Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., told Newsmax on Wednesday that California needs additional water reservoirs and other measures to fix the state's "very serious water problem" that impeded efforts to fight recent wildfires.
McClintock said on "National Report" that the wildfires that broke out overnight on Tuesday in San Diego County, causing evacuation orders in some communities, and the ones in Los Angeles have shown that California has "a very serious water problem" despite having "one of the most water-rich regions of the country in Northern California."
He added, "The problem is that we stopped building reservoirs to store water from wet years so that we have plenty in dry ones, and that's because of the environmental laws that were passed in the 1970s. Those same environmental laws have prevented us from properly managing our lands, which is why we are being consumed by fire throughout the region."
McClintock noted that prior to "the modern era, we lost about 4.5 million acres a year to catastrophic fire" before "land management agencies" were established "to do a little gardening."
He added that the state also started auctioning off excess timber to logging companies that paid to remove it and leasing public lands to ranchers whose cattle and sheep would suppress brush growth with their grazing. The state also used controlled fires to remove undergrowth and other measures to prevent large-scale wildfires.
McClintock said these policies "brought our fire losses from about 4.5 million acres a year to about a quarter million acres a year. But then those same environmental laws made permitting for all of these practices all but impossible, so we stopped."
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