarks would be, we had some
discussion a couple years ago about the CO2
emissions out in the atmosphere. And I quoted O'Mara, I quoted
from Al Gore's book that the largest producer of the
CO2 s into the atmosphere is not from coal, it is
coming from the deforestation of tropical rain forests. So the
idea of what we are seeing in Oregon, California and elsewhere
is we are contributing to this. That is why we need to address
those problems and solutions so that we are not allowing this
uncontrolled burn in our forests and allow that to take place.
Now, I go to West Virginia and there we have the Mon, which
is about 1 million acres. Like I say, Mr. O'Mara, with all due
respect, it has been groups like yours and others that have
prevented the logging in the Mon forest. It is a million acres,
and they have only received about $1 million worth of harvest.
Think about that: $1 per acre is all they are getting out of
that forest. But yet, you go to the Allegheny Forest in
Pennsylvania, and it is getting $12 per acre. So we think about
what the situation is we have in the Mon. I want to learn from
what testimony has been given here, that we may be sitting on
something that is a very aging force in West Virginia in the
Mon. And it is a tinderbox, because people are preventing us
from logging and perfecting the situation that we have in West
Virginia.
So I am looking for some guidance as to how we might be
able to approach this, because I am afraid we are going to
start experiencing the same problem in West Virginia in the Mon
that you all were experiencing out west because environmental
groups do not want to have--I have got here, the West Virginia
legislature was trying to do some in the State forest, but the
environmental groups prevented that from happening.
What advice can you give us for other areas? We have seen
the devastation and we have seen the collection that the
chairman has of soot from out west, how do we prevent that from
happening in the east as well? What would you suggest, any of
you? Don't be shy. There is nothing we can learn?
Ms. Germann. Is the question what would we----
Mr. McKinley. What would you recommend? How should we go
about this, because the National Forest, because of the
environmental movement, is preventing us from thinning that and
addressing the problem? We are only getting one-twelfth of the
wood products out of the Mon that people are getting at other
national forests. It is becoming a nursing home for wood.
Ms. Germann. If I may, I think something that is happening
right now, and I think you see it through the panel and Mr.
O'Mara and my colleague, Mr. Boggus, we are talking about a lot
of the same things. I think there is an opportunity that is
happening right now is we are all interested as land managers,
and as people who are interested in getting restoration and
protecting water quality and air quality. We are wanting to
focus on taking a cross-boundary approach. So we call it ``All
lands, all hands.'' I think that is something we talk about
across the Nation. But we have this opportunity right now to be
doing more, but we have to be making sure that we are not only
going to be doing more on private lands, we have to have the
funding through our agencies for State and private forestry
within our State. Other things like Good Neighbor Authority. So
it is an excellent partnership between the Federal Government
and the States. Working with collaboratives, working with local
governments----
Mr. McKinley. Again, those are great ideals, but it is not
happening. So Mr. Boggus, what would you suggest? What do we
have to do to try to encourage the Forest Service to eliminate
these hazards so that we don't experience this same problem?
Mr. Boggus. Well, you have to keep the dialogue open. We
are an early adapter, Texas is an early adapter for the Good
Neighbor Authority, where you have these agreements--even
before there was Good Neighbor Authority, we went into
agreement with our State--our national forest folks in Texas,
and to help them with prescribed burning. We had an agreement
in 2007 and 2008 for that. Then we had the Good Neighbor
Authority, which means the States can help the U.S. Forest
Service get management done on their lands. And you all's thank
you for the fire fix as has been said before, but that is a
great help to us, because a lot of times, the money we have and
for reaching and technical assistance and the money that people
don't talk about is the State and private funding that comes
from you all; the borrowing came from State and private often,
and so that is where we can reach out and do more on U.S.
Forest Service lands, but also on technical assistance and
helping the State and the private landowners across the State,
which we heard was most of the land. Most of the forest land in
this country is on--what you are talking about in the east and
the south is on private lands. And those folks need technical
assistance.
So these programs like stewardship, Urban and Community
Forestry and the Good Neighbor Authority help us put things not
just in a plan, but put them on the ground and manage and make
our forest healthier.
Mr. McKinley. Thank you very much. I yield back.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman's time has expired. The chair
recognizes the gentlelady from Colorado, Ms. DeGette, for 5
minutes.
Ms. DeGette. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I know some of you
were worried there weren't a lot of members here, but you had
members represent the entire Rocky Mountain west and west
coast, so that is pretty darn good, because we are the ones
dealing with these issues every day.
I just want--I think Mr. O'Mara is correct, we don't have
any silver bullets for solving this problem. Being from
Colorado, I see this firsthand, and believe you me, we couldn't
see the front range for most of August in Denver because of the
smoke.
Then I went to Oregon, and the same smoke was in Oregon,
and then I went to Vancouver and it was still there for 1
month. This is not normal summer weather for us in the West.
The thing we have to realize is there is no one solution. It
would be super great if we could just go in and clear out all
of this extra wood, and then we wouldn't have as big of a fire
risk. Number one, that is not the best management technique for
a lot of these areas. But number two, for those of you not from
the Rocky Mountain west and west, it is millions and millions
of acres that we are talking about. There is no way, even if we
had adequate funding, we could go in and clear out this wood.
Secondly, in some of these areas, we really do need to have
prescribed burns. We need to have forest management programs
that are appropriate for those forests. And I am delighted to
see our whole panel sitting here today agreeing with these
concepts.
So what can we do? There are a couple of things. Number
one, several of you said we have to have adequate funding. And
this is a bipartisan issue for those of us from the west where
our colleagues don't seem to understand how important funding
is for forest management, no matter what those techniques are.
