Colorado Flooding

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. I wish to first say thanks to the great Senator from California at this time for her words. We need to pull together for other places, Sandy and other things. Now it is time for the country to embrace Colorado, as my senior Senator so eloquently said. I know he may have to leave the floor, but I wish to say how much I have appreciated his leadership in all of this. It has made a huge difference.

The work that is really being done is the work on the ground, as Senator Udall was saying. That is the most important work--the first responders, neighbors helping neighbors. But it also has been a time when our political leadership has come together in a way at least for once not to get in the way and actually try to support the people who are just trying to serve their friends and neighbors. I wish to say thank you to Senator Udall, my senior Senator and my friend, for his leadership.

As he mentioned, our State is a long way from recovering from the floods that have inflicted so much damage over this month. The damage has been historic. Based on the latest estimates, over 16,000 homes have been seriously damaged. Thousands have been destroyed. The floodwaters consumed more than 2,000 square miles across Colorado's Front Range--an area about twice the size of Rhode Island. To give some sense of scale, it would be as if Rhode Island were completely underwater twice or, as Senator Mark Udall said, as if it covered a State the size of Connecticut. The floods have tragically killed at least nine Coloradans. We hope that number won't go up, but we don't know if it will.

Over the weekend I went to Jamestown, which is a small community about 14 miles northwest of Boulder, CO. Tara Schoedinger, the mayor of the town, showed me around. The damage to this one town was simply unbelievable. It was as if a bomb had gone off in the middle of this community. The flooding destroyed over a fifth of Jamestown's homes, half of its roads, both of its bridges, a central fire hall, and much more.

The storm killed Joe Howlett, age 72, a beloved pillar of the Jamestown community. The mayor's house is right next to Joe's house. The mayor's house is fine. Joe Howlett's house was destroyed by a mudslide that came down from the very top of the hillside, the very top of the mountain behind his house, killing somebody who had been the glue of that community.

I have a couple of photos from the visit that I wish to share to give a sense of scale of this damage.

This used to be Main Street in Jamestown. We can see it passing between these two utility poles on either side of what is now a raging river. Main Street is gone. It is not the asphalt that is gone; the whole street, the roadbed is gone. All that remains is a torrential river that ran in a completely different place than it does today.

This photo shows the end of Main Street in Jamestown. My deputy chief of staff took that picture. This is what Main Street used to look like. This is what Main Street in Jamestown, CO, looks like as we stand on the floor of the Senate today.

I will say, as the senior Senator is still here, it was amazing, the resilience of the people of this community, the sense of humor people had, and the sense of community they had. There were probably 30 people or so left out of a town of 300. They had come back to see their belongings and to secure what was left of their homes. What they were talking about was how they were going to rebuild this community together. There were tears from time to time, as you naturally would expect there to be, but what really came through, as it always does at the back end of these disasters, was the human spirit we see in each one of our States. We are particularly proud of the Coloradans who are struggling together to get through this incredibly difficult time.

In my mind, these are the most heartbreaking pictures, people who have dedicated their lives to being able to secure homes for their families.

They, by the way, had no expectation there and in other parts of the State that they would ever be affected by a flood and see everything lost.

One woman came up to me while I was there and said, ``this was our house.''

It was in reasonably decent shape compared to some of the others I had seen. She also had a rental property down the road in which she had invested her life savings. She had no flood insurance.

She said: I just don't know how we are not going to go broke as a result of this piece of bad luck.

I also saw in Evans, CO--a rural community near Greeley in the northeastern part of the State--two trailer parks that had been entirely destroyed by floodwaters from 1 mile or 1 1/4 miles away. In the middle of these trailer parks, there was a cement pipe that was about this tall sitting underneath a carport. The thing must have weighed tons. It was a huge culvert pipe that had come from 1 1/2 miles away through these raging waters to position itself in this trailer park.

The people who live there work in agriculture in our State, clean hotels in our community, and work in our oilfields in northeastern Colorado. When I went to the trailer park, the people were assessing the damage. They have lost everything. Because they couldn't qualify for financing for those trailer homes, they bought them with cash.

One person there said: Senator, it is awfully lucky this happened during the day and not at night because our kids were at school during the day. If they had been there at night, we don't know how many of them would have been killed by these floodwaters.

In addition to the human dimension of all of this, which is the most important dimension, the flooding also inflicted enormously costly damage to

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Colorado's infrastructure. Over 200 miles of roads in Colorado have been affected by this flooding. The mountainous terrain in the State is going to make repair work exponentially more expensive and exponentially more difficult. I salute our Governor and everybody who is working to make sure that at least temporary roads are built to these communities in the next 90 days, which would otherwise be completely cut off.

