Drought and Wildfires

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, this afternoon I wish to call attention to the severe drought and wildfires that are already burning in my home State of Oregon and across the West.

Earlier today, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, on which I serve, held a hearing on drought. There is no question that communities in many of our Western States are experiencing very uncertain times. Our farmers are concerned about water for their crops. Outdoorsmen and business owners fear low reservoir and river levels are going to ruin the summer season. Conservationists worry about a lack of cold water for fish habitats.

Drought and fire are a dangerous combination and create a trend continuing this year. Fire seasons have gotten drier. The fires have gotten hotter, and they have become far more expensive to fight. And severe drought is now compounding the crisis. We ought to make no mistake about what is going on in the West. The West is now bone dry, and the tragic fact is that this is the new normal for Oregon farmers and ranchers. Water is an increasingly scarce and precious resource.

Right now, every last square mile of Oregon is experiencing abnormally dry conditions, and almost 70 percent of my State is under severe drought. Fifteen of Oregon's 36 counties have declared drought emergencies or have been declared a drought emergency by the Governor. The unusually warm winter in my home State meant record low snowpack, which devastates summertime runoff, which is so important to Oregon's water supply.

Drought raises enormous issues for communities and State and Federal agencies. They have to find ways to cope while using less water. Authorities feel they are in a position, or are forced into a position, to have to make seemingly impossible choices about where to dedicate increasingly scarce resources. All of these rural communities have to face challenges that are heightened by drought--particularly the threat of wildfires.

Drought conditions mean that western forests and grasslands are especially likely to go up in flames. It means that more acres will burn, more people and more structures will be at risk, and more funds are going to be needed to put the fires out.

Fire season this year has started earlier than normal. In fact, I received a fire briefing at home this March. That is the earliest I have had a fire briefing in all of my time in Congress. It certainly bodes badly for the extra costs that we are likely to see. I recently got a letter from the Forest Service with the estimate of anticipated wildfire suppression costs for fiscal year 2015. The middle-of-the-road estimate for how much it will cost to fight wildfires is nearly $1.25 billion. On the high end, it could cost more than $1.6 billion. But the funding, however, that has been dedicated to fighting fires does not come close--not close--to covering those costs. The appropriated amount is $200 million less than even the most conservative median forecast. Wishful thinking in the budget is not going to be very useful in putting the fires out. Fighting fires costs money, and it can't be punted into the future like some minor budget line item. Once again, then, we are looking at the prospect of the Forest Service having to raid other accounts in order to put out the blazes.

According to the Forest Service, in 2013, $40 million was essentially stolen from the National Forest Fund, which would pay for the stewardship and management of the 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands.

And $30 million was stolen from the account that funds the disposal of brush and other debris from timber operations. This brush and debris is essentially fuel for future fires.

Those figures represent the stark reality that the broken funding system in place is shortchanging the resources needed for sensibly fighting wildfires.

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The cycle of stealing money from prevention accounts to pay for suppression of forest fires just repeats itself again and again without end, and it will continue until this funding problem is finally fixed.
Senator Crapo, our colleague from Idaho, and I have been working on a bipartisan basis to fix this flawed policy for quite some time now. He and I introduced the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act to end this damaging cycle, which I have described and which in the West we call fire borrowing. Our bill would raise the Federal disaster cap to allow the agencies to treat wildfire-fighting efforts like other natural disasters because wildfires are natural disasters, destructive and costly, no different than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes.

When our governmental agencies are forced to borrow from other accounts to fight fires that have bankrupted these accounts for fire suppression, they rob from the funds that are needed to reduce hazardous fuels in the forests, which leads to even more choked and overstocked forests ripe for future fires.

In effect, what happens is the prevention funds--the funds for thinning, cleaning out all of that debris--get shorted. So then you might have a lightning strike or something in our part of the world and you have an inferno on your hands. The government, in effect, borrows from the prevention fund to put the fire out, and the problem just gets worse and worse. It is that problem that Senator Crapo and I are trying to fix.

On a bipartisan basis, we seek to give the agencies the tools they need to support the courageous firefighters on the ground, men and women who put their lives at risk to ensure that Americans, their homes and communities are protected from destructive wildfires.

I know there are other Members of the Senate who are very interested in solving the fire-borrowing problem. I encourage all those Members to work with me, Senator Crapo, and our staff to find a solution that is acceptable to Congress and can be passed soon.

This is an urgent matter. This is not something you can sort of let go and offer the amendment to the amendment to the amendment, the kind of thing that happens here, and it just gets shunted off for years on end. This is urgent business because the West has to be in a position to clear these hazardous fuels and get out in front of these increasingly dangerous and ominous fires. We have to end--we have to end this cycle of catastrophic wildfires in the West. It is long past time for action. I urge colleagues to join Senator Crapo and I to work with us and our staff so this body moves, and moves quickly, to fix this problem.

There is an awful lot of uncertainty when it comes to calculating the Federal budget. But what we know for sure--for sure--is that this problem of wildfires in the West is getting increasingly serious. The fires are bigger, the fires are hotter, and they last longer. It is time to budget for reducing this problem in a sensible way.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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