The second thing is, we have to think about long-term
planning. We are not going to be able to solve this air quality
issue, or the other related issues, without the long-term
planning.
Mr. O'Mara, you talked about the dry soils, the water, and
everything else from climate change, but there are other issues
too. Let's see if they have my picture, if the clerk has my
picture to put up. This is a picture that I took in the Pike
and San Isabel National forest last month. It is always really
fun to go hiking with me, because I stopped and said take a
look at this forest. See the trees on the ground? Those trees
would not have been on the ground 10 years ago, that is
Ponderosa pine, it was all killed by the pine beetle, and they
died and they fell down on the forest floor. Then you can see
the aspens now that have grown up because of the death of the
pine forest. But then, if you look closely you can see the new
baby Ponderosa pines growing up.
So this is something the forest has tried to do to
naturally recover from the pine beetle infestation. In
Colorado, we think it is a miracle that all of these millions
of acres that look like this have not burned. We have had some
devastating fires the last few years, but we did not have
devastating fires this year. I don't know why, I think probably
luck. But if you want to solve this problem--so these could all
be burning.
Now, we all said in Colorado, we need to be able to remove
this dead Ponderosa pine, and we did in many areas. But it is
millions of acres; it is wilderness areas; it is national
forests; it is BLM land. So we have to think of ways where we
are going to aggressively address climate change issues,
because it is not just the carbon emissions that we are seeing
and everything else, it is a whole ecosystem that is impacted.
So I just really want to say, Mr. Chairman, I so appreciate
you having this hearing. And I think that there are ways that
we can aggressively work in a bipartisan way. But to think we
can go down and clear out all the deadwood or just have a few
controlled burns, that is not going to solve this problem over
this entire massive and beautiful region. Thanks, and I yield
back.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentlelady yields back. The chair
recognizes the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Flores, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Flores. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This has been an
enlightening panel today. Mr. Boggus, I have a couple of
questions for you if we could. We have got something called
Good Neighbor Authority, and we have had several people mention
that, but nobody's described it. Can you describe Good Neighbor
Authority for us?
Mr. Boggus. I guess the easiest answer is, it is a
partnership, an agreement we go into with the U.S. Forest
Service where they often have either lost the expertise or do
not have the personnel available to help them with timber
sales, with prescribed burning. And now you have added road
building in the latest version into there to help with the
management activities on the U.S. Forest Service lands, so we
go in partnership with them and help them manage the Federal
assets, the Federal force.
Mr. Flores. And how does this authority work for the State
of Texas? You are the chief forestry officer in the State, how
does that work for you?
Mr. Boggus. It is a dialogue that has to go on, and it is
something you learn as you go. Like I said, we were an early
adaptor, we saw the benefits of this. In Texas, again, we are a
private property State, the U.S. Forest Service is only 635,000
acres of forest land in Texas. But that is extremely important
because the things that happen on that forest impact the
private landowners around the forest. So with insects and
disease, with fire and so forth and so, we work with them
because we want to help make sure there are some other
programs. Like we had the southern pine beetle prevention
program; it is Federal funding through the U.S. Forest Service
that we would help with those private landowners get their
property thinned and managed around, we kind of call it beetle
proofing around the U.S. Forest Service land. We also now, with
Good Neighbor Authority, we can work with the U.S. Forest
Service partners and get those same--on the inside of the red
paint, and get those protected as well and help do some
thinning, and keep the forest healthy, that is the whole idea,
we want to keep our forests healthy.
Mr. Flores. In your testimony, you mentioned that last
year, Texas used prescribed fires on over 200,000 acres. And
you also said that burning like this is pretty common across
the south. Some States even do high amounts of prescribed
burning. What are the challenges that exist with--well, let me
rephrase the question. What are the challenges of dealing with
prescribed burns versus the challenges of dealing with
uncontrolled burns?
Mr. Boggus. A wildfire is much more challenging and much
more destructive. Now, a prescribed fire or controlled burn,
says what it is, it is prescriptive, you have very set weather
parameters, it is lower intensity. So you have less particulate
matter, and so what it does is, it fireproofs communities, it
fireproofs the area, so it keeps a catastrophic wildfire from
happening. It prevents that fire. It is almost like saying
fighting fire with fire, because you are making it where the
fuel loading is less, you are keeping those four. It is a fire
ecosystem in Texas so we are keeping those forests and those
lands healthy, and keeping the fuel loading down. So if you
were to have a wildfire break out, an uncontrolled, unplanned
fire break in through there, it would be much less destructive.
Mr. Flores. And then you also do this adjacent to
communities in order to protect those communities from the
impact of the wildfire. What do you do to protect the community
in the controlled burn process?
Mr. Boggus. Well, obviously, the biggest thing we do, and I
guess I will give an example, is our Jones State forest in
Texas, which is almost in the city limits of Houston, so it is
surrounded by subdivisions. So it is a very difficult place to
burn. We have to plan, and part of these things is working with
our environmental quality folks, and also working with the
community around there, the landowners and homeowners around
there, for them to understand if they do have issues, breathing
issues, when we are going to it. So there is a lot of
communication back and forth that those homeowners and
landowners to say here is what is going to happen. If at first,
if they are urbanized, urban dwellers, they are not used to
seeing smoke. If you didn't grow up in the country and burning
your leaves and seeing smoke, it is disturbing. They think it
is a wildfire.
So we let them know what is--and we also show them are
before and after and the benefits of that fire, the prescribed
fire. And now, some of our biggest advocates are the ones that
say, Yes, if you have anybody that is against prescribed fire,
tell them to call me. So we have a lot of peers that will help
and come to our defense, landowners and homeowners.
