Same way they have in the past decade. And will talk more about why this is. Make sure we discuss what our response is going to be to this evolving problem. Weekrchers just last published a major scientific report. The report made it clear if we are ever going to get ahead of the problem the Forest Service needs to respond to wildfires in a fundamentally different way. A self reinforcing cycle of counter effective actions. The same keep using tired approaches we have for the last 100 years. We need to make sure we are focused on getting different results. Common sense tells us our response these to be modified now that the problem is different. The Service Report does a great job tell great job summing up what the report needs to do. Altering the current trajectory will require a total system transformation. States thebluntly status quo increases losses we suffer from wildfires and significantly affects the ability to meet the core mission. We need new solutions. My chairg to work with and colleagues over the next few months to find those solutions. Need to do what we can to reduce the probability of catastrophic fires. Second we need to fight larger wildland fires, which are becoming very expensive. Since 2000 the federal government has spent 20 4 billion fighting the large wildfires. We need to treat large wildfires differently in our budget. We need to make sure these fires and the management on the ground is being done to ensure accountability. We need to make sure we are incentivizing the right kind of cost savings in the budget. Importantly, the assistance the assistance needs to show up quicker. It needs to be tailored to these issues. The government is responding to a new type of disaster where events are blowing up in a greater degree and reaching communities in unbelievable speed. Have a more proactive upfront coordination with federal agencies. Just in delivering Realtime Communications and making sure the resources are actually on the ground. The fire season forecast came out last week. I hope people are ready to help and i hope fema will work to stage things like generators and equipment that will be closer to these areas so they can respond more quickly. Thank you for this hearing. I look forward to the witnesses and without committee to try to institute some new approaches. Thank you, senator. Lets get started with our witnesses. We may just keep powering through. I may take a pause in the hearing. I would like to welcome our witnesses before the committee. We appreciate your leadership at the u. S. Forest service there. We have dr. Stephen behind. He is a professor at the school of Life Sciences at Arizona State university. Dr. Sharon hood is with us this morning area a postdoctoral researcher at the college of forestry and conservation. Great to have you with us. Finally bruce, the director of water rights and contracts at salt rivererever project. If we can begin you with your fiveminute comments, and to each of the witnesses we ask you limit your testimony. In your full statement will be included as part of the record. Your commentsd to and the opportunity to ask questions. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to be here, especially with other Panel Members to be able to talk about our upcoming fire season, but things were currently doing and the things we need to continue to do to a trust this issue. Shared,ave already predictions for this coming fire season are generally what we had definitely a much more active fire season out in the west. As the summer develops this will continue to expand to the partsest and over in two of utah, idaho, and montana. Cannot stressd, i enough that fire seasons we are seeing today, these are the normal fire seasons. We can look out and say they are more active a decade ago. It is important to understand it today this is the fire season we are going to continue to have. We have the resources. We need to make sure we have an adequate number of large caretakers to respond to these fires. We already have exclusive use. Can bring up another 200 helicopters if we need that. We will have our firefighters, our type one cruise. 900 engines for the Forest Service. We have the airplanes from the National Guard and air force reserve ready to come on when we hit those search times of the year. When i look at the millions of acres we have been treating and the combination of managing natural fire. Fire, ourcribed treatment primarily in the urban interface, we are making a difference. In our fy 16 budget falling for that same level. It has less impact on the watershed and less impact on our communities. I want to thank the committee for our budgets issue, the considerable increase. We can increase our ordination with states and other partners it to be able to get additional work accomplished. The wildland urban interface, not only are our fire seasons theyr, hotter, and dryer, are a another 60 through 80 days longer than what they were 15 years ago. We have only 15 million acres that we have to deal with. Before we can even take on really suppressing these large wildfires. We continue to suppress 98 of the fires we take initial attack on. That doesnt include the ones we manage in the back countries for the benefits. I need to stress that. Even with 98 fair is that 1 to 2 that escaped that we see on the news. Once again i appreciate the support for members of this committee to find a solution to deal with the Fire Suppression. Is a 90 chance we will not have enough money, we will have to look at transferring funds. Tired some of you to our of listening to me talk about this. It is time for us to find a solution and be able to move on and stop this disrupting practice of shutting down operations in the fall and to be able to transfer for money. I think it is no question that of ourhis concept of 1 fire should be considered natural disasters. The 10 most costly fires equals which is0 million, what we were talking about, 30 of the costs. Thank you for having the letting me for have never did is he to be here. But also to find a solution to dealing with the cost of Fire Suppression. Thank you. Thing were is one would agree on as members of this committee is we have to figure out a way to stop the fire borrowing. As we talk about other things that go on within the forest and admissions, it comes back to the fact that you do not have the funds if you are not using all of your budget. We will put a little pause here. Andnute and a half there back. We stand adjourned for three minutes. We will come back to order here. That is three minutes in senate time. We apologize for that. What we turn to your comments this morning ago we thank you for your indulgence. