Three Firefighters Died. Forest Service Chief Showed Up Selling Timber.

Days after three firefighters died in the West, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told a room of governors that more logging is the cure. His own agency gutted the crews who fight the fires.

June 30 is a hard day on the fire calendar. Thirteen years earlier, on June 30, 2013, nineteen members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were overrun at Yarnell Hill in Arizona, the deadliest day for American wildland firefighters in decades. This June 30, three days after three more firefighters were tragically killed in a burnover along the Colorado-Utah border, Tom Schultz took the podium at the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Deer Valley, Utah, to give the keynote at the Western Governors’ Association meeting.

He honored the dead first. Emily Barker, 38, of Clinton Township, Michigan. Nick Hutcherson, 27, of Glendale, Arizona. Sydney Watson, 27, of Warrior, Alabama. Two flew with a Rifle helicopter crew. Two more firefighters were burned in the same incident. Schultz called the three dedicated public servants who made the ultimate sacrifice. He was right about that.

Then, with the fire season already running about 50 percent above the twenty-year average for acres burned, he told the governor…