So you have got to do a lot of outreach with the group, and
you have got to do a lot of preparation and planning ahead of
time. So the weather has to be right, conditions have to be
right so that the smoke cannot be an adverse condition for
those homeowners and landowners around the fire.
Mr. Flores. And, of course, one of the ways that the
prescribed burns are safer is you do it seasons when you are
less likely to have it migrate into an uncontrolled burn.
Mr. Boggus. Absolutely.
Mr. Flores. I am going to try to squeeze in one last
question. A controlled burn has an environmental impact, a
wildfire has a huge environmental impact. So because a
controlled burn has an environmental impact, you have to work
with the Texas CEQ on that. Describe that relationship.
Mr. Boggus. That is an ongoing relationship, and that is
one of the things we hope to get done, and just started 2 years
ago, working with them to look at their rules. We would like to
see prescribed fire treated differently than a wildfire, than
smoke stacks, than car emissions. It ought to have some lesser
because of the good it does and will help in the long-term
prevent catastrophic particulate matter getting with a
wildfire. So we would like to see the TCEQ treat prescribed
burning and those that are done by trained, certified,
prescribed fire managers, not just anybody, but that they would
have a look at the smoke and emissions from a prescribed fire
differently than they do--we are not there yet, but we are
having those conversations. And like I said, last week, the
chair of the TCEQ said, We need to have more prescribed fire on
the ground in Texas, not less. So we are getting there.
Mr. Flores. Thank you. I have a couple of other questions,
but I will ask you to respond supplementally to those. We will
send those to you. I yield back.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman's time has expired. The chair
recognizes the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Carter, for 5
minutes.
Mr. Carter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank all of you
for being here. This is certainly a serious problem,
particularly in the State of Georgia. Georgia is the number one
forestry State in the Nation. As you know we have over 22
million acres of privately owned land, and only about 1.7
million acres of government land. So we are a little bit
different from, I think, the scenario that exists out west.
However, we have had our share of fires. We had the West
Mims fires, the Okefenokee swamp is in my district. It is truly
one of the national treasures of our country. It is a
beautiful, beautiful area that I have had an opportunity to
visit on numerous occasions.
We had a very serious fire there this past year, the West
Mims fire. One of the adjacent property owners to that was
telling me about this, and I met with him because he lost a lot
of land as a result of the fire that started on the swamp, but
spread to his private land. And I will start with you, Mr.
Baertschiger, because I see that you worked as a fire training
instructor, and a national type 3 incident commander.
I just wanted to ask you, one of the things that was
brought to my attention by the private landowner was that they
didn't utilize the air support. If they had been able to
utilize it quicker, that they could have contained it possibly.
Now in all fairness, a swamp fire is a little bit different
than other kind of fires, because you have, from what I
understand, and I know you all know it a lot better than I do,
but the Peat moss, and it is hard to put out, because the water
has to rise up, and again, you understand it much better than I
do.
But he did make that point that if--and he attributes it to
being a problem with the--whether it was low funding and they
couldn't afford to utilize the air support, the helicopters
that were available. Is there something that you experienced
before?
Mr. Baertschiger. Well, there could be--I wasn't there, I
don't know what the conditions were. And certain tools work
good under certain conditions. If you have a wind blowing in
excess of, say, 20 miles per hour, aviation stuff really
doesn't help you much. And swamp is tough, because you can't
use dozers and other mechanical equipment because they don't go
through the swamp very well. So there are challenges with every
fire.
But the example you give is very good. Every forester in
this country is exposed to catastrophic wildfire. And our
history shows that going back to 1812, but the great Maine and
New Brunswick fire, who would have thought that northern Maine
and Brunswick would burn up, I think it was 3 million acres,
and kill a lot of people.
So, it is hard for me to comment on a fire that I don't
have any specifics, but not all the tools work all the time. In
Oregon this year, landowners lost 33,000 acres of private
timberlands from fires burning off of the Forest Service on to
the private lands.
Mr. Carter. Let me ask you, I met with him as I mentioned
before, and he owns a lot of forest land in the area in
Georgia. And when I met with him, he said a lightning strike is
what this originated from. And that generally, the Federal
Government will just let it burn out and not even respond to
it, is that----
Mr. Baertschiger. It just depends where it is, and, I
believe you mentioned it was in a wilderness.
Mr. Carter. Yes, oh, yes, in the middle of the swamp, or at
least it started, and now it spread on to the private lands.
Mr. Baertschiger. In wilderness comes certain engagement
rules, and I think some of that needs to be reviewed.
Mr. Carter. I appreciate that. Let me move to--I wanted to
get to Ms. Germann.
Ms. Germann. I am Germann.
Mr. Carter. Now you are in Montana, right?
Ms. Germann. Yes.
Mr. Carter. OK. The practices in Montana, I suspect, are a
little bit different than I described in the State of Georgia,
particularly in the swamp, and I asked about that in my
district. We are not all swamp in Georgia, but in my district
we are. I am in south Georgia. But I wanted to ask you about
the practice, the forestry practices that you have in Montana.
Can you describe those very quickly?
Ms. Germann. Sure. Absolutely. So we have, I will say that
60 percent of the forested land within the State of Montana is
managed by the Forest Service. And we have active forest
management taking place on State, private and Federal lands.
And anything else that you want to----
Mr. Carter. I want to ask you specific about the State
implementation plans, and I guess this is kind of a broad
question, and I am out of time, but nevertheless, these have to
be approved by the EPA. Is that the way I understand it?
Ms. Germann. Yes. And I don't have expertise on the State
implementation plans. I might ask that my colleague from
Idaho----
Mr. Carter. I was just wondering if there were any type of
barriers that you are having, or any kind of constraints, and
how soon did they approve those? How quickly do they approve?
Mr. Shimkus. Quickly, please.
