On the recordAugust 4, 2015
as the Senate prepares for the month of August in our home States, I want to discuss tonight what I believe to be an urgent issue: The West is on fire. There is a really serious prospect that my part of the country is going to get hit by what I call the terrible trifecta--drought, high temperatures, and enormous fuel load on the forest floor. When you couple that with a lightning strike--which is not exactly a rarity in my part of the world--all of a sudden you can have on your hands an inferno. The fires are getting bigger, they are lasting longer, and they are doing more damage. Senators here on both sides of the aisle--Democrats and Republicans-- have come to realize that our system for fighting fire is a broken, dysfunctional mess. What happens is, historically, prevention gets short shrift. The agencies can't do enough thinning; they can't do enough of the preventive work to reduce the fuel load on the forest floor. Then you have one of those lightning strikes, and all of a sudden there is a huge fire because the fuel buildup is so great on the forest floor. The agencies then run out of money putting these fires out because they are getting bigger, and they are lasting longer. The problem just keeps getting worse because the agencies then have to rob the prevention fund in order to fight these big fires.…
