Information provided by the Office of Congressman Jimmy Panetta.
Congressman Jimmy Panetta and Congressman Doug LaMalfa recently introduced the Emergency Wildfire and Public Safety Act. If approved, the bipartisan bill would help protect communities from catastrophic wildfires by implementing wildfire mitigation projects, sustaining healthier forests that are more resilient to climate change, and providing important energy and retrofitting assistance to businesses and residences to mitigate future risks from wildfire.
Original cosponsors of the legislation include Congressman Jim Costa, Congressman Josh Harder, Congressman John Garamendi, Congressman TJ Cox, Congressman Salud Carbajal, Congressman Greg Gianforte. The Senate companion bill is led by Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator Steve Daines.
“Throughout the West, and especially in my district on the central coast of California, we regularly experience devastating wildfires that can result in the tragic loss of life and property, hundreds of millions of dollars in suppression costs, and prolonged power shutoffs. As the fire season becomes longer and more intense, we not only need to be prepared, but we also need to be proactive to protect our homes, towns, and communities,” said Panetta. “Our bipartisan, bicameral legislation is needed now more than ever to help reduce wildfire risk in federal forests, improve best practices for addressing wildfire, and create more resilient communities and energy grids.”
The Emergency Wildfire and Public Safety Act is supported by the California Natural Resources Agency, the California Farm Bureau Federation and the Rural County Representatives of California, according to a recent release.
If approved, the legislation would:
- Provide new authority for the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to work collaboratively with state partners in the West to implement wildfire mitigation projects. Projects are restricted to areas most in need of restorative forest management.
- Allow disaster mitigation and preparedness funding to be used to reduce the wildfire risk posed by utility lines and expedite permitting for the installation of wildfire detection equipment (such as sensors, cameras, and other relevant equipment) and expand the use of satellite data to assist wildfire response.
- Create a program to incentivize the collection of woody biomass and help expand processing facilities to make biomass more economically viable.
- Create a forest workforce development program to train a new generation of workers to help address wildfire and forest health.
- Require the establishment of a fire center in the Western United States to train new firefighters and forestry professionals on the beneficial uses of prescribed fires, a far more cost-effective method of stopping fires than mechanical thinning or firefighting.
- Lift the current export ban on unprocessed timber from federal lands in the west for trees that are dead or dying, or if there is no demand in the United States. California currently has nearly 150 million dead and dying trees on thousands of acres that are at risk of wildfire.
- Expand the Energy Department’s weatherization program to allow for the retrofit of homes to make them more resilient to wildfire through the use of fire-resistant building materials and other methods.
- Establish a new grant program to assist critical facilities like hospitals and police stations become more energy efficient and better adapted to function during power shutoffs. The new program would also provide funding for the expanded use of distributed energy infrastructure, including microgrids.
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