Will Wine Country disaster push Congress to fix fire budget?
The Tubbs Fire in has spread into Lake County. Photo/CalFire
By Emily Cadei, Sacramento Bee
Washington It’s a rare point of bipartisan agreement in divided Washington: The federal system for funding firefighting is broken, and that’s hurting our ability to prevent fires from breaking out in the first place.
But lawmakers are at a loggerheads over how to fix the problem, a split that breaks down on largely regional, rather than partisan, grounds. Some in the House and Senate, however, now hope that national coverage of Northern California’s devastating fires could finally spur a congressional compromise, a bit of a silver lining emerging out of all the destruction.
At the root of the problem is the fact that forest fires are not treated like other natural disasters.