A House committee unanimously approves a bill to improve how the Forest Service tracks wildfire prevention work, citing NBCNews reporting on how the government has long overstated how much of the country’s federal forests it has protected from fires.
Christina Barba, fuels planner for the Mountaintop Ranger District of San Bernardino National Forest in California, points to a map of the wildfire management projects around the Big Bear Lake area on June 6 as Jason Collier, a Forest Service planner, looks on.
The bill’s author, Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., the chairman of the committee’s federal lands subcommittee, cited the NBC News reporting in his summary, saying the amount of land treated to reduce wildfire risk annually — one of the key strategies for combating the wildfire crisis — is “already insufficient.”
NBC News analyzed 15 years of Forest Service “hazardous fuel” treatment data to reach those estimates, and experts said the inflated annual totals deprived members of Congress who make funding decisions of knowing the true scope of the wildfire challenge. The House bill would require the Forest Service and the Interior Department, the other major federal land management agency, to produce yearly detailed reports about work to reduce hazardous fuels, including the actual number of acres the agencies treated over the past year, as well as additional details about treatment location, type, effectiveness and cost. It would also require both agencies to standardize their tracking procedures to ensure accuracy.
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