Ms. Anderson. It normally takes an 18-month period for EPA
to approve those. So any changes to, like Idaho rules we submit
for EPA. It is a very long, drawn-out process.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Carter. Thank you very much.
Mr. Shimkus. Chair recognizes the gentleman from
California, Mr. Cardenas, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Cardenas. Thank you very much for having this hearing.
Hopefully we can see through the smoke of politics and get
things a little more right, than not, in this great country. We
don't have some of the best response systems in the world?
Aren't we in the upper tier when it comes to being able to
respond to fires and trying to protect life and property? I
think everybody pretty much agrees with that. I am not saying
we are the best, but we are definitely in the upper tier,
right? We have got all that capacity and capability, thank God.
One thing I would like to point out is the wildfires that
have been ravaging through California are in excess of anything
we have ever seen in the past. For example, 25 years ago, if
you had a 4,000-acre fire, that was considered big. Now we have
these mega fires that are consuming over 100,000 acres per
fire. And then all of a sudden, you have now where people talk
about fire season. It is kind of like fire year now, there
really isn't a 3- or 4- or 5-month season. Now the situation is
so bad, so dire, our forest and our vegetation has dried up so
much that the--honest to God truth, as they say, protect
yourself and hope and pray that there is not a fire, because
there is no season anymore; it could erupt at any given time,
and then when it does, we see these mega fires and some of them
are raging as we speak.
Another thing as well, I would like to point out this is a
responsibility that we need to hopefully get right as
policymakers, and as organizations, whether it is local or
State or Federal. We need to make sure that we can work
together to minimize the negative effects of these devastating
fires.
For example, according to the U.S. Forest Service alone,
they have spent $2 billion last year just with the fires. That
doesn't include the economic loss, et cetera. That is just the
Federal investment in that. I truly do believe that we can
always do better if we take the opportunity to learn from the
past, to learn about what is going on today, to learn about
what it is that--how we are going to deal with this issue that
many scientists are claiming that some of finest universities,
Columbia University, et cetera, are saying that climate change
is, in fact, contributing tremendously to some of the fires
that are going on today.
I hope we don't argue about the simple fact that we do have
a different environment now when it comes to the vegetation,
when it comes to the ability for Mother Nature to protect
itself, and we, as human beings, have to make up the
difference. Again, a 4,000-acre fire, not too long ago, was
considered big, 100,000 acre fire is now becoming commonplace.
So with that, I would like to also ask the chair and the
ranking member coming from California in the future, we can try
to glean through the wonderful experts, like the ones we have
here today. Maybe we can get somebody from California up here
because our disproportionality of being affected by fires as of
late is just tremendous.
Again, I don't know if that is a complaint or what have
you, I think it is an observation with five members from the
California delegation on this subcommittee. Hopefully in the
future, we can be a little more----
Mr. Shimkus. Would the gentleman yield?
Mr. Cardenas. Yes, absolutely.
Mr. Shimkus. You do know the process by which the people
are asked are both from the majority and the minority side.
Mr. Cardenas. And that is why I mentioned to both of you,
the chair and the ranking member.
Mr. Shimkus. Just wanted to make sure it was clarified.
Mr. Cardenas. But since you brought it up, maybe it is four
to one, because we get one person and you get four.
Mr. Shimkus. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. Cardenas. I will yield.
Mr. Shimkus. These negotiations are always done between the
parties, and I see no objection.
Mr. Cardenas. OK, thank you.
So again, that is why I say it is not so much a complaint,
it is just an observation. And hopefully, we can get fortunate
enough to have some folks who are dialed in directly within the
California scene, especially since it is one of the most dire
in the country now when it comes to our fires.
Mr. O'Mara, what will the effect beyond California fire
seasons, or as I just called it, fire years, actually if we
continue to roll back clean air standards?
Mr. O'Mara. You mean, the challenges that as the fires get
worse, the displacing a lot of the air quality benefits that we
have accumulated through cleaner power plants, cleaner cars,
energy efficiency, all the work that you are doing at State
level.
I actually worked for the mayor of San Jose for 3 years and
a lot of the work they have been doing--you could undo a lot of
that progress unless we deal with the underlying issue: the
public health consequences of uncontrolled fires.
Mr. Cardenas. Again, Mother Nature can--if we don't help,
can wipe things out, set us back decades, actually.
What holistic steps can Congress, and State, and local
governments take to do our part in reducing the devastating
blazes across California and the U.S.?
Mr. O'Mara. I think we talked a lot about funding today,
making sure that we have the resources for the proactive work,
through the proactive restoration work. I think there are
things we can do to help individuals, make sure there is
mitigation money and things like that. But also, making sure we
are doing prescribed burns, making sure we are doing good
management. And frankly, you have some of the best people in
the country in California. The challenge is they don't have the
resources they need to do the scale of restoration they need,
given the scale of the impacts, and we have to help solve that
problem.
Mr. Cardenas. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman's time has expired.
The chair recognizes the gentleman from the South Carolina,
Mr. Duncan, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Duncan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just like hurricanes
aren't limited to Florida or the Gulf of Mexico, wildfires are
not limited to the west. In 2009, Horry County fire down in
Myrtle Beach, same place being affected by Hurricane Florence,
experienced 24 miles, 20,000 acres burned, 70 homes destroyed,
2,500 people evacuated. In my district, we have Sumter National
Forest, which is 370,442 acres. So national forests and forest
fires are not limited to the west.
My wife owns property in Montana. We have been out there
since I graduated college in 1989. We have seen what the
spotted owl controversy did to the timber industry in the west.
