Issues Affecting America in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
ISSUES AFFECTING AMERICA IN THE AFTERMATH OF HURRICANE KATRINA -- (House of Representatives - September 07, 2005)
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. It is again great to be here with my colleagues from Florida and Ohio. It is so important that we spend the time that we spend here each week helping to get the message out to our generation and, quite honestly, to the generations ahead of us and behind us.
We had a devastating tragedy happen to us in our country, and that is to all of us, about 10 days ago. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I literally live at one point or another through every storm in the ``cone of error,'' as every storm that approaches the United States at some point or another, the gentleman's and my home and the homes of our constituents are in the cone of error for some period of time. So we know what it is like to stare down any one of a number of different levels of hurricanes or tropical storms.
As we speak tonight, we have Ophelia just about 100 miles off the coast of our State, yet again another tropical storm warning. We are up to ``O'' now. It is just never-ending.
One of the things that I would like to spend some time on tonight with both of your indulgence is we do need to get the information out, and one of the things that I did on Tuesday at home in south Florida was help to try to channel the energy of south Floridians who obviously were devastated by the last Category 5 hurricane that hit the United States and that unfortunately hit us in south Florida, deep in the hearts of our community, and we had an outpouring of affection and assistance from across the world. So you can imagine listening to this, what people in south Florida so badly want to do is return the favor and give back to the people in the gulf States and across the country what was given to them 13 years ago.
They do not know where to channel that energy, because there are so many relief organizations, so many on-the-spot relief organizations that have cropped up in the last week; and, unfortunately, if you recall during Andrew and during the 9/11 attacks, you have groups that will form within a matter of days to take advantage of a whole lot of money that is flowing through people's hands.
So what we did in south Florida is we channeled people's energy through one organization, Volunteer Florida, which is an organization affiliated with the State that exists throughout the year to help foster volunteerism. But we turned it into the clearinghouse for our State and gave people a phone number that they can call. I will check my notes and provide it. I do not want to give out the wrong number. Logon to www.volunteerflorida.org. We are trying to make sure that people go through an agency they know they can have confidence in.
Beyond that, there is an absolute necessity, I feel, for us to talk about what has gone on in the last 6 or 7 days, or, rather, what did not go on, because it is just absolutely unacceptable to me, and unacceptable is not a strong enough word.
The response, the lack of response, the indifference, the insensitivity and the actions and words of the leadership that is running this country in response to this devastating tragedy is just inexcusable to me.
While I have heard many of my colleagues and other people across this country say now is not the time for finger pointing, Well, do you know what? If we did not talk about what was not going on last week, then, quite honestly, I think President Bush might still be on vacation even today. I think quite honestly that perhaps there would not have been a response even to the degree that we needed it without someone saying that the emperor had no clothes. Where was the help?
We know, because we live in the cone of error, so often in south Florida that you have several days' notice, and they did have several days notice that a Category 5 hurricane was bearing down on the gulf coast States. Where were the troops on the border of the cone of error? Where was the readiness? Where was the preparation? Where was the response? Where was the organization? It was nowhere.
We have got to make sure not only that it never happens again, but that there is an investigation and that there is a discussion in this body as to why it happened. We should talk about FEMA and why it is being led by a person who has absolutely no previous emergency preparedness or disaster experience, none, why his ineptitude was allowed to continue. Why a year ago when Florida faced four hurricanes, FEMA was handing relief checks out like candy to people who were not even victims of the storms.
There has got to be some accountability, and the time is not 2 months from now. We have billions of dollars that we are appropriating here and are about to appropriate that we should be appropriating, but we are going to go put it in the hands of people who have proven that they are incapable of handling disasters like this? Something needs to happen so that we can hold these people accountable on many different levels.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. MEEK of Florida. I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I want to just highlight that this is not an isolated incident. It would be easy to say that FEMA was just overwhelmed and could not possibly have been expected to be prepared for a storm the size of Katrina since this administration changed the rules of the game when it comes to FEMA. FEMA used to be an independent agency prior to the Bush administration and prior to its being absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. FEMA was an independent agency with a director and a staff that had expertise in disaster preparedness.
I want to just highlight for my colleagues prior to Hurricane Katrina some of the instances of irresponsibility on FEMA's part under Secretary Brown's leadership. In 2004 Florida officials recorded 123 fatalities from last year's hurricanes. We had four hurricanes that hit Florida last year. FEMA pays expenses for 315 deaths; 123 fatalities documented from last year's storms. FEMA pays expenses for 315 deaths. There is something wrong with that.
