10-6 NWR Forest Fire Budgets

This is your Northwest report for Thursday, October 6th I'm David Sparks and the Obama administration is pushing Congress to help with the issue of funding wildfire prevention efforts and how the forest service pays for them. In six of the past 10 years the cost of fighting wildfires was higher than what the forest service was budgeted. When this happens, the money for firefighting efforts must come out of other areas of the forest service budget. That includes efforts that could improve forest health and prevent future wildfires from spreading as rapidly. Jean Wade Evans is a deputy regional forrester in California and says the lack of funding for forest health is taking its toll. "We have identified anywhere from 6 to 9,000,000 acres of the 20,000,000 acres of national forest lands just in California are at risk from a health perspective, either because they are a little too dense or because they have some real insect and disease problems. At last count, we had over 66 million dead trees in the Sierra Nevada foothills and we have been a bit hampered in trying to mitigate the risk of that and deal with the long term forest health issues around that just based on some of the problems that have been described."

Elsewhere, both the National Corn Growers Association and the National Sorghum Producers are urging members to write EPA today – the deadline for comments – to support the continued use of atrazine.