I believe that was the beginning of the change of mitigation
practices and how forests were managed all throughout the west,
not just in Montana. Families that were supported by timber
dollars lost their jobs. Ms. Germann from Montana can probably
attest a number of saw mills are lost, a number of timber
families have been displaced, and the lack of timber activity
that you saw in the late 1980s and 1990s; it went away, it went
away. And at that point, we started managing our forests
differently.
So I traveled to Montana, I was out there this summer in
August. I saw all the smoke. I experienced the smell. I saw
that all the tourists that came into the Kalispell and Glacier
National Airport to go to Glacier National Park, probably
didn't see the beautiful scenery of that national park due to
the fires, and that was before the Lake McDonald fire. While we
were there, had a lightning storm, four lightning strikes,
caused four fires, one of them was a Lake McDonald fire. Burned
all the way down the lake right there in Glacier National Park.
Three of the other lightning strikes from the same storm didn't
burn near as much, because they actually hit on property that
had been managed properly, and the fires were able to be
contained a lot quicker than that in the national park, because
we don't do any sort of mitigation efforts in national parks. I
am not advocating for that, but I think we ought to at least
think outside the box when we are talking about managing fires.
Last summer, not this past August, but a year ago, I was
also in Montana, and the Gibraltar Ridge fire, which you are
probably aware of up in Eureka, Montana, that was burning very
close to our property. So I took it as an opportunity upon
myself, and I challenge every Member of Congress and on this
committee, to go to a fire camp and visit with the people that
are fighting the fires in the fire camp like I did in Eureka,
Montana, and then get in the truck with the forest manager, and
go out to the fire line and see how these fires are fought.
Because I went to the Gibraltar Ridge fire, and I spent 3 hours
on the fire line to see the techniques that were being used,
mainly mitigation efforts to keep that fire from moving toward
where people live, and that personal property to keep it from
being destroyed. Other than that, it was just trying to contain
the fire, keep more forest acreage from being burned. But they
weren't trying to put the fire out at all.
In fact, in the wilderness study area, there is minimally
invasive suppression techniques, missed techniques. So they
weren't doing anything up there, but maybe trying to contain it
a little bit. Very difficult to get to, I get that.
Having said all of that, we need to back up as a nation and
start talking about how we manage our forests. That means more
timber activity. This is the American taxpayers' resources and
it is growing, it is going to regrow. We have practiced timber
sales forever. And one of the ways that we can mitigate the
pine beetle is cut the timber. She said we don't have a funding
stream to do some of these clearing techniques. Guess what? It
is called timber sales. They pay for themselves, actually
provide revenue back to the government to provide revenue for
these expenses.
So let's manage our forests, let's sell some of the timber,
and then let's look at shading along rodads and near where
residential areas are, let's look at fire breaks. Let's look at
prescribed burning.
I mentioned the Horry County fire earlier. The reason that
fire was so bad and got out of control, and even the
firefighters had to employ shelters to let the fire go over and
to keep from losing their lives is because the northerners that
moved down to South Carolina and occupied in Myrtle Beach, did
not like the smoke from prescribed burning. And so prescribed
burning didn't happen. And because the prescribed burning did
not happen, there was a lot of fuel there. Once that fire
started, it burned out of control, because there was so much
fuel for it. If we don't manage these fires out west and even
in South Carolina with prescribed burning and good management
techniques, we are going to see, continue to see, out-of-
control wildfires that are very difficult to contain and we are
going to pray for a snowfall to put these doggone things out,
because that is what they pray for out west is that snow to get
there. They see a thunderstorm come in August, that is kind of
a double-edged sword. It is providing some moisture to help
contain some of that fire, but it is also providing additional
lightning strikes.
I was talking to Brian Donner at the Kootenai National
Forest Service, a forest ranger there. You may know Brian. He
said while they were fighting one fire, a lightning storm came
in, they saw lightning hit over on a hill. They saw the tree it
hit. They knew right where to go, but before they could get
there, because of the amount of fuel that was there, there was
5 or 10 acres already burning and that was very difficult to
start containing at that point on the top of that mountain. Had
they done prescribed burning and that fuel had gone away, that
fire would have been contained a lot quicker.
The last thing I will say, Mr. Chairman, because----
Mr. Shimkus. Your time has expired.
Mr. Duncan [continuing]. She said in her statement--thank
you--over the past century--and this was a good statement by
the way, by Ms. Germann--over the past century a cultural fire
exclusion unfortunately removed the natural role of fire from
the public consciousness, when combined with a reduced level of
forest management in many areas of the country, fire exclusion
led to the buildup of forest fuels to unprecedented levels.
Despite our attempts to manage away wildfire, many of our
forests are more fire prone than ever. And that is the truth.
And with that, I yield back.
Mr. Shimkus. The gentleman yields back his time. The chair
now recognizes the gentleman from California, Mr. Peters for 5
minutes.
Mr. Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My constituents in San
Diego are acutely aware of these issues. I do think it was
progress to do the fire fix. I worked really hard on that to
make sure that we weren't spending prevention money fighting
fires because it just makes it harder to do. You are never
going to catch up.
Mr. O'Mara, I have two questions for you, though.
Specifically on the Clean Air Act in your testimony, you noted
the strange thing where, in terms of calculating your
compliance, whether you are in attainment of the National
Ambient Air Quality Standards, you are penalized for prescribed
burns, but not necessarily for natural burns that happened as a
result of not taking care of things. You suggest that EPA can
take care of this themselves. Is that not something Congress
has to do? Tell me why EPA can change that?
