07/06/06 Reducing Wildland Fires

The House Resources Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health got an update on the Healthy Forest Initiative and the Healthy Forest Restoration Act Thursday. Deputy Secretary of the Interior Lynn Scarlett testified that - over the past four years - the Interior Department and its partners have reduced the hazardous fuels that lead to wildland fires on seven-million acres of public lands - and on more than half a million acres in the wildland urban interface. SCARLETT: We have tripled the amount of wildland urban interface acres treated since fiscal year 2001, treating some 543-thousand acres in fiscal year 2005 and that compares to 164-thousand in 2001 and so a four-fold increase. The battle against wildland fires became a top priority for the administration after the 2002 Biscuit Fire in southwestern Oregon. The fire burned nearly 500-thousand acres and cost more than 150-million dollars to suppress. Since then - the President's Healthy Forest Initiative and the Healthy Forest Restoration Act have worked to cut red tape and encourage cooperation with local communities and tribes in planning how to fight fires. SCARLETT: Treating acres in the WUI is a big priority for us and I think that three to four-fold increase we have seen over 3 years really is a testament to that. Also testament to that is how closely we are working with communities on their wildfire protection plans and tiering our priority projects off their plans. Sixty some percent will be tiered off the wildland protection plan in 06-07 and we expect that to grow rapidly as we get those plans completed. Deputy Secretary Scarlett says the use of administrative tools - such as the Tribal Forest Protection Act and stewardship contracting - has been combined with the technology of vegetative mapping to reduce buildup of hazardous fuels. SCARLETT: With the advent of landfire, our vegetative mapping, we believe that will be a significant tool to enhance our ability really to target to priority area and then secondly we have had a lot of discussion this morning about the community wildland fire protection plans. We have provided seed money to several hundred communities for those plans. There are some 2700 communities now covered under those plans. And for our WUI projects, our wildland urban interface projects, the majority now are beginning to be at project sites identified in those plans. That will help us to get more bang for the buck which I think is important. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act has encouraged local communities to work with federal agencies to prepare Community Wildfire Protection Plans. Each of the Interior agencies is actively involved in assisting state and local governments. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.