Bush Gets Firsthand Look at Fire Devastation in Oregon

President Bush toured fire-ravaged areas of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains by helicopter Thursday and argued that the destruction demonstrates why he is pushing a plan to thin forests in the West.

“It’s the holocaust. It’s devastating,” Bush said. “We saw the big flames jumping from treetop to treetop.”

Bush’s itinerary was changed just hours ahead of time because the fast-moving 3,000-acre Booth fire forced the evacuation of Camp Sherman, outside Bend, where he was originally scheduled to stop. On the way to Redmond, northeast of Bend, Air Force One flew through thick clouds, stained dark orange by smoke and filling the cabin with the acrid smell of charred wood.

“We have a problem in Oregon and around our country that we must start solving,” Bush said at the Deschutes County Fairgrounds after his tour.

“The problem of too much undergrowth creates the conditions for unbelievably hot fires. These forest firefighters will tell you that these hot fires that literally explode the big trees can be somewhat mitigated by clearing out the undergrowth.”

Environmentalists say they don’t take issue with the need to thin forest land, but they object to the way the Bush administration plans to do it.

In particular, they argue that the administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative will open protected forests to logging under the guise of thinning. Timber companies, they say, will harvest not only the undergrowth that fuels the fires, but also mature and old-growth trees. They also worry about the environmental effects of building logging roads in back-country areas.

“Healthy Forests should be called the No Tree Left Behind plan. If the logging industry cut down 1,000 trees in the forest, George Bush would deny they made a sound,” Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said in a statement Thursday.

Environmental groups also argue that the president is disingenuous when he claims that thinning projects will protect towns in fire-prone regions. Instead, they say, the areas targeted in Bush’s initiative are mostly federal lands in the back country, far from settled areas.

“The recent fires in Oregon and across the West illustrate the importance of prioritizing the fuel-reduction work near where people live, not miles away in the back country,” Carl Pope, president of the Sierra Club, said Thursday.

Bush is on a two-day trip to the Northwest to draw attention to his environmental policies and to attend two reelection fund-raisers. The fund-raising events -- a luncheon in Portland on Thursday and another in Bellevue, Wash., today -- are expected to raise about $1 million each.

Oregon is a critical swing state in 2004; Bush lost the state’s seven electoral votes by less than 1 percentage point in 2000. Its current unemployment rate -- more than 8% -- is the highest in the nation, making Bush vulnerable on economic issues here.

“I understand there’s a lot of people hurting in the state of Oregon,” Bush acknowledged in Portland. “Your unemployment rate is too high. I will continue to try to create the conditions necessary for job creation, so long as there’s anybody who’s looking for work.”

Bush urged the Senate to pass his forest initiative when it returns from recess; a version has already passed in the House.

The president said the question of energy reliability should also be a top priority for Westerners after last week’s blackout in the Northeast and California’s recent power crisis.

“We’ve got some old laws that were passed a long time ago that make it harder for people to invest in new electricity lines, new transmission lines,” Bush said. “That doesn’t make any sense. If we’ve got a problem, let’s deal with it.”

He urged Congress to pass his energy bill, which he said would help reduce the country’s reliance on foreign sources of energy and encourage energy efficiency.

“And part of that was to recognize that ... the electricity infrastructure needs to be modernized,” the president said.

In Portland, Bush’s motorcade drove past a few thousand antiwar and pro-environment protesters on the way to the fund-raiser. Placards along the route read, “He lied. They died” and “This tree is anti-Bush.”

Similar demonstrations a year ago sparked disturbances that were subdued by riot police using rubber bullets.

Today, Bush plans to visit Ice Harbor dam in eastern Washington state to discuss his efforts to preserve wild salmon.