Senator Wyden's Bill Would Designate Biggest Wildfires as Natural Disasters

Last Friday, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden discussed Wyden’s bill he co-sponsored that would designate the largest one to two percent of wildfires each year as natural disasters as Wyden explains
Wyden: “In affect what has happening is that fire prevention gets the short end of the stick. Consistently the fire prevention gets shorted. So what happens is when it is hot and dry and you have lightening strikes — all these forces come together and you have an inferno on your hands. And as the Secretary duly noted, you have to spend money to put it out. But because the fires have gotten so big, and so hot and last so long what happens is there isn’t enough money for fire suppression and then you have the prevention fund gets ‘borrowed’ and the problem just gets worse and worse. So what Senator Crapo and I have proposed is that the biggest fires — just the one or two percent of the biggest fires would be treated as natural disasters. So of course, there is some spending associated with that but that spending would be offset by the fact you would have fewer fires in the first place because you were doing more in prevention. And the fires that you do have would not be so serious.”