In 2004 FEMA reimbursed over 5,000 people $9.3 million for rental assistance when a follow-up study showed that most residents never left their homes. In 2004 FEMA reimbursed people for 11-piece bedroom sets when they just owned a bed. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina strikes Florida damaging over 200 homes. FEMA has declined to pay individual assistance to those homeowners.
And I stood in the yard of an 86-year-old woman on Monday who lives in my district who was in tears, whose hearing was so poor she could barely hear what I was saying to her. Her home had no roof. Her neighbor's home across the street was basically crumpled in his yard, and around the corner was the same type of home with the roof ripped off and lying on the front lawn. FEMA has decided that there is an 800-home standard for destruction or damage before they will pay individual homeowners reimbursement for their damage.
Let me just show my colleagues the type of damage that FEMA says people are not eligible for assistance. This is what FEMA will not pay for. After Hurricane Katrina, as a Category 1 storm, struck Florida last week, this is the damage that they say these people do not deserve reimbursement for because we did not have 800 homes suffer this kind of damage.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Because why?
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. FEMA is saying that the standard they are using in 2005, and as I have outlined for my colleagues, which they had no such standard in 2004, coincidentally in a Presidential year, they are saying that because Florida did not reach the threshold of 800 homes that were damaged that our homeowners who have damage are not eligible for individual assistance, meaning they cannot get reimbursed by the government, by FEMA, for the damage.
Now, I will not claim by any stretch of the imagination that Floridians suffered the same type of strife and damage that people in the gulf States did from Katrina, but I will argue that hurricanes know no boundaries. Hurricanes do not respect State boundaries. Katrina did not know the border of Florida and Alabama and on westward. The impact on a homeowner in Florida is the same as it is on the homeowner who suffered the same kind of damage in a gulf State. This is what FEMA is denying. It is disgusting. And it is just not going to stop. We have got to get the word out to people, Mr. Speaker, that there are places that they can turn to for help, but clearly FEMA was not one of them.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, to piggyback on what the gentleman from Florida said about tax cuts, I mean it is just mind-boggling that yet again, their answer, their solution for everything is more tax cuts. I mean, I would not believe it unless I had it in print in front of me, but Treasury Secretary Snow said just the other day, today is September 7, he said yesterday at a press statement, this is in response to what we should do about Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. He said, ``Making the tax cuts permanent would be a real plus in a situation like this, because people would know they had going forward the advantage of lower tax rates,'' Snow said. ``And when people know they have lower tax rates locked in going forward, it affects their behaviors. It makes them more confident of the future.''
Now, let us talk more about FEMA's failure, because that is really what it boils down to at the end of the day, because we need FEMA to be there, we need FEMA to generate confidence in Americans.
Mr. Speaker, the Republicans, and I am going to use the word ``Republican,'' but the Republicans ran last year on being the party that would be the best choice to protect people. They were the security party. That is supposedly the thing that tipped the scales.
Well, it is not just an issue of security in a terrorist crisis, which all of this resulting from Hurricane Katrina calls into question now, about whether they really are the party. They are clearly not the party of crisis.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. They have proved they are not the party.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. They have proved they would not be able to be there in a disaster, in a disaster of any major proportion.
Let me just detail, because I have another chart here that is going to outline a couple of things that I think are important, FEMA's failures. Let us talk about cleanup, and let me just acknowledge that ``personnel'' is spelled wrong on this chart. I want to make sure the people knew that I know how to spell ``personnel.''
Cleanup: FEMA has failed for pay for debris removal from private property. This has resulted in many homeowners incurring large expenses paying for the removal of not only their own fallen trees and other damage, but also rubble blown onto their lots from other locales.
Let us talk about Federal aid.
So we give them an ``F'' in cleanup, because they are basically ignoring Florida as if a storm never hit our State.
FEMA must be more responsible in allocating Federal aid. We are talking about the things that FEMA should have been doing already and must do going forward. About $30.8 million in FEMA money has been awarded to residents in Miami-Dade, a county that I represent and that Congressman Meek lives in, much of it for replacement of appliances such as televisions and air conditioners, although the storms last year in Florida barely grazed the county. Meanwhile, this year, when the storm hit the county directly, now they are not reimbursing people who have legitimate damage and roofs ripped off their houses. Meanwhile, other storm-ravaged areas still have many families who continue to be displaced because of the severe damage to their homes. So they get an ``F'' in Federal aid.
How about personnel? Subsequent reports detailed how FEMA inspectors received little training, that FEMA approved millions in assistance to other areas of the country largely unaffected by disasters; that government scientists said that FEMA misrepresented wind data that it used to justify the payments in Miami-Dade County last year, and that the agency paid 315 hurricane-related funeral claims in Florida, even though the official death toll was only 123. So they get an ``F'' in personnel.