Mr. O'Mara. Yes, if you go back to the record--the Clean
Air Act amendment to 1990, this anthropogenic versus natural
kind of distinction isn't as clear-cut as you might think. It
has been an administrative practice, and the challenges that
seems to build your prescribed burn and your State
implementation plan and basically account for it, a wildfire
you have to--it is excluded. You had to get an exemption,
because it is kind of considered natural. The challenges--I was
in Delaware at the time we were trying to prescribe burns,
Delaware has so many challenges being downwind, pollution from
coal plants out in the Midwest, there is nowhere to put it in a
ship. You have to find a different place in some of those
sources to offset. And so it becomes a big burden, so you end
up not doing the very thing that would help protect you long-
term because of the potential penalty.
Mr. Peters. So you think that that can be addressed at an
administrative level?
Mr. O'Mara. I believe so.
Mr. Peters. One other question for you, I like what you
did, which was sort of threw out your notes, so I will throw
out my notes a little bit and ask you if you were in charge of
allocating money for fire, where would you put it first? What
would be, you think the highest priority for new fire money?
Mr. O'Mara. There are great collaborative plans that have
been on the books for years that don't have the resources to
get on the ground. I think I would prioritize on the interface
projects that have the potential of loss of human life. But I
would pour money into mitigation, I would pour money into
prescribed burns. I would pour money into the collaborative
plans that already have buy-in among communities, because they
are going to move faster through the process. But we need to
move from a couple acres a year to tens of millions of acres a
year. We don't have the capacity at this point. The Forest
Service has been, through sequester, their resources were taken
down so far in addition to not having the money because of the
fire borrowing issue. We have got to rebuild fire capacity in
this country at both the Federal and State level.
Mr. Peters. The collaborative plans you are talking about
are regional collaborative plans?
Mr. O'Mara. The regional level, yes.
Mr. Peters. And what sort of management reforms would you
like to see enacted, management reforms? I have to confess, I
hear a lot of discussion back and forth. It sounds like
disagreement, but never quite understand, kind of, what is it
that we are fighting over?
Mr. O'Mara. Look, I think there are places where you could
have more efficient processes. There are things where maybe not
having to go through the same level of review for individual
parts of project if you actually do the analysis at the
landscape level. We layered on so many parts of the process.
Mr. Peters. How do I write that down? How do I write that
down from here? What does that mean?
Mr. O'Mara. There are ways to do it. I mean, there is some
language that Senator Cantwell was working on around Ponderosa
pine, basically trying to say, Look, if it fits this kind of
landscape project, we will have kind of one analysis, one
environmental impact review as opposed to having them do every
individual discrete component.
So there are some things we can do at the landscape level.
Some of that could be done administratively. And if the Forest
Service has predictable resources to be able to do that kind of
planning, but a lot of these forest plans are 20, 30, and 40
years old. It means we are updating project plans, we are not
looking at the landscape level. We would love to work with you
on that, because I think that could be bipartisan. I don't
think that would be a controversial issue.
Mr. Peters. Obviously, I am particularly interested in the
urban forest interface. And I am concerned about the fact that
it is not even October and we have already had fire season, we
are not even into October. So we are getting ready for what we
hear from our local firefighters is as bad a condition or worse
than 2003 and 2007, which were the fires that cost San Diego
County a lot of property, and money, and damage. So we are very
interested in taking you up on that and look forward to talking
to you.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Walden [presiding]. The gentleman yields back. The
chair recognizes the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Johnson. Thanks
for joining us. You are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and thanks for holding
this hearing today.
While many of our witnesses are from western States, these
issues are certainly relevant to where I live there in Ohio. I
have a significant portion of the Wayne National Forest within
my district which will, from time to time, carry out prescribed
burns. The Wayne is a patchwork of public and private lands. So
these burns are meant to protect human property and reduce
potential damages from wildfire, but they can also encourage
the growth of plant life, and help ensure oaks, for example,
remain prevalent within the forest.
So while we have heard about the benefits of these
practices, prescribed burns today, whether that is air quality,
safety, et cetera, I would like to discuss the planning that is
undertaken before a burn happens. It is crucial that many
factors are considered before conducting a burn, such as
temperature, humidity, atmosphere stability, wind direction and
speed, as well as smoke dispersion.
So a question for either Ms. Germann or Mr. Boggus, or
both, along with other resource constraints and other issues, I
am sure these factors that I just listed inhibit the ability to
accomplish all that is needed to be accomplished over the
course of a month or a year. So how do you balance the factors
in planning with the need to efficiently manage healthy
forests?
Mr. Boggus. You mentioned it already that is planning, you
have got to look out. We have a meteorologist on staff because
of the very conditions you are talking about. And we have an
urbanizing State. I know Montana has 1 million folks, we have
28 million; in Ohio, the same way, a very populated State. You
have to take those into consideration. We have 94 percent
privately owned. So we don't have the luxury of--if a fire
starts, we have got to get on it, and we suppress them all
because there are human lives and property, and improved
property at stake. And so you have got to plan that. And
because of that, you have got to have folks that are dedicated
to, we call them predictive services. So they are telling us
days and weeks ahead what the weather is going to look like,
when is it going to be right,
And so you have these plans written way ahead of time. And
you know this is the time, this is the window that this
particular piece of land will burn. So then you have Good
Neighbor Authority on Federal lands that you work with those,
with our partners there. And so, we have got those agreements
done well in advance. So you are not like, Oh, my gosh, it is a
good day to burn, and you go out and burn. So the planning is
crucial.
Mr. Johnson. Sure. Ms. Germann, do you have anything to
add?
Ms. Germann. Certainly. I think one of the challenges we
were talking about before this hearing is the social license
that you have with this. And something that we constantly face,
our Federal partners, we as State agencies face when we are
planning prescribed burning, the communication piece, so
educating the public, getting them to understand the benefits
of that.
In the State of Montana, we burn, on average, about 30,000
or 40,000 acres of forested land per year, prescribed burning.
