During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing before the congressional recess, Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-ID) questioned witnesses about forest management methods.
00:00Chairman Westerman. The gentleman from Idaho, Mr. Fulcher, is now recognized for his five minutes.
00:07Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to the panel for being here today.
00:10And I'd like to start with a question for Mr. Wright, or at least some dialogue, I hope.
00:15I come from the great state of Idaho, and we have approximately 34 million acres of federally controlled land in that state.
00:24We've got about 2 million people. So what that means is we really don't have a choice sometimes as to where the urban places are placed and how people live and where they live.
00:41And we really do have an insurance problem. The federal government is totally overwhelmed when it comes to forest management.
00:50And the policies that are in place have not allowed for wise management.
00:55And so many of our residential regions have no option when it comes to insurance.
01:03And I'd just like to get your feedback. What do we do?
01:08How do we mitigate that?
01:11Whether it be on the private side, on the federal side, need some counsel, please.
01:17As you know and have alluded to, so insurance is regulated by each state and territory.
01:25So 56 different insurance regimes are in place across the country.
01:30And you look in those elements, so your experiences are different than Wyoming, and they're different than Arizona.
01:38Probably not a lot, actually. We probably have a lot of the same, similar problems.
01:42Similar problems, but how the insurance is regulated is different from state to state.
01:47Fundamentally, insurance on the property side is there to understand what the potential losses are
01:54and charge premiums so they can be there on a bad day and pay those claims.
01:59I do think we're in a point by which we have to collectively take on these risks.
02:04What is particularly hard with wildfire, which is different than some other pieces, is once it gets into a suburban neighborhood,
02:11it can move from structure to structure to structure very, very quickly.
02:16You have very, very large losses for the insurance companies and the community.
02:23But what about on the federal agency front? Is there some focus that we should be putting there?
02:28I mean, on the private side, I can understand whether, regardless of what the local regulation is.
02:34Yeah.
02:34So I'll highlight.
02:35Let me finish.
02:35A private insurance company is not going to want to take a risk if there's adjacent mismanaged land that puts them at risk.
02:43Two important things that I think Fix Our Forest addresses.
02:46First of all, the fuel loads, those dead trees, the kinds of pieces there that can exacerbate the risk, have to be addressed.
02:53That sits in your state primarily on federal lands.
02:57The second piece is when those actions took place, and Mr. Begich spoke about this,
03:01having that dashboard that says what mitigation actions took place, where have they been maintained,
03:09because the insurance industry needs to have visibility on those pieces.
03:14So much of that, it has its potential to be addressed by the Forest Service, by BLM, by others.
03:23The community, as well as the insurance industry, needs to have visibility on what's been done,
03:29as well as the flip side, what has not been done.
03:31Okay. Thank you for that.
03:32Mr. Muncy, I want to shift to you just for a moment here.
03:36Given your expertise, can you cite, from a Western state perspective,
03:42any models where federal land managers have had some success in prioritizing the urban versus rural,
03:51and how that gets managed?
03:53Is there any success stories that you can relay to that might be a good model?
03:58Yes, sir.
03:59I'd specifically recommend you look at the Angels National Forest.
04:02The chief one of that forest, Bobby Garcia, is performing at a very high level.
04:07I'm sorry.
04:08Where was that?
04:09His name is Bobby Garcia.
04:10He's the chief one of the Angels National Forest.
04:13And what surprises me is he works in the same federal regulatory environment.
04:17He works for the same bosses within the same budget.
04:22He works with the same lawsuits, yet he's able to get things done.
04:27And I think that he's an absolute success.
04:29I demonstrated in one of my photos how the bridge fire, which occurred in the Angels National Forest,
04:35just east of where the Eaton fire would start months later,
04:38the fuel treatments on the bridge fire allowed us to limit that fire.
04:42That fire had an exponential growth, 34,000 acres in one day.
04:46But when it hit this fuel-treated areas, the fire went to the ground.
04:50It was a low-intensity fire, and our firefighters were able to pick that up.
04:54I look at that as an absolute case study, and I would be happy to send you a report
04:59that was developed by that forest on the effects of fuel treatment on large fires.
05:06Mr. Muncy, I would greatly appreciate that.
05:08If we can make a note either through staff or directly, I would love to see it.
