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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| David Knight, Infowars.com. | |
| I'm talking to Tad Haupt. | |
| He's here in John Day. | |
| He has a long experience in the logging industry, and I wanted him to take us around and show us what has happened to the infrastructure where he has worked and lived for many decades. | |
| It's basically been destroyed by the policies of the federal government. | |
| Tell us a little bit about what we have behind us here, Tad. | |
| This originally was Edward Hines' lumber mill, and then it was bought by D.R. Johnson. | |
| A number of years ago and was turned into Grant Western lumber. | |
| This was a thriving mill, you know, saw in Ponderosa Pine, mainly in Douglas Fir, and they were basically squeezed out. | |
| A shortage of timber was made artificially by the U.S. Forest Service and their policies here. | |
| Now, I introduced you as a former logger, but you're also an elected official here, is that correct? | |
| Yeah, I'm an elected official in the Grant County Forest Commission. | |
| A lot of these buildings have been torn down, you were saying? | |
| Yeah, they just started scrapping this last year, and I imagine here by the end of this year, most all the rest of these buildings, they'll probably save a couple, will be scrapped. | |
| They were sold for scrap, just a few cents on the dollar. | |
| And we drove past some other abandoned mills that were going to ruin, and you told us that just a few years ago, tell us how many people were living and working here and what the situation is now. | |
| Well, like 1970, we had almost 8,000 people employed in this county. | |
| It's a huge county with a small population. | |
| Almost everybody was employed, and almost everybody's employed in the private sector. | |
| And now we have less population. | |
| I don't even think we have 8,000 people in this county. | |
| And we probably have around 3,000 employed. | |
| Most all that's government employment. | |
| The policies of the federal and state governments here have just completely squeezed the private sector out, basically. | |
| Now, when we talk about the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management... | |
| People think that they're managing this for the benefit of the forests, and yet at the same time they're shutting down access to the loggers and strangling that industry, putting people out of work. | |
| The forests themselves are suffering massive fires. | |
| Tell us about the fires that have happened here. | |
| Well, here this summer we had a massive, well, we had the biggest fire we've ever had, 110,000 acres. | |
| I was one of the people that got burnt up in that, me and my property, along with many others. | |
| I think close to 50 homes they burnt, and probably tens of thousands of acres of private land they also burnt. | |
| Most of the private land, though, was very well managed. | |
| What the problem was, was the BLM and the federal lands that were adjacent to it were a disaster. | |
| The pine forest here in Grant County, about two tons of light fuels on the ground is known to be acceptable. | |
| The live trees will withstand the fire. | |
| When you're talking about fuel, you're talking about dead trees. | |
| When I'm talking about fuel, I'm talking about pine needles, pine cones, limbs, logs laying on the ground, stumps. | |
| And some of these areas of the federally managed lands in this county exceed 500 tons per acre of fuel on the ground. | |
| When you have too much fuel on the ground, when it catches on fire, then it ignites the secondary fuel, which is the standing live trees, and then you have a massive forest fire. | |
| Every forest has different conditions, and we have a real dry condition here, and we have a ponderosa pine forest. | |
| Ponderosa pine forests are made to burn, but... | |
| They're made to have really light burns, and even the broadcast burning that the federal government does is many times what the natural fires were, and that's what they say they're trying to mimic, but they're actually catastrophic fires. | |
| So you're saying that two tons is what they typically have, but you saw it as much as 500 tons, 250 times the recommended amount. | |
| Even at their higher standards, they were far exceeding that. | |
| I think some of their standards are like 6 to 10 tons and your forest is dead. | |
| Either that or it's mortally wounded. | |
| So there's gross mismanagement unless their purpose is to drive the people off of land. | |
| When I look at this and I look at what they're doing to the miners, I look at what they're doing to the ranchers, it seems to me that what they're trying to manage is... | |
| To get the people away from the land. | |
| That's what we see continually in all these different areas. | |
| I'm telling you, this is intentional. | |
| Take, for instance, if a jetliner crashes. | |
| There's immediate investigations to what caused that jetliner's crash. | |
| These fires are happening all over the western United States. | |
| And there is no investigation. | |
| They don't even want to talk about what's causing them. | |
| And it's their policies are 100% causing these fires. | |
