State officials on Tuesday announced awarding about $6.3 million in grants to businesses, nonprofit groups and school districts around the North State to find solutions to reducing forest waste that pose a fire risk from thick and overgrown land. The money is designed to help businesses purchase equipment to process forest waste that typically can’t be milled into lumber. The money also will be used to train people to do forest thinning and prescribed fire and other logging and natural resource jobs. The state has set a goal to annually thin out and treat 1 million acres of overgrown and dense forests to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires that have devastated communities and forests across the state over the past 10 years, said John McCarthy, the California Department Forestry and Fire Protection’s program manager for wood products and bioenergy.