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Call it a strategy of resistance. It sought to eliminate threats before they could become serious. That doctrine failed because it excluded could fires. Which leads to a consideration of what might the next 50 years hold. To berategy seems congealing in the west that we might label resilience. It seeks to make the best of the hand we are being dealt. Let me consider the strategies in turn. There remains an old guard that returns to the former order. There are progressive thinkers who want to upgrade that tradition into an all hazards Emergency Service model. Or the National Coast guard for the interior. If your primary land uses urban or exurban. If it retains the strength of Fire Suppression it also magnifies suppression weaknesses. Restoration is upgrading its mission from the simple hope that a prescribed fire may substitute for wildfire. Now it embraces complex withborations, supplements other treatments, and tries to operate on the scale of landscapes. The vision has proved costly, not only in money but political and social capital. It requires tens of millions of acres out of whack. Resilience. In the west the strategy is emerging that expect that accepts we are likely to get ahead of problems coming at us. Allows for the management of wildfire lands to aift, where feasible, to thames of more direct control and containing outbreaks. There were some fires that bold away from the moment of ignition and some that threatened people right from the onset. Many fires opportunities to back off and burnout. Elsewhere they will try to pick places and draw boxes. Long urged by critics. It can look like a mashup and the outcomes will be mixed because the fires are patchy. Some will burn more severely than we would like, some may hardly burn at all. The rest will likely burn in a range. In such burnouts may well be the future of prescribed fire in the west. To push theing analogy too closely we may like the resistance strategy to iraq. And the resilience strategy to paper. Time and place one trumps another. All three. We need rocks around our prize assets communities. We need scissors to buffer , and we needurns paper, because the ideal could be the enemy of the good, and a mixed strategy that includes boxing and burning. It may be the best we could hope for. Dr. Hood, welcome. Dr. Hood thank you for inviting me here today. Previously i worked as an ecologist prior to running prior to turning my phd in 2014. Across our country. Today my testimony focuses on my showing mount pine needle. Also it is not a substitute for fire. It is a type of fire that burns through the forest understory and causes mortality to larger trees. Increasedf fires has composition in many areas. We continue to actively suppress the majority of wildfires today. We must allow more fires to burn to achieve the goal of allowing more fires to burn we must accept the Critical Role of fire as the natural ecological process. Low severity fire increases se docs are used by trees entries with more dogs are likely to survive attacks. When low or frequent severity defensese removed, declined over time. Low severity fire at as a natural agent to reduce forest density. This also promotes an increase in defenses and increases were increases resistance to Mountain Pine needle. A longterm study site . 10 a creative these treatments were originally designed how to effectively restore the forest and increase resilience to wildfire. They were implemented five years before the outbreak began. Duct increased with the burn only treatment threat the length of the study. Differs markedly between treatments. In the control, 50 of the ponderosa nine Ponderosa Pine was destroyed in the outbreak. High levels of douglas for both the control and burn only treatment, due to 100 years of fire exclusion, coupled with a high pine mortality, has reduced resilience beyond the ability to return to a pine dominated system. A forest type where there is strong scientific support. Further research is needed throughout the u. S. I found thinning with or without pinealbed fire to a outbreak, groovy reducing tree mortality. Term, thinning with prescribed fire created the most resilient forest by stimulating tree defenses and the beneficial effects of these affects a fire cannot be replicated. Very useful and necessary restoration and management toolkit of is crucial for longterm maintenance of low and byelevation fires stimulating defense that can entry that can increase survival. There is no onesizefitsall approach. Aimctive treatment should to increase forest resilience through a multitude of stressors and foster conditions that allow wildfires to burn under more natural intensities. All my study is just one example, these findings are supported by other scientific literature, showing the Critical Role of fire and creating a resilient Ponderosa Pine forest. Thank you for the opportunity to testify here today. Good morning senator murkowski and members of the committee, it is an honor to be here to share my experience with you