During a Senate hearing, federal officials said easy access to funding to mitigate the damage done by large fires is essential.
BY JACOB PALMER | OB DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR
Federal officials said easy access to funding to mitigate the damage done by large fires is essential.
The Bend Bulletin reported on the appearances by U.S. Forest Chief Tom Tidwell and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s plea for a more comprehensive response system — while also defending the president’s proposed budget.
“It’s a better business model, it’s a better approach,” Tidwell said Thursday, referring to the plan to treat the top 1 percent of wildfires, which account for 30 percent of the cost of fighting wildfires, as natural disasters, with response funded through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden supported reform.
“The system is essentially broken,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who sits on the committee, said during Thursday’s hearing. Wyden has introduced legislation, co-written with Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, that would create the framework described by Tidwell. The plan hopes to end “fire borrowing,” when U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management raid other programs’ accounts within the agencies when fire-suppression funds run out during increasingly intense fire seasons. “You all don’t get enough resources in order to deal with prevention, then you have a situation where it gets hotter and drier, and you get a lightning strike and all of a sudden you have an inferno on your hands. In effect the prevention fund is asked to put up the money to put the fire out, and the problem gets worse because you’ve shorted prevention,” Wyden told Tidwell.
Meanwhile, a real estate data company says more than 9,300 homes in the Portland/SW Washington area are in danger of fire damage.
The Portland Business Journal reported on the study that indicated that much of the western side of the country is at some level of risk this summer:
CoreLogic’s wildfire risk analysis designates risk levels as “Very High,” “High,” “Moderate” and “Low.” Two additional categories, “Urban” and “Agriculture,” indicate homes at lower risk. CoreLogic classified more than 1.2 million Oregon homes at some level of risk, varying from low to very high, as well as those that fall within the urban and agriculture categories.
The states most commonly associated with wildfires also contain the most properties at risk. California, Colorado and Texas have the largest number of residential properties categorized as “Very High Risk,” with a combined reconstruction value exceeding $36 billion. The Denver-Aurora-Lakewood CBSA ranks first for the most homes at the highest risk.
