On the recordOctober 4, 2000
I mentioned that nearly 1.2 million acres of Federal land burned in my State this year, beautiful forested land that was in trouble environmentally, and when Mother Nature came along and struck with her violence, it all went up in smoke. There is a lot of money in this bill to begin to deal with those problems, a great deal of money in this bill to pay off the fire expenditures that are natural to do so. A lot of this money is to pay back the expenses that were incurred this year, the millions and millions of dollars spent each day for nearly 60 days across this country during the peak of the fire season when the skies of Idaho were gray to black, as it was true in other States across this Nation.
Source
govinfo.gov
