Texas

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, we have had some bizarre weather in my State in the last week or so. We are still reeling from a deadly winter storm that hit all 254 counties in the State of Texas last week.

The snowstorm brought snow, ice, and prolonged subfreezing temperatures. We don't have temperatures below zero in Texas--or at least we haven't for a long, long time, but we did last week. As a result, it paralyzed much of our critical infrastructure, leaving millions without electricity, leaving them without heat, and leaving them without running water for days on end.

The good news is that power has now been restored for the vast majority of Texans, and cities are slowly lifting water boil notices as water filtration systems come back online.

But a number of families are still facing outages, and as we have seen during previous disasters, low-income and minority communities are the hardest hit. Our top priority is to restore power and clean water to every single Texan.

Throughout this episode--this tragedy, really--my staff and I have been in contact with local, State, and, of course, Federal officials to determine what kinds of things we can do to help and how we can mobilize resources as soon as possible. As recovery efforts continue in the coming days and weeks, I will continue to try to do that.

This is not unlike what we have to do periodically for hurricanes that seem to find their way to the State of Texas. But in this case we know that some of the problem was not an act of nature; it was a failure to anticipate these subfreezing, subzero cold temperatures. So we have got to ask not only ``What happened?'' but ``How can we prevent it from happening again in the future?''

As I said, we experience, from time to time, hurricanes, occasionally tornadoes and tropical storms or record-low temperatures, but we cannot allow our infrastructure to go offline for days on end.

I want to thank the countless Texans who supported each other during this crisis. There are those that have gone above and beyond the call of duty in their official capacities, whether it is as first responders, emergency dispatchers, utility and energy workers, healthcare workers--the list goes on and on.

But there are also the unsung heroes--those who invited neighbors into their homes, delivered hot meals to those in need, checked on an elderly neighbor, those who towed vehicles stuck in the snow, and so much more.

I just want to assure all of my constituents that we are in this together, and we will do everything we can not only to find out how this happened but what we can do to make sure it never happens again.

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