Hurricane Irma

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Illinois for his inspiring words. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to update the House on what has occurred in Florida after the aftermath of Hurricane Irma.

First, I want to start by thanking so many Members of Congress for supporting a package that doubled from $7 billion to $15 billion, the emergency relief. Not only was it so critical for the great State of Texas, but it was absolutely essential for anticipating the effects that Irma would have on the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico,

Florida, Georgia, up through South Carolina, and southeast United States. When I arrived back on Friday--you know how important it is to go back to your district when there is a crisis on hand--I saw people taking the notice of evacuation seriously. I saw people stocking up on gas, stocking up on water, stocking up their cupboards, making sure to be ready.

While it was initially supposed to hit the southeastern portion of Florida, as you know, these predictions can be somewhat accurate, which is why we always need to be sure to always prepare, whether you think you are in the eye of the storm or not. Because, in fact, after it went through the central Keys and leveled a lot of
Marathon and other central Keys islands, it hit southwest Florida. The eye went right through the Naples-Fort Myers area, and a lot of those folks are still struggling with that. It actually went up through the western center of the State, through the western portion of my district in Polk County, as well as Hillsborough County, Pasco County, and other areas, and then finally going up through the Big Bend.

That night, the wind was so loud and the rain was so hard that you couldn't even hear the trees snapping. When I woke up the next day, I knew it was bad, but, to my surprise, there were trees down everywhere.
Right outside our door, right down the street, in Osceola, Orange, and Polk Counties--all the counties that I represent--one of the first initial acts of courage that I saw was neighborhood folks with nice F- 150s, chainsaws, and all of this construction equipment, volunteering their time to get these major trees out of the roads. We saw that throughout Kissimmee, east Orlando, Winter Haven, Haines City, Lake Wales, and so many areas, like St. Cloud, that I represent.

That debris removal that the State was approved for by FEMA is going to make sure, now that those trees are on the sidewalk or they are on the median, that they are going to get picked up. It is going to be so critical that we have that either 75 or 90 percent reimbursement for debris removal to make sure that these neighborhoods can come back to normal.

One of the other impacts of having all of these trees down, since we haven't had a hurricane with major winds since 2004, was that it absolutely decimated the power grid. If our fellow Members remember nothing else about what I have to say here today, it is that our power grid was absolutely annihilated--the worst that Duke Energy, FP&L, and municipal electricity providers like KUA and OUC said they have seen in their history.
There are people that are without power now--several hundred thousand--and it is primarily because we saw so many of these trees go down on power lines.

When I went through my district, I saw rivers swell to floods. We saw worse in Harvey--far worse flooding in Harvey. We know with the supplemental FEMA packages that we are going to have to take care of Texas and Louisiana. But there are areas that are still under water as of yesterday, as of last night, and as of this morning. A few of them in east Orlando, where the Econlockhatchee River swelled over into the swamps and over into apartment buildings.

There were still, unfortunately, some UCF students that needed to evacuate; and I think, after the firefighters got there with the fire trucks, they heeded that warning.

I saw in Kissimmee flooding in the Mill Slough area. The slough flooded over. And we saw in Buenaventura Lakes flooding in the streets in many neighborhoods.

I witnessed folks throughout the area in mobile homes suffer pretty extreme damage in certain areas of Polk County.

I commend FEMA for allowing these counties and many others on the central and southern part of the State to get the designation of individual assistance. These folks are still without power--many of them worried about the dangers that are still going on. So to know that the Federal Government--Congress--has their back is absolutely a hope that they can hang on to as they sit day after day without power, slowly but surely getting back on their feet.

I will be having outreach events throughout the district. Some of my fellow peers who went through Harvey have suggested that it is critical to have these, not only major FEMA centers, but ones that are embedded in the various neighborhoods, because some people have trouble getting gas and transporting around, and have trouble through mass transit getting to some of these major centers.

So we will be following the cue of others, our brothers and sisters in Houston, by having localized FEMA outreach centers in the district, and I look forward to hosting some of those this week. Throughout the State, we see the Federal and State government working hand in hand with our local governments.

It is key that we are going to need a supplemental package for Texas, parts of Louisiana, Florida, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and parts of Georgia and South Carolina. I know that Congress, like last Friday, will hopefully come together to pass that package.

One of the things that we are going to need to do going forward is continue encouraging local governments and utilities to harden their infrastructure. We in the Federal Government should be promoting and matching funds with those utilities that are going to put their power lines underground. The cost of keeping them up aboveground is going to continue to exacerbate these disasters.

Just understanding by the numbers, we had one of the largest evacuations in the Nation's history. Nearly 7 million people were asked to evacuate from central and southeastern Florida to shelters or other facilities. As of Monday morning, over 200,000 Floridians were still in shelters.

Nearly 33.8 million Floridians lost power to their homes and businesses, with hundreds of thousands still without power.

We saw a massive hit to our citrus crop, which is already struggling with citrus greening, and we have bipartisan letters going out from Congressman Ross, Congressman Rooney, myself, and others making sure that the USDA follows along with FEMA to make sure that our citrus growers can have some relief as they grapple with what will be a dismal 2017-2018 crop.

We saw Florida's coasts, especially in cities like Jacksonville, experience historic flooding. The Atlantic came into the St. Johns. The St. Johns, being one of those rivers that flows north, took much of the water from central Florida and brought it forward to create a terrible situation of flooding of 2 to 3 feet in downtown Jacksonville alone.

For the first time in U.S. history, we saw two Category 4 hurricanes make landfall in the same year. Obviously, we need to continue to prepare for the increasing weather events caused by man-made climate change, and that will be why, whether you agree or not with the cause of it, that we will need to harden our facilities, our infrastructure, our buildings, and our utilities. Whether or not you agree with what the cause of it is, we know that the solutions are making sure to have more resilient infrastructure, building up our coasts, and making sure that we have, through the Federal Government, incentives for our local and State governments to do that.
Officials have reported 31 dead across three States in connection with this hurricane, 24 of those in Florida.
One other area that Congress needs to look at is generators for our nursing homes. This is already required under Florida law, yet we saw several people yesterday, eight of them, pass, our seniors in their golden years, who should be protected.

And when you are talking about no power in Florida, you are talking about not only no ability to turn on the lights, but air-conditioning, which is critical when it is 90-plus degrees out, particularly for our seniors, our children, and our persons with disabilities.

I want to thank all of our first responders: our firefighters; our cops; our EMTs; all the county officials and city officials who put together all this demanding information to get the FEMA Individual Assistance designation; our local officials for continuing, to this moment, to give us information on hardest hit areas; and also our community for coming together, our volunteers, those who are helping get the trees out of the streets, for providing water and food to hardest hit areas, to people opening up their homes, contributing through nonprofits such as the Red Cross. All these issues, all these commitments, all this volunteerism is coming together to help out our constituents.

I am appreciative, Mr. Speaker, for this time to be able to brief Congress on some of the issues affecting central Florida, and I thank my peers for their help and for their continued efforts in Texas, in Florida, in Puerto Rico, in the Virgin Islands, and in South Carolina and Georgia, where we saw a lot of this damage happening.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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