Executive Calendar--continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, 2 weeks ago this very evening, I had just finished my time as Presiding Officer over the Senate, and I made the decision that early the next morning I would be returning to Florida instead of staying here the following day. The reason was that at that time and in that moment, the strongest storm ever recorded out of the Atlantic was bearing down first on the Caribbean and headed not just toward Florida but actually toward the city in which I live. Then the Nation and State watched over the next few days as that storm took its track.

There has been a lot said about Hurricane Irma since that time. I have heard some say that it could have been worse, and I imagine in some particular instances perhaps that is true. Had that storm entered through Tampa Bay, FL, the loss would have been incalculable. Had it hit directly throughout the southeast coast, right through the major metropolitan areas of Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties, the economic costs would have been very significant. So it is possible that the storm could have had an even greater impact, but it is difficult to say that to the people who were impacted by it.

It was a unique storm in a lot of different ways, like the sheer scope of it. One of the things that really perplexed people in Florida, including myself--we were thinking perhaps we should move our families to another part of the State. We have a very good building code in Florida, but there are no structures under our building code that can withstand the hurricane winds of a category 4 storm. It is very difficult to do that, given the height and level of construction.

One of the difficult things about figuring out where to go is that the whole State was covered by it. It was a huge storm in its size and an enormous storm in its impact. I know for a fact that dozens of people left South Florida, as an example, and drove to another part of the State, only to find themselves actually worse off than they would have been had they stayed home. There was no way to know that at the time.

I can tell you, maybe it is because of our history with hurricanes. Obviously, in 1992, as a student at the University of Florida, I was home, the semester was about to begin, and Hurricane Andrew came barreling through there. It fundamentally altered what South Dade looked like.

Whether it was the impact of the storms in 2004 or 2005 or perhaps it was the images from Harvey from just a few weeks ago and the impact it has had on Houston and the State of Texas, people took the threat incredibly seriously, and there was a massive evacuation, perhaps the single largest evacuation in the history of the United States.

In any event, the storm did come. We measure the impact of the storm first and foremost by the loss of life, and there were 59 people who lost their lives--directly related to the storm in one way or another.

Eleven of those people died after the storm from carbon monoxide poisoning. When power is lost, people run generators, sometimes even running them inside their homes. Carbon monoxide gets on them, and before you know it, they are dead. At least a dozen more didn't die, but they had been poisoned. It is an incredible threat after storms that we see every single time.

Nine people died in Monroe County, some from natural causes, although it is hard to imagine that having a heart attack in the middle of the storm or in the aftermath wasn't somehow related to the stress such a storm brings.

Of course, we all heard the horrifying news last week that eight senior citizens had lost their lives because a nursing home's air- conditioning unit failed them in the middle of the night. The heat became unbearable, and they passed.

You can only think, despite these horrible tragedies of losing 59 people, how many more would have died had they not heeded the warnings to evacuate.

So I begin talking about the storm today by thanking the men and women who responded before and after the storm--and even during it--who kept so many people safe, and they did so even though their own families were being impacted by the storm. If you see a police officer or a firefighter from a community in Florida, they have homes, they have children, they have families, and they, too, are concerned about the impact it could have on them. Even as they are out there getting the rest of us ready, they have to think about themselves and about their own families. We thank them for the extraordinary work they do every day but in particular--at this moment--because of the storm.

We think about the National Guard. These were people who, on Monday or Tuesday of that week, were at the accounting firm or doing whatever their job might be. They were called up, and within a matter of hours found themselves on the road and headed toward an uncertain number of days that lay ahead.

We think of all the people throughout the emergency operations centers--from the State center in the capital to all of the counties-- who put in over a dozen hours a day, if not more, preparing to handle the storm.

We thank the Coast Guard for the extraordinary work they do and the Department of Defense, particularly the Navy, which were prepared to respond--and did so--to the storm, even as many of them were coming off similar duty just a few weeks earlier responding to Harvey.

Of course, we thank the first responders, who came in from all over the country. I was in the Florida Keys on Friday, and I ran into firefighters and police officers from as far away as Colorado, and we thank them for coming all the way to Florida to help us. We could not have done it without them.

I would also be remiss if I didn't thank the National Hurricane Center. The improvements that have continued to happen year after year have helped improve not just the forecast track of the storm but its intensity, even though I can tell you, all hurricanes are bad.

