12th District State Senator Brad Hawkins says he’s excited about wildfire prevention techniques being proposed by the Washington Department of Natural Resources.
“They are rolling out a 10-year, wildfire strategic plan and it includes priorities for what we can do to better fight fires, to be better prepared. It includes information about her budget request to try to staff up better so we can fight fires more as a year-round effort.”
Hawkins says Franz and DNR want to treat fires and forests, at all the different stages of potential or current wildfires..
“We need to more work on the forest health side, on the proactive effort to thin our forest and do some prescribed fire. We also need to improve our firefighting capabilities so that we can put out the fires soon after they start burning rather than just managing these big fires once they start burning.”