Fourth, the shocking statistics in terms of their preparedness. Florida officially recorded 123 fatalities last year from hurricanes, as I outlined, but were paid for 315 deaths, including those of a man who shot himself and a stroke victim who was hospitalized more than a week before the last storm hit, and that was documented by the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel. In one case, a FEMA worker tried unsuccessfully to persuade a coroner to count among the hurricane casualties a morbidly obese heart attack patient who purportedly was scared to death.
This is the kind of thing that went on in FEMA before Katrina. These are the people that we are putting our confidence in and that people in the gulf coast States are having to put their confidence in, who are going to come in and rescue them and clean up this mess.
Most recently, disaster aid earmarked for hurricane victims in central Florida paid for funerals for people who died of cancer, a brain aneurysm and, in one case, advanced AIDS, according to the local medical examiner. That was in the Sun Sentinel as well. Asked to comment on payouts in central Florida, FEMA spokesman James McIntyre did not provide a response. He also did not address how many more funerals FEMA has paid for since that time.
We have to make sure that FEMA takes responsibility and is held accountable for its mishaps. This is an organization that gets an ``F'' in every single thing that they are primarily responsible for. This is the organization that Americans are supposed to be putting their confidence in, that is going to be there for them when disaster strikes, and in advance of disasters striking that they should be ready for, and afterwards when they have to come in and clean it up. It is just absolutely inexcusable and disgusting.
For example, with the President, responding to the damage that the gentleman talked about to the levees, he said on Good Morning, America last Tuesday, that no one expected the levees to fail. Yet, he cut the budget that would have shored up those levees just last June, in 2004.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. You talk about the quarterback, and let us continue the football analogy. If you have got the quarterback in the FEMA Director not having any ability to get things done, let us continue the football analogy and call Secretary Chertoff the coach, and the President the man in the front office. You have got both of those people who we cannot have any confidence in either.
And I will take a less than left-leaning example here, an excerpt from Fox News Sunday, because the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) talks about it not being intentional. The gentleman is right. It is not intentional. Their response was not intentional. It was just indifferent. The indifference is what is shocking. And you had Chris Wallace go through this exchange with Secretary Chertoff on Fox News Sunday this past Sunday.
Mr. Wallace said, ``But Mr. Secretary, you know there are an awful lot of people around the country that are asking these questions and want to hear answers from you today.
During the week, during this past week you seemed to minimize or not to know about a lot of problems on the ground in New Orleans. Let us watch some of those.''
And then he went on to show him some of the clips.
And this was Secretary Chertoff's response: ``We are extremely pleased at the response that every element of the Federal Government, all of our Federal partners have made to this terrible tragedy. There have been isolated incidents of criminality. We have all seen pictures of looting.''
Then he goes on to say: ``I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the Convention Center who do not have food and water.''
Well, I can understand why, because yesterday when we had the briefing in this Chamber from most of the members of the Cabinet, you had one of the Secretary of Defense's military leaders stand up and say that the pictures we have all seen on TV are just like looking through a straw, that that does not show the full picture. We are looking through a straw, that they are extremely pleased with their response and it is going exceedingly well.
So then he goes on to say, what Chris Wallace says: ``Mr. Secretary, how is it possible that you could not have not known on late Thursday, for instance, that there were thousands of people in the Convention Center who did not have food, who did not have water, who did not have security, when that was being reported on national television?''
Secretary Chertoff says: ``Well, Chris, you know, that is one of the issues we have to look at. I mean, we were in constant touch with what was going on in the field, getting information from State and local officials. As it happened on that very Thursday I was in a video conference with State officials and did not get any information about this. And one of the things we will look at is why in the middle of this emergent crisis there was a conflict in the information.''
You know, I can tell Secretary Chertoff why the State and local officials did not feel like they had to tell you that there were people at the Convention Center, because you could not turn on your TV and not see them dehydrating in front of your very eyes. How about the woman who had her dehydrated baby who she could not even wake up? I mean, I have a 2-year-old. God forbid that ever happened in my family. I can assure you that if it happened in the community that I represent, I have a hunch that the response would have been a little bit quicker because my constituents are not poor and they are not African American primarily.
You know, you talk about the South, and obviously I am one of those Members that would be very protective of the South. But this could be a natural disaster in Detroit or in Wisconsin or name any State with a black community or a predominantly poor community, and there but for the grace of God go them. I mean, really.
We are not here to point fingers. We are just here to point at what has been happening in front of our very eyes. And this has just got to stop. We do have to come up with solutions. We cannot hand out $50 billion to a person who is running the show like it is a circus, like he is the ring leader in a circus, and not a very good one. It is just inexcusable. We cannot ever let this happen again, and we have got to draw a line in the sand and say this far and no further.
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