Representative Greg Walden (R-Hood River) recently spoke at a House Energy and Commerce joint subcommittee hearing titled “Out of Control: The Impact of Wildfires on Our Power Sector and Environment.” The hearing was the third the Committee held in recent years on air quality and the effects of wildfire smoke. Under Walden’s leadership, the Energy and Commerce Committee held two hearings on the topic during the 115th Congress.
“When we last held a hearing on this topic in September 2018, my home state of Oregon for the second year in a row was battling near-record wildfires,” said Walden. “Communities in my district experienced some of the worst air quality in the world, while also suffering significant economic impact as tourists went elsewhere. Oregonians told me that those with breathing disorders actually had to leave the state, go over to the Oregon Coast, go somewhere else to find air that they could breathe.”
In the wake of 2018’s devastating fire season, Oregon and California took steps to adopt new strategies for responding to forest fires, including coordination with utility companies to turn off power to high-risk areas in order to prevent fires caused by downed power lines.
“My hometown, serviced by PacifiCorp, was told this year we would be in that zone — if there was a problem they would de-energize our entire town,” said Walden. “This past year we witnessed how this risk reduction practice put two million people in the dark just as windstorms were threatening new wildfires. But we also know this strategy is not without negative consequences for people who have special medical needs that require electricity without interruption.”
Walden noted that unwieldy government regulations are standing in the way of other common-sense risk reduction strategies, including hazard tree removal and improvements to the aging power grid.
One of the witnesses at the hearing was Dave Markham of Central Electric Cooperative in Redmond, Oregon. Central Electric’s service territory is 56% on federal land. Walden shared a photo that Markham had given him that showcased an aged power pole that Central Electric attempted to move 20 ft in April so that they could mitigate the threat of wildfire. However, the Forest Service did not get around to that application until October. Unfortunately, October was too late to get in and do the work to move one pole before the snow.
“This is why we’ve got to reform the federal rules and laws that prevent the utilities from doing what they know needs to be done to protect our great National Forests and the communities around them,” said Walden. “Delays in these sorts of maintenance efforts can have deadly consequences, especially when combined with our poorly managed federal forests, that frankly, are overstocked and waiting to burn.”
He further emphasized previous evidence from OSU forestry professor John Bailey, who had testified before the committee in 2018 that the natural density of tree stands in eastern Oregon is around 20 trees per acre. Mismanagement has pushed that number to upwards of 1,000 trees per acre.
“When fire strikes that excess ends up as smoke and carbon in our atmosphere,” said Walden. “We know that the Forest Service and the EPA have data that in 2015 in Oregon we burned 685,000 acres, that emitted the equivalent annual emissions of 3 million cars, or 3.5 coal-fired plants. Nationwide since 2015, we’ve burned 39 million acres. Following the same pattern that would be emissions roughly equal to 170 million cars or nearly 200 power plants.”
Walden then pointed to a 2014 study by the U.S. Forest Service, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy and The Nature Conservancy found that fuel treatment projects can reduce the size and intensity of fire between 30 and 76%. This treatment also helps reduce carbon emissions from these fires by up to 85%.
“We need to do more active management,” said Walden. “We have legislation to do that.”
In May 2019, Walden introduced the Resilient Federal Forest Act of 2019, which made significant reforms to forest management policy and reduced the risk of wildfire in Oregon and nationwide.
In 2018, Walden helped pass into law the most sweeping reforms to forest management policy in more than a decade. The reforms included a fix to the so-called fire borrowing so that federal forest management accounts were not used to pay to fight wildfires.
Walden remains committed to getting forests back into balance, reducing the risk of wildfire, helping forests recover faster after fires and supporting forested communities. Learn more about the Resilient Federal Forest Act of 2019 and Walden’s additional efforts to improve forest management and decrease the risk of wildfires here.
