Jeff Bingaman: “let me mention one other aspect of this which I think is significant, and that is the Forest Service has a program…”

“let me mention one other aspect of this which I think is significant, and that is the Forest Service has a program called a Cooperative Fire Protection Program which they try to use to educate people who own homes in or near the forests and also to work with people who have private homes in our forests, that are private property, so the benefits of some of this clearing, some of this thinning we are talking about can also be realized by the people who have those homes, and those homes can be better protected as a result. One thing that became obvious to me as a result of the Los Alamos fire was that there had been a thinning that had taken place around the laboratory itself, around many of the structures of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; and because of that, because of that thinning activity, there was a dramatic reduction in the fire risk to those facilities.”