National Weather Service

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I have come to the floor tonight to talk about a few issues. Literally, I thought I was going to come and talk about healthcare and the need for us to come together to help reduce healthcare costs and to continue to fight to make sure Americans are covered because covering them helps reduce all our costs when you have the reduction of uncompensated care. But I also wanted to mention a very important safety issue on aviation.

But what I need to say now is really to the State of Washington and to our National Weather Service people. I just got off the phone from our National Weather Service Director for the Pacific Northwest, who was telling me about the extremely dangerous events that are now taking place in the Northwest, with flooding, that we are going to see catastrophic events in at least a couple of our counties, and certainly a lot of damage in the better part of Puget Sound.

So it is very important that the public understand that these rivers, particularly in Snohomish and Skagit Counties, are going to reach catastrophic levels, literally 4 to 5 feet above the historic mark of these rivers. So this weather event of what is called an atmospheric river, bringing about this much precipitation into our region is going to cause the need for evacuations.

Do not tarry in the evacuation. If evacuations are requested, please comply. These are very drastic situations, and we need the public to understand that. So I am sure you are going to hear a lot more from your local forecasters, your county executives, your emergency response teams, but just know that we are under an unbelievable weather event, and we need to have the public's cooperation.

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