| We warned them. | |
| The projects, they fanned and they did stewardship and broadcast burning and that's where the fire actually exploded and got big. | |
| A number of years ago they implemented a 21 inch rule here in Grant County and they would not harvest any trees over that diameter size. | |
| Well, that diameter size is what the timber industry needs. | |
| But it's also just an arbitrary rule. | |
| There's no good reason for it. | |
| I believe it was done to break the timber industry here, and it had a very good effect on it. | |
| But they hold to that rule even when it's a burned tree. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| I mean, it's insanity. | |
| And then when that tree falls over in a few years, probably a tree that's 21 inches in diameter, when it falls over, you're probably looking at one ton of fuel on the ground. | |
| Withholding a tree that is already dead, saying nobody's going to be able to use this to build a home. | |
| The loggers can't earn a living with it. | |
| We're going to leave it here. | |
| Eventually it's going to fall over and it will become fuel for the next fire. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And this, like looking across the canyon from here, that will never ever be salvaged. | |
| So what that means is within a matter of 15 years, most all that will be laying on the ground and we will have a greater fuel load than when this fire burnt. | |
| When these fires were going, it looked like two atomic bombs hit. | |
| And NASA has satellites that look for heat signatures, and I imagine it's for, you know, looking for nuclear bombs testing and all that. | |
| Red flags come up from these two fires and one in Baker County at the same time, and I was told that they were the equivalent to 300 or 400 Hiroshima bombs, the energy release off these two fires. | |
| These two fires here, they put... | |
| They put smoke in North and South Carolina. | |
| When these fires get big, it takes, you know, when they get huge like this and they're sucking and huffing and puffing, they make their own weather. | |
| And actually, when looking here, there was two fires, one on each side of the canyon. | |
| The one on this side was 14 miles away. | |
| It blew on the one on the west side of the canyon. | |
| And burn all that entire piece right there in less than an hour. | |
| And when that fire sucked out, it pulled this other fire in, and we had winds that exceeded 100 miles an hour here, just from the fires. | |
| And when these fires, when they suck in like that and they make these mushroom clouds, it's sort of like the nuclear testing of the atom bomb and stuff, where you see a shockwave go out and then you see all the dust sucking in on the ground. | |
| These fires can actually make winds 50, 60 miles away from the fire. | |
| So when they're pulling that much in and pushing it so high into the atmosphere. | |
| This is a problem that is happening, as he pointed out, across the country. | |
| And it's not just the logging industry. | |
| It's the mining industry. | |
| It's the ranchers. | |
| And people who think, who live in the cities, who think that they want the government... | |
| To maintain these areas. | |
| This is an issue of mismanagement, of bad stewardship. | |
| What they're doing is even locking recreational use of these parks that you want to have available. | |
| They're locking that out. | |
| They want to take everything. | |
| They want to have zero use for the public. | |
| This is not public lands. | |
| These lands could be managed by the local communities. | |
| They could be managed much better by the people who live here who have a vested interest. | |
| Just like a person who is a rancher isn't going to abuse his animals. | |
| This is livelihood. | |
| So these people who live here, this is a beautiful heritage that they've had here, living here for generations. | |
| It's their livelihood. | |
| They have to live here. | |
| They don't want to mismanage this area. | |
| So that's what everybody's concerned about. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| I'm sorry about what's happened here. | |
| Thank you. | |
| David Knight for Infowars.com. | |
| Did you know that only six corporations control 90% of what millions of Americans see, hear, and read every single day? | |
| It's the illusion of choice. | |
| Think about it. | |
| The mainstream media is owned by only a handful of megacorporations with vested interests. | |
| But on the other hand, the Internet is an interconnected network of billions of sources. | |
| So you can research information for yourself from multiple sources. | |
| Or you can blindly accept what you hear or read in the mainstream media, never questioning what you are being told. | |
| This gives you a false sense of reality. | |
| I mean, do you actually know what you think you know? | |
| Or have you been programmed to accept someone else's version of events? | |
| Think about it. | |
| This is Darren McBreen, and I want you to break the matrix at Infowars.com and PrisonPlanet.tv. | |
| And listen to The Alex Jones Show, because there's a war on. |
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