The Rowena Fire that ignited near The Dalles in June of 2025 burns along a rim of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. (Photo by Mike McMillan/Oregon Department of Forestry)
Oregon’s U.S. senators are urging their peers on a powerful budgeting committee to send emergency funding to Oregon and other states where national lands and parks were recently burned by wildfires.
More than a million acres of federal land burned across the West this summer, including thousands of acres of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area straddling Oregon and Washington in the Rowena and Burdoin fires.
While state, tribal and private lands are eligible for disaster aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency federal land managed by natural resource agencies are not. Officials at the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have to seek congressional help to finance recovery efforts.
In light of this, Oregon’s U.S. Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, both Democrats, joined eight Democratic senators from Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, California and Nevada in writing Monday to the chairs of the Senate Appropriations Committee asking for federal funding. The letter reminded the chairs that Congress has approved similar funding in prior years.
President Donald Trump has in recent months threatened to withhold disaster aid from states led by Democrats and has discussed eliminating FEMA altogether. The agency’s leader resigned Nov. 17 after six months on the job.
“Ensuring that federal lands are restored after wildfires is a responsibility to our shared, national heritage,” the senators wrote to Sens. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington.
They asked that any emergency disaster appropriations bills drafted before the end of the year include additional money to natural resource agencies to help pay for the removal of hazard trees, road and bridge assessments, replacing burned structures and repairing trails.
Besides the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, other spots listed as in need of help for wildfire recovery are the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado, Joshua Tree National Park in California and Gila National Forest in New Mexico.
They said repairing the damage is vital for the safety of visitors to those lands and the economies that rely on them.
“Just as our forests and parks require restoration, so too do the surrounding counties and communities that bear the economic and infrastructure impacts of these disasters; their recovery is inseparable from that of the federal lands themselves,” they wrote.
The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area,established in 1986, is the largest national scenic area in the U.S. It spans 85 miles from Troutdale to the Deschutes River and encompasses 13 communities and a patchwork of state, federal, private and tribal lands.
More than 3 million people visit the area each year, according to the Columbia River Gorge Commission.
The Rowena fire ignited near The Dalles in June and burned more than 3,600 acres, 50 homes and 91 structures. On the Washington side of the river, the Burdoin Fire in July ignited near Lyle and burned 14 homes, 80 structures and more than 10,000 acres.
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