Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced on Sunday more than $21 million in new funding for wildfire risk reduction; she spoke during a press conference with Senator Jeff Merkley at the Oregon Department of Forestry Southwest District headquarters, according to a report by KEZI-TV News in Eugene, Oregon.
She said fire management agencies plan fuel management work on more than 170,000 acres in Oregon this year.
District Forester Mike Shaw said there’s good news with better snowpack this year. “I do project that we’re going to have another challenging fire season,” he said. “All hands on deck is the approach that we’re taking and all wildland fire agencies are working together.”
Senator Jeff Merkley, chairman of the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, joined Haaland and Shaw to emphasize their collaboration on wildfire prevention. “We’re really focusing on the front end of forest treatment and on the back end of having the resources to fight the fires,” Merkley said. “The key word here is collaboration.”
Aside from the millions in federal funding allotted from his bipartisan infrastructure law, Haaland said that President Biden is also supporting increased pay, better housing, and more full-time jobs for firefighters.
Vice President Kamala Harris joined other national leaders in the nation’s capitol to announce the new funding to help protect high-risk communities. “Our acres of burned land have doubled,” Harris said. “We need to change how we think about how we respond to fires. We need to prevent them, not just respond after they’ve started.”
KRDO News reported that $197 million in federal funding will be made available this year to 100 communities in 22 states and 7 Native American tribes. “There were 36 states and 45 tribes that applied for the funding,” Harris said. “This is the result of legislation I started years ago while I was in the Senate.”
She said she was motivated by recent destructive fires in her home state of California. “This will be the first of many grants,” she said. “We’re committing $1 billion over the next four years and $7 billion over the next ten years.”
We all are jaded over government funding of wildfire mitigation projects. It seems a ‘new commitment’ pops up every few years. The money is there for a year or two, then is slowly siphoned away to other budget priorities.
ho hum, another politician promising money to fix the problem once and for all. Deja vu all over again.
Love the attacks without solutions. Seems like some of his suggestions weren’t fully understood but y’all gave me a great new business idea. Much appreciated.
Instead of throwing tax payer money at this, just start logging again. We don’t have to clear cut everything to have proper logging. We don’t have to log all the way to stream banks. There should be a compromise between timber companies, environmentalists and the courts. Common sense just doesn’t exist anymore. Proper logging and forest management will reduce wildfires while utilizing the renewable resource and generate revenue for our schools and towns. The forests are so overgrown and mismanaged and people are still surprised when we have large fires. What other possible outcome can you have? If we don’t manage it, mother nature will. After we do have a fire, move in and log the burned timber before it rots and is completely wasted and then replant. In todays environment, burned acreage for the most part is left as dead rotting standing timber which leads to more fuel for the next fire to come through that area and our courts are as much to blame for this as anyone else.
Oh yeah it is so simple….. Just log it… Have you ever seen a government logging contract? What about the HUGE swaths of forest in the Mountain West that are too remote to economically log? What about poor-quality wood. Economics of forestry and logging have way more to do with wood harvest than you understand. If it can’t be economically harvested, I would rather see it burned. Point source protect sensitive areas, lives and structures. Let the rest of it burn, haha. Don’t forget about fires that burn in range and steppe environments as well, what is your solution for that?
This is an argument better suited to 1990; we are way beyond “just log it”.