House passes bill to improve wildfire prevention accountability after NBC News report
An NBC News investigation found the Forest Service overstated the land it treated to reduce wildfire risk by an estimated 21% nationally.
A bill to improve how the federal government tracks wildfire prevention work passed the House in a near-unanimous 406-4 vote Wednesday, a month after the nation’s deadliest wildfire in over 100 years killed at least 115 people in Hawaii.
The bill, the Accurately Counting Risk Elimination Solutions (ACRES) Act, was proposed this year after an NBC News report revealed that the government has long overstated how much of the country’s federal forests it has protected from catastrophic fires.