Smoke from California fires sweeps across Carolinas, experts say
Jacob Saylors, 7, center and his brother Jeremy Saylors, 11, finds religious figurines still intact as they comb through the rubble for personal items that survived the Camp Fire in Paradise on Sunday. The family’s home was also destroyed by another wildfire 10 years ago.
RALEIGH, N.C. – Hazy conditions in the Carolinas on Tuesday morning can be traced to catastrophic events taking place on the other side of the country, weather experts say.
The National Weather Service in Raleigh posted on Facebook Monday night to tell people the smoky air is from the California wildfires.
The post included a map showing a flow of haze sweeping from California into Texas and taking aim at Charlotte and Raleigh as of 8 a.m. Tuesday.
The weather service’s air quality forecast maps show the streak of haze gradually shifting across South Carolina and other parts of the Southeast into Tuesday afternoon.
Seventy-nine deaths were reported as of Monday in Butte County’s Camp Fire, which at 151,000 acres is “the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history,” The Sacramento Bee reported.
As of last week, the fire had burned more than 1.6 million acres of land, making it the worst California wildfire in at least 15 years, according to The Bee.
North Carolina had its own wildfires in 2016 that scorched thousands of acres in the western region, The Charlotte Observer reported.
Smoke from those fires caused unhealthy air quality conditions for people with breathing problems in the region.
The smoke brought to North Carolina from the California wildfires, however, shouldn’t pose much threat.
“Much of the smoke will be in the mid to upper atmosphere and air quality is still expected to be good at ground level,” the weather service wrote in the post.
WASHINGTON – After touring the devastation of the Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif. on Saturday, President Donald Trump announced that the federal government would provide an additional $500 million in funding to the 2018 farm bill for forest management to help mitigate future fires.
Back in Washington, however, no one seems to know what he’s talking about.
“$500 million. That will be in the farm bill. We just put it in,” Trump told reporters at the Incident Command Post for the Camp Fire in Chico, Calif on Nov. 17. “We have a new category, and that’s management and maintenance of the forests. It’s very important.”
The president repeated the figure during a stop in Malibu, where the Woolsey Fire has burned roughly 100,000 acres, later the same day.
“So we’re putting in the farm bill, $500 million,” Trump said, according to a White House transcript.
“I’m not sure where he got that from,” said one congressional aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record, echoing the sentiment of a number of colleagues on Capitol Hill.
The reality is that there is no such funding provision in the 2018 Farm Bill, which authorizes federal agriculture and land management programs but does not appropriate funds. That requires separate spending legislation, a congressional source familiar with the Farm Bill confirmed.
And Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue confirmed to reporters in a conference call on Tuesday that his agency, which oversees the National Forest Service, was not requesting additional funds in the fiscal 2019 spending bill. Congress is working to pass that spending legislation by Dec. 7, when current funding runs out.
Instead, Perdue and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke are pressing for new authorizations in the Farm Bill that would allow the government to circumvent environmental restrictions when conducting forest management work like dead tree removal, controlled burns and thinning the forests.
“Interior would love for the Senate in the Farm Bill to add language to give the secretaries more authority,” Zinke said on the call.
The debate is not a new one. The versions of the Farm Bill that the Senate and House passed earlier this year include forestry sections, contrary to the president’s suggestion that forest management had just recently been added to the legislation.
Zinke and Perdue have been campaigning for months for Congress to adopt the House version of the bill, which would roll back environmental review requirements on forestthinning projects they argue will help reduce the risk of wildfires, including the ones ravaging California.
The Senate is resisting most of the controversial House provisions, which are vehemently opposed by environmental groups and questioned by many forestry experts.
Members of Congress are still wrestling with how to reconcile differences between the forestry provisions in the two bills, among other disagreements.
The White House declined to address specific questions about the $500 million in funding the president promised over the weekend.
In statement, White House spokesman Judd Deere said, “The administration continues to work very closely with both chambers of Congress to include strong forest management improvements in the Farm Bill negotiations.” Gov.-elect Gavin Newson, FEMA Director Brock Long, President Donald Trump, Paradise mayor Jody Jones and Gov. Jerry Brown tour the Skyway Villa Mobile Home and RV Park during the president’s visit to Paradise on Saturday. The Camp Fire in Northern California has become the national’s deadliest wildfire in a century and has killed at least 81 people and left more than 1000 still missing.
Congress budgeted $566 million in fiscal year 2018 for what is known as “hazardous fuels reduction”– removing dead trees, brush and overgrown vegetation that can become tinder for wildfires. That was $63 million more than the Trump administration requested for those programs in the Agriculture and Interior budgets last year. For the fiscal year 2019 budget, submitted in February, the administration requested $540 million to address hazardous fuels.
The president seemed to suggest in California that he was prepared to provide new funding, in addition to what the White House and Congress have already been negotiating over the past nine months.