BEAVER, Utah — The destruction from the Cottonwood Fire and the flash flooding that hit this community has Utah political leaders calling for changes to how forests are managed.
On Friday, members of Utah's congressional delegation and Beaver community leaders showed Trump administration officials the aftermath of the wildfire and flooding that took place. FOX 13 News accompanied them past a roadblock to the Cottonwood Fire burn scar and flooded out areas.
"It’s something else," said Beaver Mayor Matt Robinson. "This canyon that we’re in here is representative of what we’re dealing with."
Trees on the mountainside are charred. Mud and debris is all over the ground. Off in the distance, storm clouds advance toward the community triggering more flash flood warnings.
"We want to help you every way that we can," Mike Boren with the U.S. Department of Agriculture told them.
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Utah political leaders called on Congress to pass the "Fix Our Forests Act," which they said would go a long way to ensuring other communities don't have to deal with disaster after disaster. Arkansas Rep. Bruce Westerman, who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, joined Rep. Celeste Maloy in Beaver on Friday.
"We’re always going to have fires, the issue is how intense how these are fires going to be," he told FOX 13 News. "If these forests had been thinned to their caring capacity, a lot fewer trees per acre and some controlled burns to take the underbrush out, there’s just not the fuel there when these fires start to not make them catastrophic fires."
The bill won bipartisan support in the U.S. House of Representatives, but it has been stuck in the U.S. Senate.
"It just takes a really long time to get things on the floor to the vote in the Senate," Sen. John Curtis, who is sponsoring the bill with Democratic senators from Colorado and California, told FOX 13 News. "I have to satisfy 99 senators, anyone can block it. Right now we’re running all the traps on it, we’re very, very close."
Some environmental groups have been supportive of the "Fix Our Forests Act," but others have raised concerns about the bill and its impacts through logging, grazing and undermining environmental policy.
"Not only can inappropriate logging destroy habitats and ecosystems, but logging mature and old-growth trees, which are more fire resilient than younger trees, could actually make the forest less able to withstand wildfires," the group Environment America said of the legislation last year.
But Utah political leaders don't believe it would harm the environment — but help it.
"Fix Our Forest isn’t a repeal of our bedrock environmental statutes," Rep. Maloy insisted in an interview with FOX 13 News.
She said the bill could benefit rural Utah communities. While praising local U.S. Forest Service officials, Rep. Maloy said the bill would cut through bureaucratic red tape and environmental pushback that stalls forest management and prevents wildfires.
"If we were turning some of this small-diameter timber into wood shavings or bio-char, that creates jobs in rural Utah. When we don’t it turns into fuel, flood and poverty. We have people who are going to lose their homes in Beaver," she said.
Utah lawmakers were supportive of the act. House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, said he had concerns that the Cottonwood Fire and its aftermath could happen elsewhere in the state.
"You look at the Wasatch Front and what is to the east of us? We have a huge mountain range. We could be staring down the same things that happened in Beaver County in Salt Lake County, in Weber County, in Utah County," he said.
