On the recordSeptember 26, 2018
It really is. Mr. Speaker, our watersheds, most of our water sources start--many of them start in national forests. They are certainly in forests, but a lot of national forests. And with wildfires, you create a situation where there is no stability in the soils. And so where these wonderful trout streams, streams that support life, support communities, support families with clean water, these wildfires, they basically caramelize that soil so that, essentially, the flash flooding, the runoffs, it puts all these solids within those streams, it creates turbidity, the solids, the nutrients that go in there. So the impact of wildfires, as the gentleman said, it is the land, it is the air and, quite frankly, it is the water, and that is why we have to do a better job of preventing these wildfires to start with.
