Oregon Governor is trying to set blame on the Republican legislators who walked out and stayed out on a sessions funding package bill last year, iirc.
One part of the massive democratic bill included a wildfire funding package that would have provided cash to agencies to remove dense underbrush from Oregon Forests.
Yep, this twice in a lifetime event is the fault of Republicans.
Politics never stops.
😎
Laughable... who would have guessed?
Liberals never quit pointing the finger at others for their failures...if they can't blame the Republicans.. there is always the Russians readily available to blame...
and then how many local idiots will mark their ballots for democRATS once again in 60 days...
therein lies the rub as some Englishman once said.
"We" try to vote in fiscally conservative folks, "They" try to put together massive spending packages, "our folks" don't play, the whole package gets cancelled and nothing gets done.
Anyone who has followed my posts here every fire season knows my feelings on the issue. Many, if not most, of these major fires start in areas that are not commercially important. Chaparral, scrublands, Oak grasslands, sagebrush/juniper grasslands, roadside brush (Carr fire and apparently one of the Ashland fires). Because there's no financial value to these lands (maybe some grazing and firewood permitting) there is no push to spend money on REAL fire prevention in these areas.
No commercial company is going into these areas without being compensated with taxpayer monies. No Govt agency (Fed,State, Local) is going into these areas without raising taxes or cutting other necessary programs (roads, police, fire). There's NO money in thinning or controlled burning in chaparral or scrublands.
In areas with productive forests it's sometimes possible to get a commercial operation in there to take some of the small stuff down................if they can get a BIG harvest of merchantable timber. As in enough to cover them losing money on cutting down pecker poles. (dog hair thickets to some of y'all) . But, they'd just as soon go in and harvest good trees and leave the rest.
Someone mentioned "clear cuts" as being part of the answer? Ever seen a clearcut a couple of years into recovery go up in flames, especially on private land where they've nuked the brush with weed killer to release the conifers? That might be worse than a chaparral fire sometimes.
Lots of solutions...............................NONE of them cheap............and we don't get to pick and choose where our tax dollars go unfortunately. Really sticky for Fed stuff. Folks in the Midwest and back East don't want billions of $$$ going to clear brush and chaparral on our Western Public Lands. It's "our Western problem" after all, right? Well, I get a bit miffed every decade or two when the Mississippi or Missouri floods a good chunk of cities along their banks and folks are allowed to rebuild in the flood zone and "my" money is used to fund the rebuild.
Most of us here on the 'fire are fiscal conservatives and don't want to pay more in taxes for most anything. So we get to live with wildfires out here in the West, floods in the midwest, hurricanes on the Gulf Coast (people build back again as soon as the wind stops blowing, right?), Blizzards and Nor'easters on the Atlantic coasts.
And then there's.............................The Corona.........................which we're all going to pay for for a long long time.
The desert is a true treasure for him who seeks refuge from men and the evil of men. In it is contentment In it is death and all you seek (Quoted from "The Bleeding of the Stone" Ibrahim Al-Koni)
