Agency Seeks to Clear More Brush

The Clinton administration wants to clear brush and trees on another 455,000 acres of federal lands next year, a 33% increase over what agencies planned before this summer’s brutal wildfires, officials said Friday.

A total of 1.8 million acres--an area larger than the state of Delaware--would be thinned through logging and prescribed burns to reduce the threat of fires.

The thinning effort, mostly targeted near fast-growing communities such as Billings, Mont., and Flagstaff, Ariz., doubles what the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management logged and burned five years ago to prevent fires.

Agencies “are committed to minimizing the losses from future, unnaturally intense fires,” said Jim Lyons, an Agriculture Department undersecretary.

Agency officials said most of the clearing will involve small-diameter trees, not commercially valuable large timber.

The acreage figures, provided in testimony before a Senate subcommittee Friday, were some of the first details of how President Clinton plans to carry out a plan that would spend an additional $1.6 billion for firefighting and fire prevention next year. Clinton announced the proposal last Saturday.

Agency officials said Friday they also want to help thin 315,000 acres on private, state and tribal lands, and clean watersheds, stabilize soils and replant vegetation on about 750,000 acres charred by fires this year.

The officials likened the effort to a 1930s-style public works project that would create about 8,000 jobs.

But Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) called the budget request for thinning forests “totally inadequate.”

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) said another Clinton initiative--a proposed rule to ban road building on 43 million acres of roadless forests--would increase the fire risk.

“You’re turning your back and walking away from living things that Mother Nature will burn down,” he said after the hearing.

Nearly 6.7 million acres have burned this year, one of the worst fire seasons in 50 years.