We need to do about 10 times that, from an ecological
perspective, to really have an impact on fuels reduction. And
one of the things that we find the most challenging is getting
the public buy in. So I think in addition to all the planning
is the communication piece of that that we need to constantly
be doing better.
Mr. Johnson. Gotcha. Well, along those same lines, how do
you choose what section of forest to address next, particularly
if you can't treat every section that needs to be treated? You
said you are doing 10, or you are doing 45,000, you need to do
10 times that many. How do you decide which 45,000 acre lot to
do.
Ms. Germann. So there is a number of different filters. And
I want to clarify that in the State of Montana, we don't just
put prescribed burning on the ground, we have to do active
mechanical fields reduction before we do that, because our
fields are at such unprecedented levels. We use a number of
different things statewide, and I will talk about our forest
action plan that we are going to be undertaking. What we did do
in the State of Montana is our governor did identify 5 million
acres of priority treatment, and that was on Forest Service
land, under the authority of the 2014 farm bill.
So we match that along with high severity areas, identified
by community wildfire protection plans. We use collaborative
groups to really help identify where we need to be focusing our
treatment. A lot of that is driven by forest pests, insects and
disease occurrence, fuel loading, wildfire hazard. We have a
lot of that data, and that is where we typically plan our
priority treatments.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman yields back. The chair recognizes
the gentleman from California, Mr. McNerney, for 5 minutes.
Mr. McNerney. Well, I thank the chairman and ranking
member. It feels kind of strange, this morning we were talking
about hurricanes, and now we are talking about wildfires. But
both of those have some connection to climate impact, so this
has to be a holistic discussion.
Now, it seems to me the difficulty is managing forests to
prevent and minimize damage, but also protecting health and
safety. On the other hand, is it necessary, or will it be
necessary at all to prevent--to manage development, so that we
don't put people and property at risk at these high risk areas.
So my question was sort of a general one for whoever wants to
answer: How should we be thinking more holistically about
forest fires and management?
Mr. Baertschiger. I would like to respond to that. In your
State, which I have been down many times fighting fire, has
that Mediterranean climate, and your fuels cure much earlier in
the season, and they stayed cured much longer, and then you
have the Santa Ana wind event in the southern California. So
dispensable space around houses and evacuation routes need to
be a lot more thought through because fire in your State burns
very quickly. As a firefighter, we say in Oregon, sometimes you
can't run fast enough. In California, you can't drive fast
enough. So I think that is something you need to take into
consideration as you build your communities and expand them
into what we call the urban interface, that those conditions
are really taken into consideration, defensible space and
evacuation routes.
Mr. McNerney. Well, I would like to direct this toward Ms.
Germann. How are you working with communities to manage
building in these high risk areas?
Ms. Germann. In Montana and some research just came out
from one of our groups out of Bozeman that showed that a
tremendous amount of money is being spent in urban interface in
suppressing fires. And I will say, in Montana, we are in the
infancy of talking about this from a land use planning
perspective. But what we do is DNRC, we are really trying to
interface with the local government to help them organize
around the tenets of the cohesive strategy. Talk to them about
fire-adapted communities, the stuff that we are experts at, at
forest management, really helping local governments do that
treatment in and around homes; and educate people on the risk
of living in the wild land, but urban interface. But from a
planning perspective, it is really pretty much in its infancy
in the State of Montana.
Mr. McNerney. So do you feel the local communities are
responsive to your advice and input?
Ms. Germann. Certainly, absolutely. We pride ourselves in
really excellent relationships with local governments. We have
a local government forest adviser who is engaging with county
commissioners and volunteer Fire Departments on engaging with
the Forest Service, which is the predominant landowner, forest
landowner around the communities about suppression efforts,
about forest fuels reduction, and certainly, we help deliver a
lot of that education to private landowners within our
communities.
Mr. McNerney. Mr. O'Mara, is there a lack of funding that
we can address at the Federal level to improve how we as a
nation handle wildfire management?
Mr. O'Mara. Yes. I think it is amazing what the Congress
did in the last session, fixing the fire borrowing practice; it
is still an underinvestment. I can say all Americans are
Libertarians until they need help. We have to figure out a way
to monetize some of these costs. They are putting people in
harm's way, they are putting firefighters in harm's way. It is
the same thing in flood insurance, it is the same thing. We are
basically paying people to be in more risky areas. I think we
are billions of dollars short in terms of the amount of money
that is used toward active restoration annually, that is the
kind of level of funding that we are going to need, because
Chairman McKinley and I have gone back and forth on many
issues. He is exactly right. I want to say when he is not here.
Because we are not talking the east coast forest enough. The
east coast forests and the Great Lakes forests have equal
threats, they are just a couple of years behind in terms of the
temperature patterns.
Mr. McNerney. Well, I think one of the big controversies or
areas of disagreement is whether we should use suppression or
management. From the science that I have seen, the fires can be
managed better, and it gives the forest a better chance to
recuperate and create natural fire breaks and natural water
sheds and so on. So I wouldn't rush to one or the other. But I
would lean toward management, in my opinion. Thank you, I yield
back.
Mr. Walden. The gentleman yields back, I want to thank our
panelists for being here, we will send Mr. McKinley a video of
your comments where you agree with him. I don't know how that
is going to play out. But we do appreciate it. Our work is
better informed by your participation, I know some of you,
including the Senator, have traveled great distances, and we
thank you for doing that.
