Senate Democrats have asked Senate leadership to fund recovery from wildfires on federal lands.
The senators, including Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, asked that any new emergency disaster appropriations bills include funding resources to help national parks and forests to recover from wildfire. Such lands are not covered by FEMA, leaving the cost to clean up and restore the lands to the federal agencies.
"As you know, unlike wildfire response activities on state, tribal, or private lands which are coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), wildfire response on federal land is managed by the land agencies themselves. In the past, Congress has appropriated the funds our public land agencies require for their critical response, remediation, and mitigation activities," they wrote.
Nearly 1 million acres of Bureau of Land Management terrain burned in the American West this year. In Arizona, the Dragon Bravo and White Sage fires devastated about 200,000 acres of the Grand Canyon’s North Rim and the Kaibab National Forest.
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A group of mostly Western U.S. senators is demanding answers on why the U.S. Forest Service has fallen behind on efforts to reduce hazardous wildfire fuels. -
A group of U.S. senators say the Forest Service has fallen behind in wildfire prevention work like forest thinning which has been deemed vital to preventing billions of dollars of damage to regions in Arizona surrounded by national forests. -
The Healthy Lungs for Heroes Act was introduced by Democratic California Senator Adam Schiff and Republican Utah Senator John Curtis. If passed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal officials would have one year to develop a plan to make "commercially available appropriate respiratory personal protective equipment for wildland firefighters and supporting staff in settings in which smoke exposure surpasses covered permissible exposure limits." -
Data analyzed by the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters shows that prescribed fires and other hazardous fuel reduction efforts have fallen by nearly 40% across the West this year. -
The tragic Los Angeles fires were a historically destructive disaster, but they also presented a unique opportunity to study the toxic exposures faced by firefighters. New findings point to a heightened risk for serious diseases like lupus.