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Mr. BENNET. Earlier this year Congress passed funding for Federal Highway Administration emergency relief. States such as Colorado that have been hit with significant natural disasters are eligible for funding. Our State will be in desperate need of these funds, as New Jersey and New York were in desperate need. The scale of the damage far exceeds what our States and local governments can cover.

As my senior Senator said, there is a catch. There is a cap of $100 million per incident, per State, on this Federal highway assistance.

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Mr. BENNET. Senator Udall and I have a simple bill that would raise the $100 million cap for Colorado for emergency funding for our highways, matching what Congress has done, as Senator Udall has said, many times previously--in fact, as far as I know,

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every time an issue like this has arisen.
We have already talked to the Congressional Budget Office about this. They have looked at the bill. They have told us that it will not cost the Federal Government one dime because the money is already there. It has already been appropriated. It just needs to be used for the purpose Congress laid out--to help States with major disasters that inflicted cost damage on that State's highway system.

Colorado needs this Congress to act, and act now, to get this done so that Colorado can access the highway aid we will clearly need to recover in the coming months.

This $100 million cap on emergency funding from the Federal Highway Administration, as I mentioned earlier, has been lifted many times before. It has been done routinely and swiftly by this Congress following other major disasters when it was obvious--as it is in our case--that federally maintained highway costs would exceed $100 million. We lifted it for the Sandy States, as I have pointed out, earlier this year when we passed the Sandy supplemental on January 29, 2013. We lifted it on November 18 for Hurricane Irene and the Missouri River basin flooding. We lifted it on September 30, 2008, for Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. We lifted it on May 25, 2007, for storms in the State of California. We lifted it on December 20, 2005, for Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. All told, Congress has waived this $100 million cap 14 times in the past 25 years. It is routine, and it is normal when there is a major disaster that causes major highway damage in excess of $100 million.

Senator Udall and I have been working with our colleagues in the Senate. Nearly all of them have indicated a readiness to work with us to pass this bill. I am very grateful for that.

I also wish to thank my colleagues for working with us to get this done quickly for Colorado in recognition of how badly we need this cap lifted and this Federal funding made available.

I urge my colleagues to pull together to work with us to quickly clear this bill in the coming days so we can get Coloradans the help they need.

If you will indulge me a few more minutes--and if the Senator from California would as well--I wish to take a quick moment to tell you why this is so important.

A picture tells a thousand words--especially when I am the one who is speaking. I want to show the damage to Colorado highways as a result of this historic flooding.

This photograph was taken during a helicopter tour by Vice President Biden, Governor Hickenlooper, and FEMA officials of flood damage in Greeley, CO, earlier this week. We can see that a huge portion of the road has washed away and water has breached a dam.

I would like to say that FEMA has been doing a tremendous job with our local and State officials.

This is a section of Highway 72 that collapsed and washed away after a flash flood tore through Coal Creek near Golden, CO, which is outside of Denver--maybe in Golden they would say Denver is outside of Golden. This is what the road looks like there.

A bridge on the south side of Lyons is gone. Huge portions have broken off. This is a photo of the bridge that is missing. Here is another shot of large portions of U.S. 34 washed away.

This is a very clear example of the way these mountain roads work. In this case, when the prospectors first came to Colorado, what they would do is pan for gold in the bottom of the rivers, near the plains. They would see whether there was gold leaf there. That would lead them to walk up these valleys--very steep valleys--to see where the gold was coming from. They founded towns in these places. That is the way the river came, then the road followed the river, and that allowed them to get to their town. You can see in this case this road has been completely washed out by the river.

This is just another instance of mountain roads where we can see the dropoff below is what used to be road but no longer is.

Here is a roadway that, when this photo was taken, is completely submerged and with extensive damage. And then this, what used to be a ribbon of pavement, is now in fragments in the remaining water.

In times of disaster in this country, we have stood together time and time again. Working on behalf of the people of Colorado, along with Senator Udall, that is what we are asking for again. We have pulled together with all of our colleagues and we are going to need all of you to pull together with us.

The Founding Fathers had a lot of work to do and they are often quoted around this place, but they were engaged in founding a country, not dismantling one. This is a reminder of why this vision was so important and why people, frankly, are counting on us to carry this on for this generation of Americans and for the generations that will follow us.

With that, I thank the Chair for his indulgence, and I yield the floor.

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