Oregon Wildfires

Floor Speech

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, at this moment in my home State of Oregon 500,000 acres are ablaze. Sometimes it is hard to get your hands around numbers, particularly large numbers, so I will give a sense of this. If you were to add up all of the fires in Oregon and if they were in one place, it would cover an area roughly 20 miles by 40 miles. That is an enormous section of a State to be aflame.

Because there are so many devastating fires at once, crews are coming from all over to help with all kinds of aircraft and all kinds of hotshot crews. They are doing all they can, but it is not just Oregon that has fires; other States have fires too. There are over 250,000 acres ablaze in Washington State to the north in a single fire. I believe it is the largest single fire in Washington State's history.

As a result of fires in Oregon and fires in Washington and other fires, we are draining our fire funds at an expansive rate, and thus we have a big problem: We are running out of funds to pay for fighting these fires.

Tonight we had before our Chamber an emergency supplemental bill to provide 615 million more dollars to fight fires this season across the United States of America. A procedural tactic was used to kill this bill. Quite frankly, that is enormously shortsighted.

Here is what has been happening in the past: The fires are being fought, and then the funds run out, and then the Forest Service has to pull the funds from every other department--from departments involving forest health, from departments providing efforts to prevent fires and create conditions in which they will not happen in the future. We are continuing a vicious cycle of robbing fire prevention and forest management funds to fight emergency fires, and that cycle will go forward now that we have failed to pass this emergency supplemental up front.

I will give a little flavor of what I am talking about across our State. We have the Ochoco complex east of Post, 10,000 acres aflame. The Logging Unit complex northwest of Warm Springs, 6,600 acres; the Kitten Canyon complex west of Vale, 23,000 acres; the Bridge 99 complex north of Sisters, 5,700 acres; the Hurricane Creek fire southwest of Joseph, 900 acres; we have the Buzzard complex in southeast Oregon, nearly 400,000 acres; the Reeves Creek complex southwest of Grants Pass, 200 acres; the China Cap fire east of La Grande, 200 acres--by the way, zero percent contained--the Black Rock fire east of Antelope, 36,000 acres; the Sniption fire north of Fossil, 12,000 acres; and the Bingham complex east of Marion Forks, 450 acres. We also have two more fires that have just arisen, and those are the Haystack complex, 1,700 acres, and the Salt Creek fire northwest of Medford 100 acres.

Here is the thing. We have the conditions for more fires to come--more lightning, a forecast of more hot weather, and we have incredibly dry timber on the floor of the forest.

This situation in which these fires are going to be fought--by pulling funds from every other part of the Forest Service--is unacceptable. It is not good stewardship of the complex operations that occur within the Interior Department and within the Forest Service.

Think about the need to plan the timber harvest to sustain the lumber industry. That is a complex process. It involves a lot of folks who have to go out and evaluate the forests and work it out so those timber sales can occur on schedule. All of that gets stopped when you have to rob the fund in order to pay for fighting these fires.

Let's think about the millions of acres of second-growth forest that are overgrown. It is very good for disease, it is very good for fires, and it needs to be thinned, but how do you plan for the thinning if you rob the funds to do so? The list goes on and on and on.

I am deeply disappointed and frustrated with what happened tonight, and I urge my colleagues to exercise a little thoughtfulness, a little wisdom, and a little stewardship regarding our national forest. The next time this comes up, let's pass it unanimously so we can provide the funds that are needed to fight this national emergency.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

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