"There aren't very many experienced firefighters to carry on…part of the money is being used to hire permanent people to start becoming these experienced firefighters."
There aren't very many experienced firefighters to carry on, from here on. And so part of the money is being used to hire permanent people to start developing into these experienced firefighters. And we need that desperately. I don't think that's a very bad thing at all.
We also are using a lot of the money for additional resources: engines and airplanes and helicopters and lookouts and things like that. And there's certainly a need to beef that up. We're adding something like twenty hotshot crews. We need to do that. There's no doubt that some of the money is gonna be wastefully spent, because there's just too much money coming too soon, too quickly, to do too many things, and just not enough people to do it wisely. And so some of it's just gonna be pooped off, I'm sure, on wasteful kinds of things.
Part of the money is being spent for things like research. I support that because that's what I do now. So I think that we need to find out more about what we can do to make the forest more acceptable of fire. Fire used to burn in the western forests very, very frequently, and a lot of fire. And so we need to do some things now like thinning and restoration of the understory to make the forest more compatible with fire once again—more sustainable in the face of fire. I think that some of the money will be used for that. Probably more of it should be used for research, than is going to be used for that. But there is a big backlog right now of just getting some of these other things—the crews hired, and the helicopters on, and some of the underburning done. So hopefully in a year or two we'll shift and begin to do more of the ecosystem restoration with some of that money, and I think that would be very appropriate.