today. I have been involved with fire. Y entire life a fire behavioral analyst for 15. Ears i like to think of myself as a student of fire. I learned in Southern California that we will always have extreme fire, we will always have a drought. Ignitions,ways be and ignitions are plentiful and random. The driver of the entire system is fuel. Doesnt burn very well and doesnt burn very fast, even under extreme conditions. Conversely burns extremely hot, extremely well, and extremely fast. The age of the fuel at origin fires in San Diego County since 1950 the average age of the fuel where the big fires start is 71 years. Fire starting in fields less than 20 years old had become major fires. The fire problem has gotten worse. California is not a good spot to be in the lead. What we have seen in the past 50 years is becoming the norm in the western United States. I see two main issues with costs. We recognize the fire problem is the fuels. We are now treating to treating close to 2 , which is a 50 year rotation cycle, which means as we are doing a great job we are not even getting close. Our fuelo be doubling treatment. It has to be mechanical and fire. The fire will not thin them. It has to maintain with fire. We need projects picked by Forest Service, multidisciplinary teams, not just fire but Forest Health people, sociologists and risk assessment, to pick the ones that are going to give us bang for the buck. We need to spend our dollars wisely. San bernardino National Forests is on its or tier of a oneyear on its fourth year of a oneyear document. People are gaming the system. Shoppingt building a center or freeways. We are mitigating damage to the forests. The budget process, i pointed out they do a plan for state and local tribal governments, when the fires need a certain criteria for you fix up 75 of the cost. They can do that for the federal agencies also. We can reduce the cost of fires by managing them better and i think there is a technological aspect. We need to have the guy on the ground laptop computer that can predict where the fire is going and measure the results of what they are doing based on that. We need to know where the fire is. We dont know where the fire is because we cant see through the smoke and we cant map them. They need to map them in the first day, not three days later. That kind of technology is going to go along way to managing things like managing the fire than managing the air assets. We can model where the aircraft is good and effective. We can let the fire managers make those kinds of decisions based on sound science. We need to know where the fire is, where the firefighters are, and the people were supervising those fire writers need to have a nap in their hand and shows them where everybody is on the ground. Just knowing where they are doesnt help. I appreciate the opportunity to comment today. Welcome to the committee. Ranking member cantwell and members of the committee, thank for the opportunity over 100 years the salt river tot has provided a fulfill this responsibility yes rpa operate seven dams and numerous groundwater wells. On thealso dependent health of a 13,000 square mile watershed to provide a renewable protectingy and these headwaters has been a priority since its founding. Watershed protection efforts focused on setting aside lands in the federal forest system to ensure development and timber harvest in a way that preserved a Sustainable Water supply for arizona. State of unhealthy these National Forests are causing catastrophic wildfires that threaten sustainability and quality of Drinking Water for millions in arizona. The situation was not unique to arizona. We are working with the National WaterResource Association and others who are facing similar threats. Catastrophic fires have severe and longterm impacts to watersheds, which are felt far beyond the area impacted by the fire. Firee the low intensity the aftermath for the severe fires we are experiencing as a result of the unnatural force conditions increase sentiment loads and debris that restored and reduce Storage Capacity and affect the predictability of runoff. These Treatment Facilities have been handled to increase levels at the costs of 100 of the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. To bew exactly what needs done to mitigate these impact. We need to quickly too thin overcrowded and unhealthy forests. We need to reestablish a force product industry to carry out treatments and create an economy around Forest Restoration. And we know we need Public Policy at all levels of and invest in Forest Restoration. Srp is actively involved in efforts to expedite Forest Restoration by committing resources in all of these areas. We started a Northern Arizona forest fun in partnership with the fourth foundation. We are also involved with the project of four service and the National Forest foundation to watershed. 4,000 acre the projects we are currently involved with highlight the need to improve federal policy to more efficiently made progress in restoring our forests and protecting our watersheds. We greatly appreciate the priority of the Forest Service and the department of interior have placed on this project. However despite the significant funding and staff dedicated to undertaking the project is expected to take at least two, if not three years before anything can be done on the ground. Written testimony includes as the committee continues to address Fire Suppression budgets, it is also important that the provisions include a dedicated secure funding stream for Forest Restoration in order to promote the certainty needed. We need to rebalance the requirements placed on these kinds of projects to reflect that reality. The problems, the solutions, and the consequences are clear and i look forward to working together with this committee on our shared goals of protecting the forests and w