Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue advocated the thinning of forests and removing brush to eliminate fuel for wildfires during a roundtable discussion in Northern California, said the Redding Record Searchlight. The cabinet members said thinning the tree stands in forests did not mean clear cutting the land.
Perdue said a reduced fuel load would diminish the threat of catastrophic fires. “We have decimated that whole ecosystem, that economic ecosystem, by our rules and regulations, and litigation and that’s what happened,” Perdue said at the roundtable. “I’m not scared of being sued. I was governor of Georgia for eight years, I got sued every day.”
Redding is near two national forests. The Carr Fire, ranked as the eighth-worst in state history, burned more than 200,000 acre of land to the west and northwest of Redding. The first was 61 percent contained on Monday.