Joel Hefley: “the amendment before us moves $4 million from the wild horse and burro management line item of the Bureau of Land…”

“the amendment before us moves $4 million from the wild horse and burro management line item of the Bureau of Land Management budget to the wildland fire management line item of the U.S. Forest Service. In recent weeks, we have seen just how serious a problem fire is in the Rocky Mountain West. The recent fires in New Mexico resulted in the destruction of 400 residences, damaged two Indian pueblos and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and loss is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem is not confined in New Mexico. This week, two wildfires are burning houses and forced hundreds from their homes southwest of Denver and west of Loveland. I have headlines here from the papers just this week out there: ``Two fires destroy homes, force residents to flee. Hundreds flee Larimer County fire. Front Range fires rage,'' the headlines read. Three years ago, Dr. Thomas Veblen, a forest historian at the University of Colorado, stated that Rocky Mountain forests were due for a catastrophic fire event 3 years after the onset of a wet season. He was not talking about the kind of fires we see every year. He was talking about wildfires stretching the length of the Rockies from Wyoming to Colorado to New Mexico. At that time, some of us estimated that these catastrophic fires could occur within 3 to 5 years, and we would have what they call a ``millennial fire.'' Now we may be 1 or 2 years away.…”