Reinforcing Education Accountability in Development Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. President, I encourage folks to take a close look at this picture of a forest ablaze in Oregon. Right now, there are innumerable fires burning across our State. Some of them are called complexes--a fire complex. Maybe it is referred to as a single fire complex, but that means there may be 10 or 20 different fires within that area.
What we are seeing more and more with the changing climate, with climate disruption, is that we have lightning storms that sweep over our forests, will light up and create multiple fires at one time, and then, because the forest is so much drier, they burn fiercely.
Just last week, Mary and I were hoping to spend a couple days out on the Pacific Crest Trail. This is the trail that runs from Mexico to Canada, and we were planning to go down to the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument and experience some of that, but we couldn't because of the intense smoke from fires burning.
Fires in the middle of the State had shut down some of the Pacific Crest Trail near Jefferson, so we decided to go up to the northern end of the trail, the trail that plunges into the Columbia River at a place called Bridge of the Gods, Cascade Locks, and walk south. The plan was to go about 18 miles or so and then pick up the Eagle Creek Trail and come right back through to where we had started. But posted at the start of the Pacific Crest Trail was that the Eagle Creek Trail had been closed and that the loop was shut down due to the Indian Springs fire.
Well, we decided, OK, we can still at least do the first half and maybe continue walking on through to Lolo Pass on Mount Hood and then get a ride and come back around to where we were. The point is that all across Oregon, there were either blazes or smoke from blazes.
Oregon State is a plain, and it is not the only State. California, Washington, Montana, and parts of Idaho are burning up, and it is getting worse each year.
As we were considering how we were going to progress, we had to bypass a campground at Wahtum Lake because it was shut down. We had to camp on the side of a ridge that was just on the edge of the fire containment area. So we pitched our tent on a steep slope that had a little rock outcropping and a little bit of flat ground, basically about 3 feet by 6 feet. We settled down after a long day of hiking. We were absolutely exhausted.
About 1 in the morning, I woke up and I got a strong whiff of smoke.
So I leapt out of the tent, and down below us on the slope last week was this glow. Immediately I was concerned that fire had leapt into the valley below us, and you do not want to be on a steep slope upstream from a fire, especially when that is the direction the wind is blowing--as it was.
I said to Mary: Wake up. Get out of the tent. We may have to make a run for it. And she jumped up.
The glow just stayed the same, and it turned out it wasn't a fire. It turned out that it was a landslide, and the Moon was illuminating that landslide and creating that glow on the slope below us. But we were terrified. You can imagine, if you are hiking through Oregon and suddenly there is a forest fire on the slope below you, you are going to run like crazy.
Well, there were a bunch of folks who were on that Eagle Creek Trail that I referred to, and they were on a section very near the Columbia gorge--that section that hadn't been shut down. They were walking south, but they couldn't go on through the Tunnel Falls area. They could go only a few miles in. But a couple of teenagers went up that trail and started throwing firecrackers, fireworks off the edge of a cliff, and it set the gorge on fire on that Eagle Creek Trail.
You can see how the Cascade Mountains plunge down to the Columbia River, and you can see here how that Eagle Creek Trail was lit up.
There were 140 hikers trapped by this fire and the fire that Mary and I were dodging--the Indian Springs fire--and they had to retreat to the section of trail that actually goes through a tunnel that is drilled through the basalt. It has a waterfall next to it, and they were dropped supplies overnight before they could be brought out and escape this fire. This fire was raging so much, it had leapt the river--the Columbia River, the largest river by river flow volume in the United States of America. It had leapt this river to the State of Washington.
These are just two of the fires of the many that are burning across the State of Oregon. There is also the Chetco Bar fire, which is even larger than the Eagle Creek fire. The Chetco Bar fire has continued and now has burned 176,000 acres of Douglas fir and oak and manzanita brush fields. There are 1,700 people working to contain this fire right now and, as of yesterday, it was just 5 percent contained. And, as of yesterday, the Eagle Creek Trail was just 5 percent contained.
Fires are a big problem that is just getting bigger. There are 65 large fires burning across the United States; 19 of those are in Oregon. You can see how they are spaced out here. Both the Indian Springs fire and the Eagle Creek fire that I referred to are here, and you can see its position and how it leapt across the Columbia River into Washington State.
There are more in Washington State and more in California and Idaho and Montana going this way. Nineteen of those 65 big fires are represented right here. Another 23 are in nearby Montana. Over the last decade, we have seen an average of about 50,000 forest fires in America each year, with an average of about 5\½\ million acres being burned. This year, we are already over 8 million acres, with a lot more acreage that will be burned in the weeks ahead. In Oregon, we have seen an average of about 493,000 acres a year burn. We are over 550,000 acres now--and counting.
So what happens during these intense fire years? What happens is we run out of money to fight these fires, and then we engage something called fire borrowing. There is no FEMA for fires--no Federal Emergency Management Agency for fires. So the Forest Service says: Well, we must fight these fires. I can tell you that a tremendous number of helicopters and planes and ground crews are involved in this effort. It is very expensive to fight them.
We run out of money, and the Forest Service has to borrow from other accounts--from the hazardous fuels fund, which tries to reduce the amount of fuels that will create fires on the front end, so we decrease our effort on the front end in order to fight the fires on the back end.
Forest management funds, forest restoration funds, forest conservation funds, road maintenance funds, and funds that are designed to prepare for future timber sales--all of those are borrowed from. So I have been pushing, I have been fighting for us to get the funds now, right now, to make sure we don't engage in fire borrowing to have to address this challenge, and we have a compromise that has been worked out that is going to help. In the continuing resolution, the funds are based not on the amount the administration wanted but on the fiscal year 2017 level that included $400 million of buffer funds. One-quarter of what was authorized in fiscal year 2017 is now going to be available--and available retroactively--so that it can be used and spent in September, which is still in fiscal year 2017, so in immediate moments we will not have to engage in fire borrowing. That is a victory. I thank the cochairs of the Appropriations Committee for working so hard to help us get this provision that will stop the fire borrowing problem in the short term. But in the near future, after we are into fiscal year 2018--into October--we will be short funds that were spent for fiscal year 2017, so that will be a challenge we will have to continue to address in the year to come.
We are all thinking a lot about Harvey and its impact on Houston and Texas, and we are all worried about Irma and the fact that it is hitting Puerto Rico, and it is aimed for Florida. But let's not forget the fires burning all over the United States at an unprecedented rate, which we need to make sure we address as well.
Under this provision I just mentioned--this compromise that will be helpful in the short term--the Office of Management and Budget has control, and we need to make sure they actually exercise that control and release those funds, so we will have to keep pushing.
I see my colleague is here. I do want to talk a little bit about fisheries, but I will defer to him if my colleague from Vermont would like to speak.
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Mr. President, so far this year, the Secretary of Commerce has declared nine disasters for fisheries, and another
disaster assistance request is pending in Southern Oregon and in Northern California. When these fisheries close, our fishermen and their families are in deep trouble. Their expenses don't disappear--the mortgages on their vessels, their mooring fees, their maintenance. Of course, they have to continue to be able to pay their basic living expenses. So when they are told they have to stay in port because a fishery is closed because of a fishing disaster, then, it is an enormous challenge to which we need to help to respond. It is not just for the fishermen themselves, but for the entire community--the recreational anglers, as well as the commercial fishermen, the processors, the gear stores, the boat repair facilities, and the tourism. All of it is impacted.
So let us not forget that we have nine declared disasters for fisheries, and we should make sure we respond and assist these communities.
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