Wildfires

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, because of raging fires in my home State of Oregon, many communities in my home State have been reduced to ashes. A number of others are experiencing what is known as the ice box effect, where, in effect, smoke blocks out the Sun, and it gets quite cool. Virtually all of Oregon is now choking on smoke--that is whether you are inside or outside at this point. Countless thousands of Oregonians are under evacuation orders. Many are quite literally fleeing for their lives and abandoning their homes as the flames approach.

When I was home this weekend, I initially thought that a number of my communities had been hit by a wrecking ball. That really understates the situation because usually when you get hit by a wrecking ball, there is a little bit left that is not just ashes. Now thousands of people in my State have lost their homes. They have lost their businesses. They have lost lifelong memories.

I brought a flag to a family who lost in one of the fires the service flag of a loved one that they had cherished, and it just struck me that it is those kinds of memories, and losing them, that are as painful in many instances as losing houses and businesses.

The death toll has been rising. Others are still missing and unaccounted for.

Amid all the panic and loss, one of the aspects that left me, as I came back to Washington, with a bit of hope is that we lost so much, but we didn't lose our spirit. We didn't lose what we call the Oregon Way--neighbor helping neighbor, volunteers helping evacuees get food and water and shelter. Everybody steps up when a crisis arrives; nobody cares a whit about anybody's politics.

I have come to the floor today with a specific purpose, and that is to ask the Senate to match the same standard I saw of volunteers, neighbors, and Oregonians helping Oregonians this weekend, to show the same kind of can-do spirit.

The Presiding Officer of the Senate is new to this body. He has a State with a lot of rural terrain. I am going to be asking him and every Member of the Senate, all 100 of us, to say: Let's make today the day when the Senate chose to finally get serious about fire that has harmed so many these last few weeks. Let's make this the day when the Senate chose to take a dilapidated and out-of-date fire policy and replace it with a modern strategy for the real, on-the-ground conditions that have caused fires to magnify the pain that is being felt by millions today.

The reason I am making this request of the Senate--that the Senate replace the way forest policy has been made in the past--is that those past processes--and, as my colleague already knows since he has been here now, the Senate moves often with glacially slow Senate processes, and those processes are now being totally overwhelmed by the massive infernos that are blanketing our communities and blanketing the West with smoke that is literally up to our eyeballs. The Presiding Officer in the Senate is a tall fellow. I am 6 feet 4 inches. That is what I felt this weekend. I and everybody else had smoke up to our eyeballs.

The process the Senate has for dealing with these new kinds of forest calamities--and there is no other way to describe it--those old procedures lack the urgency, lack the speed, lack, frankly, the resolute discipline for the incredibly big job that needs to be done and done quickly.

So today I want to begin by offering three policies that I believe could be supported by every Senator, Democrats and Republicans. The first is that Congress should pass a 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps Act. I have actually seen press in Missouri calling for this kind of approach, where young people are involved, securing jobs where they pay a living wage, and they can go in and shore up these communities threatened by fire.

I want to emphasize that, having served on the Energy Committee now for several years, having authored the two major bills in the forestry area--the bill with Senator Crapo--so we no longer waste so much money not budgeting for fire, brought about the end of fire borrowing so the big fires get taken care of in the disaster fund--don't shortchange prevention--and then secure rural schools, which I think is also a policy that benefits people all over the country in rural forested areas.

I will just offer the first. All over America, there are millions of acres of overstocked timber stands. They are hazardous fuels. It is urgent that we go in there, and we can use these hard-working young people to clean out those overstocked stands and reduce the risk of fire. Fire is inevitable. I know of no bill--none--that can abolish fire. The question is, Can we take concrete steps to reduce the suffering and the damage of these big fires?

(Ms. ERNST assumed the Chair.)

I just gave one example of what the 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps could do. In my home State, there are more than 2 million acres backlogged in terms of these hazardous fuels that need to be reduced. You could have the 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps--thousands of young people--going into every State and taking action to reduce these risks. There are a lot of other things that could be done by the 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps.

I learned this weekend that we are going to need to deploy new cell phone connectivity because a lot of people have lost those connections. In fact, one of the challenges in trying to determine how many people we have lost is that we believe when the fires first hit, a lot of people went to a friend's house and then the friend is not able to communicate because they lost cell phone connectivity.

This is about having young people work on communications, having them clean out hazardous fuels, and having them work on stabilizing soils to prevent massive flooding, because, make no mistake about it, all over the West--in Oregon, Washington, and California--we are going to need those soil stabilization projects to prevent massive flooding this spring. As sure as the night follows the day, it will be a problem.

