My compliments to the editor on the Sept. 15 opinion piece, “In Our View — Burning Need to Face Fires,” on federal fire funding needs. This issue has been before Congress for a number of years now with no action to resolve. This is not a U.S. Forest Service problem, but squarely a congressional problem, one that Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, has been helping to solve with insufficient colleague assistance.
But the real cause of this complex problem is lack of adequate and appropriate forest management on our public lands.
The fuels that feed a fire can be broken up with landscape-level vegetation treatments that serve to slow a fire, and bring a canopy (crown) fire to the ground where it can be contained. With 60 million acres of bug-killed federal forests across the West, it is baffling that we have zero Congressional action to pass emergency measures to address America’s treasures that are being wasted. We seem to address floods with a sense of emergency, but not our forests.
