Commemorating the 1-Year Anniversary of Superstorm Sandy
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. PETERS of California. Thank you very much, Mr. Tonko. I appreciate the chance to speak with you on this special occasion.
I am the climate task force chair of the House Sustainable Energy and Environmental Coalition, SEEC, and I rise to recognize the 1-year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy and to recognize those who have lost their lives as well as those continuing to rebuild from the destruction.
I might mention, for the benefit of Mr. Holt, that I am a graduate of Westfield High. I spent my high school years in New Jersey. I still have sisters in Chatham and New Providence and nieces and nephews. I visited regularly Long Beach Island, Ship Bottom, and Beach Haven for family vacations. So I know well a lot of those areas and howhard they have been hit both from a personal and an economic standpoint.
I want to speak a little bit too about San Diego, though, as it has been my home for 25 years. My constituents in San Diego have experienced and know the long rebuilding and recovery process after disaster strikes, and we have a little bit of a different effect from climate change and global warming.
October marks the 10-year anniversary--and I think the anniversary was a few days ago--of the beginning of the Cedar Fire, the largest wildfire in California history. As a San Diego City Council member at the time, I remember firsthand the destructive impact of this fire on people's lives. It destroyed hundreds of homes, personal belongings and memories, and the recovery costs were in the billions of dollars.
The Cedar Fire burned through 273,246 acres of San Diego County, destroyed 2,232 homes, and took 15 lives. It burned through 95 acres of the Cuyamaca State Park and blazed through 98 percent of its mature conifer trees. To date, little of the forest has grown back from the bare mineral soil left behind by the wildfire.
The community faced similar damage in 2007 during the Witch Creek Fire, and parts of the city of San Diego were also scarred at that time.
Wildfires aren't new to California, but the damages from these fires are rising. This will sound familiar when we think about the warmest years on record all being recent. In California, 12 of the 20 most damaging wildfires occurred in the last 10 years. This has huge implications for California's tourism and farming industries. For example, take the Rim Fire this summer that pushed into parts of the Yosemite National Park and devastated local tourism.
After the Cedar Fire, San Diego, the county and the city, are undoubtedly more prepared and ready to respond to a large wildfire. We have better communication equipment, better communication among agencies, and better fire equipment in general. More importantly, we have worked to minimize further damage through better planning. As Thom Porter, the chief of the San Diego Fire Authority said, ``It's not about stopping a fire from occurring but preventing the amount of damage it causes.''
Today San Diego has new planning guidelines and building codes and 100-foot brush clearance requirements around homes. Before 2003, it was just 30 feet. We found that we could decrease risk and save homes and lives.
Resiliency starts at the local level because they know the conditions and the situations on the ground. They are the people who can talk to the neighbors about what they have to do to be ready. We have to make our communities more resilient to wildfires, hurricanes, and other extreme weather.
In the last 5 years, wildfires have cost taxpayers more than $1.6 billion a year. Last year, 9.2 million acres were burned by wildfires, which is an area bigger than the States of Delaware, Rhode Island, and Connecticut combined.
In June, I introduced the bipartisan STRONG Act so the Federal Government could give tools for planning and resiliency to State and local actors. I think one of the first things we noticed as freshmen here, one of the first votes we were asked to take, was $60 billion for Sandy relief, which was the appropriate vote to take. We have spent $136 billion on relief in the last 2 years off the budget.
Every dollar we spend now on disaster preparedness and resiliency, we can avoid at least $4 in future losses and FEMA expenses. We can bounce back faster with less economic damage. Each day that a community is disrupted by extreme weather, we lose economic output. So we need to be doing more to support our local communities with emergency management communication, public health, and energy reliability in the event of an extreme weather event, whether it is a wildfire or something like Superstorm Sandy.
Swiss Re, a major reinsurer, recently ranked the top 10 metro areas in North and Central America that face the highest value of working days lost from natural perils. Nine of them were in the United States.
On this occasion, I commit with my colleagues to better protect my district from the devastation caused by extreme weather by working to rebuild stronger and smarter with a mind for the future.
Again, thank you very much for inviting me. I would be happy to discuss some of these items.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. PETERS of California. Just to follow on.
I think what Mr. Cartwright said is exactly right. We don't know that our house is going to burn down, yet we buy fire insurance because we know that there is a risk of it.
I often hear in this building, unfortunately, a lot of professed doubts about climate change; but even though I disagree with it, I think the science is pretty clear. If you doubt it, that doesn't mean it is not going to happen and you don't prepare for it and you don't plan for it and you don't make the investments to be more resilient, which is what the STRONG Act is about.
So I completely agree. In the face of doubt, that doubt should not equal inaction. The fact that we have the strong evidence that this is happening, that we have had these off-budget expenses, is every reason in the world we need here to plan.
I would say to folks listening at home that they need to get in touch with people in this body to let them know that.
One thing I would just add briefly about what we did in San Diego, I was chair of a volunteer climate initiative which was part of the San Diego Foundation's effort to do civic engagement. What we tried to do was, through philanthropy, provide good support for decisionmaking locally around climate, because a lot of leadership, as you know, Mr. Tonko, is happening at the local level.
We provided research on science. We did a study of what the major climate effects in San Diego would be, which are more intense wildfires, water supply threats, and sea level rise--no surprise to anyone here. And we were able to give that information to our elected officials so that they knew what we had to plan with locally.
We also did a public opinion survey just to let them know what people thought. It turned out that people in San Diego wanted to be leaders on climate action. First of all, they wanted to be leaders in the State. They also didn't want the jobs associated with the industrial opportunities to be going to China or Texas. So we were able to arm our elected officials with that information and made them a lot bolder about taking the actions that we needed to take.
I bet the people in this body would benefit from the same kind of information and wouldn't be surprised that America is behind us in taking action, particularly on getting ready and being resilient and being prepared to save money down the road.
No one likes spending $134 billion off-budget. I certainly didn't, and I know my colleagues don't. There is no need to do that. We can be prepared.
Again, thank you very much for scheduling this at this hour.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source