Using the 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps, we can deploy folks into the forest and into our wildland-urban areas, where there is a connection--an interface--because we have a lot of fires in those areas, and the Civilian Conservation Corps can reduce hazardous fuels, prevent catastrophic fires, and they can do it on a grand scale.

An ideal part of it and one of the reasons I think this will appeal to Democrats and Republicans is there doesn't have to be a fight over carrying out our nation's environmental laws. As I mentioned, in Oregon alone, there was already a backlog of more than 2 million acres that need to be treated. Without those treatments, a lightning strike or a carelessly dropped match can start yet another inferno. Just picture that. After everything that we had over the last few days, you have all of these hazardous fuels built up and you have a lightning strike or a carelessly dropped match and, all of a sudden, you have ripped through thousands of other acres in the blink of an eye.

Oregon's forests and the forests of the West badly need this care and investment. It would really be an updated version of one of the most popular programs the government has ever pursued, that came out of the New Deal, and it would be a huge economic boost to rural communities--I see the Presiding Officer from the State of Iowa--rural communities that feel like government has left them behind.

That is my first proposal--the first of three--that I believe can help us come together as a Senate to reduce the devastating toll of these fires that are not your grandfather's fires. They are bigger and they are hotter and they are more powerful. We can do it together.

The second area that I want to see the Senate focus on is addressing that the fires mean a lot more than spending all your money on just putting big fires out. Forest science has shown that wildfires are a part of the natural life cycle of certain parts of the Nation. If all you do is focus on putting out fires all the time, you disrupt the cycle and that can lead to bigger fires down the road.

But America no longer gets just manageable natural fires. Instead, we get these huge infernos like the ones we have in Oregon, fires that are hot enough to melt a car and sterilize the soil. I ask the Presiding Officer to imagine how hot it has to be to melt a car.

There is a need for another tool to help reduce the devastating effect of these great fires. It is supported by scientists who have been looking at the various tools for dealing with these horrors-- Democrats, Republicans--and it basically involves a prescribed fire that can be done safely in the off-seasons, say, in the winter months.

During those months, there is less risk of spread. You can limit the smoke. Civilian Conservation Corps workers working with the scientists at the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Oregon Department of Forestry, collaboratives, and our counties can carefully target these prescribed fires during the off-season and help prevent catastrophic fires in the summer and the fall by using the concept to clean out the dead and dying undergrowth.

Here is the essence of my second proposition. If you use prescribed fire to burn a little when it is safe in th off-season, you can save a whole lot later on by preventing catastrophe during those hotter months of summer and fall.

I have a bill that I have been developing with the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. I would say to my colleagues that this approach, like the 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps, will be ready for cosponsors later this week. I am going to be going to all of my colleagues to ask for support for this second commonsense approach to catastrophe avoidance.

The third proposal brings it all together. Congress must finally kick its aversion to making long-term budget investments in treatment and fire prevention. Managing our forests requires an investment that we essentially look to beyond the next 36 hours. Managing our forests for wildfire resilience needs to be approached as a longer term proposition, one that can make our communities safer while generating jobs--timber for mills, improving recreation opportunities. And yet this has been an investment the Senate has been unwilling to spend.

Clearly, not enough has been done to deal with fire prevention. The fact that the Congress has constantly been shorting fire prevention is contributing to what is being seen in Oregon and throughout the West right now. Shorting fire prevention is the wrong way to go, and this item, No. 3, is literally a matter of life and death.

Somehow, this Senate can produce hundreds of billions of dollars for tax breaks for special interests. There are outrageous, indefensible subsidies for fossil fuels that compound the climate crisis.

Senator Crapo and I--my colleague who sits just a few feet away, the Republican of Idaho--worked for years in a bipartisan way to end what is called ``fire borrowing.'' This is actually the first year when our bill has gone into effect. It got to the point where we needed over 300 citizens' groups to pass this bill because so often the big fires were fought with prevention money--money borrowed from the prevention accounts, and then the fire just got worst.

Senator Crapo and I said that is foolish, even by Washington, DC, standards. We were able to get a special fund created where the big fires would be fought from the disaster fund. But still, even with the beginning that Senator Crapo and I have made on a bipartisan basis, the budget for fire preparedness and prevention is still so woefully short. More has to be done to limit the damage from staggeringly powerful forest fires, and one of the best ways to do it is to start building up that prevention fund that Senator Crapo and I started here in the U.S. Senate.