Seeing there are no further members to ask questions for
the first panel, I would like to thank all of our witnesses for
being here today. Before we conclude I would like to ask
unanimous consent to submit the following documents for the
record: Two academic reports entitled Prescribed Fire in North
American Forest and Woodlands, and Prescribed Fire Policy,
Barriers, and Opportunities; and document from the National
Academy of Sciences, called, The Impact of Anthropogenic
Climate Change on Wildfire Across the Western U.S. Forests; an
article from GeoHealth, Future Fire Impacts on Smoke
Concentrations, Visibility and Health in the Contiguous United
States; Washington Post editorial board, We Won't Stop
California's Wildfires if We Don't Talk About Climate Change;
New York Times article, Trump Inaccurately Claims California is
Wasting Waters as Fires Burn; the Scientific American article
Fuels by Climate Change Wildfires Erode Air Quality Gains; and
a document from the National Wildlife Federation, Mega Fires.
And in pursuant to committee rules, I remind members they
have 10 business days to submit additional questions for the
record. I ask that our witnesses respond to those questions
within 10 business days upon receipt of those questions. And so
again, thank you all for participating in this very important
hearing, and without objection, this subcommittee is adjourned.
[The information appears at the conclusion of the hearing.]
[Whereupon, at 3:15 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
[Material submitted for inclusion in the record follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
[all]
| MEMBERNAME | BIOGUIDEID | GPOID | CHAMBER | PARTY | ROLE | STATE | CONGRESS | AUTHORITYID |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rush, Bobby L. | R000515 | 7921 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | IL | 115 | 1003 |
| Upton, Fred | U000031 | 7991 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | MI | 115 | 1177 |
| DeGette, Diana | D000197 | 7859 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | CO | 115 | 1479 |
| Shimkus, John | S000364 | 7939 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | IL | 115 | 1527 |
| Schakowsky, Janice D. | S001145 | 7929 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | IL | 115 | 1588 |
| Walden, Greg | W000791 | 8115 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | OR | 115 | 1596 |
| Murphy, Tim | M001151 | 8723 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | PA | 115 | 1744 |
| Blackburn, Marsha | B001243 | 8154 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | TN | 115 | 1748 |
| Burgess, Michael C. | B001248 | 8182 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | TX | 115 | 1751 |
| McMorris Rodgers, Cathy | M001159 | 8209 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | WA | 115 | 1809 |
| Matsui, Doris O. | M001163 | 7810 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | CA | 115 | 1814 |
| McNerney, Jerry | M001166 | 7816 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | CA | 115 | 1832 |
| Bilirakis, Gus M. | B001257 | 7881 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | FL | 115 | 1838 |
| Castor, Kathy | C001066 | 7883 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | FL | 115 | 1839 |
| Loebsack, David | L000565 | 7915 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | IA | 115 | 1846 |
| Sarbanes, John P. | S001168 | 7978 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | MD | 115 | 1854 |
| Walberg, Tim | W000798 | 7992 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | MI | 115 | 1855 |
| Clarke, Yvette D. | C001067 | 8072 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | NY | 115 | 1864 |
| Welch, Peter | W000800 | 8204 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | VT | 115 | 1879 |
| Latta, Robert E. | L000566 | 8095 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | OH | 115 | 1885 |
| Scalise, Steve | S001176 | 7959 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | LA | 115 | 1892 |
| Guthrie, Brett | G000558 | 7954 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | KY | 115 | 1922 |
| Harper, Gregg | H001045 | 8021 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | MS | 115 | 1933 |
| Lance, Leonard | L000567 | 8049 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | NJ | 115 | 1936 |
| Lujan, Ben Ray | L000570 | 8058 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | NM | 115 | 1939 |
| Tonko, Paul | T000469 | 8082 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | NY | 115 | 1942 |
| Schrader, Kurt | S001180 | 8118 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | OR | 115 | 1950 |
| Olson, Pete | O000168 | 8178 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | TX | 115 | 1955 |
| Kinzinger, Adam | K000378 | 7931 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | IL | 115 | 2014 |
| Bucshon, Larry | B001275 | 7947 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | IN | 115 | 2018 |
| Long, Billy | L000576 | 8015 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | MO | 115 | 2033 |
| Johnson, Bill | J000292 | 8096 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | OH | 115 | 2046 |
| Duncan, Jeff | D000615 | 8143 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | SC | 115 | 2057 |
| Flores, Bill | F000461 | 8173 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | TX | 115 | 2065 |
| McKinley, David B. | M001180 | 8222 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | WV | 115 | 2074 |
| Cardenas, Tony | C001097 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | CA | 115 | 2107 | |
| Ruiz, Raul | R000599 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | CA | 115 | 2109 | |
| Peters, Scott H. | P000608 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | CA | 115 | 2113 | |
| Brooks, Susan W. | B001284 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | IN | 115 | 2129 | |
| Hudson, Richard | H001067 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | NC | 115 | 2140 | |
| Cramer, Kevin | C001096 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | ND | 115 | 2144 | |
| Collins, Chris | C001092 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | NY | 115 | 2151 | |
| Mullin, Markwayne | M001190 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | OK | 115 | 2156 | |
| Walters, Mimi | W000820 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | CA | 115 | 2232 | |
| Dingell, Debbie | D000624 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | MI | 115 | 2251 | |
| Costello, Ryan A. | C001106 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | PA | 115 | 2266 | |
| Doyle, Michael F. | D000482 | 8132 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | PA | 115 | 316 |
| Engel, Eliot L. | E000179 | 8078 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | NY | 115 | 344 |
| Eshoo, Anna G. | E000215 | 7819 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | CA | 115 | 355 |
| Green, Gene | G000410 | 8185 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | TX | 115 | 462 |
| Barton, Joe | B000213 | 8162 | H | R | COMMMEMBER | TX | 115 | 62 |
| Pallone, Frank, Jr. | P000034 | 8048 | H | D | COMMMEMBER | NJ | 115 | 887 |
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