Press Gaggle by Dana Perino

Business Wire, Oct 25, 2007

Q Fran, Democrats on Capitol Hill and, I think maybe in California, have complained that the administration hasn't devoted enough money to fire protection. How do you respond to that -- or prevention, rather?

MS. TOWNSEND: Well, I mean, we work through USDA, who's got the firefighting capability. We work through the Department of Interior. There's a number of different ways we work on fire prevention. I didn't bring the -- I haven't brought the statistics back on that, but we can get it for you.

MS. PERINO: Let me just add couple points on that. We'll try to get the numbers. First and foremost, it was only after years of Democratic opposition that we finally had the fires in 2003, which led to the passage of the President's Healthy Forest Initiative, which is precisely for this problem.

These problems of wildfires don't occur overnight. They build up over time, and it takes time to take out those fuels. It takes time to -- fuels, meaning, dry timber; when a bug infests a whole area of wood and kills those trees, the most important thing you can do is go in there and clean that out. And over the years, we have -- we, as a federal government, either suppressed wildfires or forest fires, or we weren't allowed to go in and clean out that basically, kindling, that fuels all of these fires.

The other thing that you have to keep in mind is that you have a lot more -- there are many more people today living near fire-prone areas, and they're -- within the Healthy Forest Initiative, part of that was providing people the information that they needed and how to protect themselves, and creating those barriers so that the fuels don't come all the way up to the home. That's different in a situation where you have these high winds and everything is different.

We can try to get you the numbers, but as of last year, last spring, USDA, I believe, had over $800 million roughly that they hadn't spent yet. So I think that the effort has been well funded. But keep in mind, you can't spend all that money at once. It takes a little bit of time to do this work, so extra money isn't necessarily going to help. You have to have the time and the resources to be able to actually get the work done.

Anything else for Fran?

Q Real quickly, I know that different parts of Southern California have been hit with different levels of severity. Could you give us a quick sense of what we're going to see, in terms of the sites that were chosen for the President to see: San Diego and Escondido?

MS. PERINO: We're not commenting on the locations. We'll get them -- we'll be able to talk more about them when we get closer.

Q But he's going to get a, fair to say, representative sense of the type of damage?

MS. TOWNSEND: He'll get -- without going into the specifics of it, he will speak with firefighters, he'll walk -- he'll get an opportunity to be in a damaged area, so he'll -- he should get a pretty representative feel of what the -- what the conditions on the ground are.

MS. PERINO: In addition to the aerial tour.