We laid the foundation, but it is clearly not enough. I checked, actually, a couple of days ago. There are $3 billion now in the fund for fire suppression. We are sure going to need that because we have scores of fires still burning in Oregon, but we are going to need to build up preventive funds. And still, prevention as of today, September of 2020, is woefully underfunded.

The Forest Service has the technical tools it needs to improve forest health and to reduce the risk of fire, but, as I mentioned, there is a 2 million-acre backlog just in Oregon. Multiply that all over the West or all over the country where there are forests that are under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government and it is pretty clear that America has to decide it is urgent business to build up the budget for fire prevention.

By allowing the fire prevention backlog I have described to build, Congress is just racking up more debt--dangerous debt--and the devastation and the smoke in Oregon and across the West today is the debt coming due.

For those of us in the West who fear it is going to be impossible to pay the enormous bill that we have been handed through a combination of lousy forestry science and a disinterest in real policies that reduce climate change, we know the job is going to be hard, but we can and must do it by coming together like I saw Oregonians do just this last weekend.

Before I wrap up, I want to mention that there sure have been some misguided priorities on all sides of the political spectrum. On one side, some of the timber industry skipped past active management to pursue the golden calf of eliminating environmental laws. On the other side, misguided nonmanagement priorities beat back every attempt to manage our forests based on science. Now add to that the ridiculous new lies and delusions you are seeing online about the causes of these fires, and you have a recipe for distraction as to how the Senate must move forward.

Just today, while visiting California, the President was asked about climate change and fires. He said: No problem. The President said, ``It'll start getting cooler,'' and then he blamed ``explosive trees.'' Sending that kind of nonsense across the land is cold comfort to the families who are mourning the loved ones they have lost in the fires or the thousands of Oregonians who barely made it out before their homes and businesses went up in flames.

The Senate has an obligation to act because around this country--and it is not just in my State but across the West--big-hearted neighbors, animal lovers, county employees, city administrators, local U-Haul businesses, teachers, nurses, and retirees--all of them--are stepping up and pitching in. They are bringing food and clothes and towels, and they are helping with mental health services.

Before I wrap up, I particularly want to thank the incredible firefighters who are working on hardly any sleep, and I thank the first responders, the police and others who are doing so much. One issue they are helping with is cell phones and service. My staff and others in the delegation have been working with these folks.

I see my friend from Virginia, who knows a lot about what it takes to maintain communications networks, and that is what we are working on this afternoon.

One problem that has come up is networks and equipment burn. There is a major strain on the resources for the people on the frontlines who are fighting the inferno--for example, with the repeaters that can amplify a signal and keep our firefighters connected. I am hearing that this country doesn't have enough repeaters in stock to begin to address such a crisis that the West is experiencing. It is another example of what happens when, year after year, you ignore the urgent need for serious fire prevention.

Before I left Oregon, I told some friends that I was going to come back and try to bring the Senate together around fire prevention.

One said: Well, you are going to be Mr. Fire Prevention.

I said: No, that is not how it works. I would like to make this the Senate that is known for fire prevention and the Senate that said, between there and here, there are 100 U.S. Senators, and we have differences of opinion. Lord knows that this is the case. But I offered concrete proposals, 21st Century Conservation Corps-prescribed changes in the budget that Democrats and Republicans can come together on. The reason I say that is that we have already done it. That is how Senator Crapo and I ended fire borrowing.

I close with this: What I saw this weekend was heartbreaking-- thousands of families mourning unthinkable loss, trying to figure out how to move forward when their homes and their possessions had been reduced to ash. Yet, when you talk to them, they will tell you that they also know that the problem is not going to get better all by itself--I know there are Senators who want to debate this--and that is because the climate crisis is here, right now, today.

It is no longer a far-off hypothetical danger for Senators to debate in comfortably air-conditioned buildings. The American West--my State-- is on fire. Whole neighborhoods and whole communities are being reduced to ashes. Our air quality has had the dubious recognition over the last couple of days of being some of the worst in the world. The climate crisis is happening now to us and to our kids. America and the Senate ignore it at our peril.

I brought today three concrete proposals that I think make a serious contribution to reducing the pain and suffering that have been seen across Oregon and across the West over the last couple of days. I want this to be the day the Senate gets serious about fire prevention as part of a comprehensive effort to fight the climate crisis.

The ideas I have outlined--the three major proposals--ought to become law soon, and they ought to have bipartisan support. They are policies that will protect our communities and the families who live in them and that will protect jobs, protect homes, and protect businesses. They sure are a lot cheaper because they will prevent fires rather than force a bigger pricetag when we need to rebuild communities out of the ashes.

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