A multi-year drought means a greater the risk of forest fires again this year across much of the U.S. Northwest and into the Rocky Mountain states, the Bush administration said Tuesday.
The 2005 fire season also could take a toll on southern parts of Arizona and New Mexico, officials from the Interior and Agriculture Departments told a Senate Energy subcommittee.
But Alaska, which was responsible for 80 percent of the 8 million acres that burned in the United States last year, will be spared from a severe fire season, they said.
“We are prepared for the 2005 fire season,” Lynn Scarlett, assistant secretary with the Interior Department, told the subcommittee.
Currently, much of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are mired in exceptional or extreme drought, according to weather forecasters. Moderate drought exists in Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Washington state and Oregon.
A Bush administration forest management plan to curtail future blazes was passed by Congress in 2003.
It cut procedural delays at federal agencies and encouraged tree-thinning and brush removal to reduce the threat of wildfires on some of the estimated 190 million acres of forest land susceptible to wildfires in the United States.
In the 2004 fiscal year, the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service, a division of the USDA, thinned trees and brush on 4.2 million acres. So far this year the two agencies have treated 1.6 million acres.
But some lawmakers expressed concern that as another season with potentially hazardous forest fires nears, the law has not done enough to reduce the threat.
“I believe in prevention, and we ain’t getting it done. We ain’t cutting it,” Sen. Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican, said at the hearing.
Bush asked Congress for $867 million to fund the forest management plan in fiscal 2006, up from $811 million in the current fiscal year. About $492 million of that total would be used to remove underbrush from more than 4 million acres of land close to where people live.
