As the Post fire rages on over15,000 acres of Southern California, legislation to improve wildfire forecasting is waiting for a vote in the U.S. Senate.

A bill sponsored by Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Calif called the Fire Weather Development Act, passed the House with bipartisan support and would create a program to better understand wildfires and monitor their development by using drones and other tools. Garcia explained in an interview with Spectrum News that the legislation “basically brings firefighting into the 21st century.”

“Just like we would arm our soldiers with modern technology, modern communications and networking capabilities -- unmanned vehicles on the ground, unmanned aerial vehicles up in the air -- we would give those to our troops before we sent them overseas to fight combat operations. We need to be doing the same for our firefighters before they start going into combat operations, effectively, against these wildfires,” explained Garcia.

Garcia’s district, in north Los Angeles County, has a dense population bordering California state forests, making the threat of wildfires inevitable to his constituents. But the bill, Garcia reasons, would help all states, not just the Golden one.

“This isn't just a California thing, we just had Texas that one of the worst fires in our nation's history. We just had Hawaii that was completely caught off guard and flat footed by one of the most devastating, in terms of loss of life, fires. This is a ‘west of the Mississippi problem,’ and most of the country, frankly.”

Garcia has another bipartisan bill to address another natural disaster from which California has suffered in recent months: atmospheric rivers.

“These atmospheric rivers are a relatively new phenomenon in terms of our awareness to them, they've been happening for a while. But what we're realizing is that especially in Southern California, we're getting these long periods of very heavy rains,” said Garcia. His bill, the Improving Atmospheric River Forecasts Act, would establish a program within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to improve the forecasting of these powerful storms that bring severe flooding and substantial snowfall in its wake.

“It gives the forecasting tools to the folks managing the dams and the reservoirs to release water in anticipation of this. In California, we always hear about the drought, but we actually don't have a water problem in California. Our problem isn't that we don't get enough water, our problem is that we don't store the water.”

Experts say legislation like Garcia's could make a difference, especially as global temperatures continue to rise.

“It's been a period, sort of a tumultuous climate period in California characterized by the worst wildfires on record and also, some of the most significant flooding on record in some places,” explained Daniel Swain, a Climate Scientist at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “I think that there's a lot of awareness right now surrounding the need for California to prepare for these sorts of events and also questions surrounding how the risks are changing, partly due to climate change and partly because there are more people living in high hazard zones, for these sorts of events, than that ever before.”

Swain said specifically in the Fire Weather Development Act that it “really jumps out at me” the “joint focus on understanding the fires themselves, but also in early warning systems.” Swain said a pattern of lack of communication or inability to disseminate information quickly in a wildfire emergency put people in harm's way unnecessarily.

“When in situations where literally minutes count, I can personally remember as somebody in the space, receiving messages from people who were, encountering walls of flame and didn't really have any official guidance as to where to go.” said Swain. “The need for better emergency communications and notifications during wildfire defense is actually quite a real, tangible issue that's been faced by Californians and really people in many other states as well.”

The bills are both waiting on Senate action before they can be signed into law, which Garcia remains hopeful for. But the window for passage may be closing: with the Democratic and Republican national convention as well as a Presidential election less than 5 months away, Washington’s legislative machine will slowly stutter to a halt later this summer.