US lawmakers advance forest management bill as fires scorch LA

Legislation to reduce the impact of increasingly devastating forest fires on US federal land passed the House of Representatives on Thursday as firefighters battled to tame the latest in a series of blazes threatening southern California.

One of the first bills to pass the lower chamber of Congress in Donald Trump's presidency, the Fix Our Forests Act would increase the pace and scale of forest management projects by speeding up environmental reviews, deterring frivolous lawsuits.

It was reintroduced after passing the House of Representatives last September with overwhelming bipartisan support but did not make it through the Senate, and will need to compete for floor space in the upper chamber before it can be signed into law.

It passed the House comfortably in a 279-141 vote but environmental groups said the bill had been "misleadingly" named and would open public lands to massive logging projects under the guise of preventing wildfires.

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"This is nothing more than a bill of goods that will do little of anything to combat fires and instead plays favorites with the timber industry which is hungry to consume more of our forests -- removing large fire-resilient trees and devastating the lands and species which call them home," said Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife.

The group said the bill would remove science from land management decisions and weaken protections for endangered species.

The vote came with the greater Los Angeles area on edge after two enormous fires tore through America's second largest metropolis, killing more than two dozen people and wreaking billions of dollars of devastation.

Firefighters on Thursday were trying to tame a new blaze in Castaic, 35 miles (56 kilometers) north of Los Angeles, that forced 31,000 people to flee their homes.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson blasted Democratic leaders in Los Angeles and California for having "mismanaged virtually every aspect" of the wildfires, leaving a reservoir empty and allowing forest debris to pile up near homes.

"They assumed the risk because they advanced their radical political agenda, and now people are paying a heavy price for that," he told reporters.

"We think that needs to be taken into account going forward, but the bipartisan Fix our Forest Act will do what the governor of California would not do, and that is restore the health of our forests and make communities more resilient to wildfires."