Obviously, the stronger they get, the more damaging they become. I would just say that the work they do--we had 5, 6 days to get ready for this, and it all began because of the National Hurricane Center. They don't always have that much time, but they were able to give us and everyone proper notice. You can't carry out these evacuations unless you have accurate meteorological information, and they did an extraordinary job and continue to do so now, monitoring the new storm that tomorrow is going to make landfall over the island of Puerto Rico, potentially as a category 5 but certainly a category 4; I will talk about that more in a moment. We thank them and so many others. There are so many to mention that we would run out of time, but we thank them.

Let's first talk about some of the challenges. The first challenge, as I said earlier, is the scope of the storm. If you know anything about Florida, it is a peninsula, the third largest State in the country in terms of population. But it is a peninsula that sticks out into the Gulf of Mexico and into the Caribbean Basin in the Florida Straits. It is a huge State.

From Jacksonville, FL, in the northeast all the way down to Key West is a long distance, and we are talking about a storm that had damage in Key West, damage in Jacksonville and the southwest in Naples and the central part of the State and the southeast. Literally, the entire State of Florida was impacted by the storm because of its size and because of the route that it took, and that poses all kinds of challenges.

Our emergency operations system is built on the idea that if two counties are hit, all the other counties help respond. Well, every county was being hit. Every county was getting ready. So that right away put a real strain on our emergency operations system. We were counting on other counties being able to help us, but they couldn't because they themselves were getting ready to deal with the impact of the storm.

There were prepositioned assets in Alabama and Georgia getting ready to come down and help us, but they themselves were also in the track of the tropical storm and winds headed in their direction, not to mention the impact it had on their ability to get there. So it impacted the entire State.

You know, we have gotten trained, in watching these storms, to see images of destroyed buildings. Obviously, that is a terrible thing. We lived through that with Andrew, and we have our share of that. If you see the images of the Florida Keys, you can tell quickly that a storm went through there. But underneath the surface, underneath the structures that might still be standing and the roofs that might still be intact are deep scars and damage that will be around and will impact us for months if not years to come.

Think, for example, of the Florida Keys. If you haven't been there, it is an incredibly unique place. There is only one way in and one way out. It is a chain of small islands built on a coral rock formation, and it is truly unique. The further south you get in the Keys and the further southwest you get as it turns, the more unique it gets. It is a place where I have spent many days, especially with our family. Some of our best memories with the family were made in the Florida Keys. We spent a number of days there not long ago before the storm.

If you know anything about the Florida Keys, this is not a place with Johnny Rockets or TGI Fridays. It has a lot of small businesses, not just in the restaurant industry but in the hotels, the bait shops, the charter captains, and everything in between. There are a lot of small businesses, and many of them are generational businesses. The families have been there and have been doing it for 60 years. Those businesses are literally going to have no customers now or for the foreseeable future. They still don't have power in many places. They don't have internet. They don't have fuel. They certainly don't have tourists.

Imagine for a moment that you are the owner of a small restaurant and you have to go 30 to 60 days without any revenue. I can tell you that most businesses don't have that kind of reserve, not to mention your employees who may not get paid.

When you think about the Florida Keys, it is an expensive place to live because it is a valuable piece of land right on the water, which is an enormous challenge for the workforce. The people who work in the Keys don't want to drive 3\½\ hours a day from South Dade to get down to the Lower Keys, or anywhere, for that matter, depending on the day.

That housing stock in many places is trailer parks, mobile homes, or small apartments. The trailers are gone. The apartments have suffered water damage, and they certainly are not livable now, in many cases because of water and wind damage.

Think about agriculture. I know Florida is not thought of as an agricultural State. I promise you, there is an extraordinary presence of agriculture in our State and a great variety of crops.

Florida is one of the largest cattle producers in the country. You don't associate Florida with cattle, but it is an enormous part of our agriculture. Our signature crop is citrus, the sugar cane growers, fresh vegetables, and the nurseries. The nurseries produce tropical plants that you see in big developments or all of the indoor plants.

Much of that is grown in Florida.

There are also dairies. Florida is a dairy provider to much of the Southeast. Every single one of them has suffered significant damage and, in the case of a couple of them, catastrophic damage.

The citrus industry was already being hurt by citrus greening, a disease that kills trees. Senator Nelson and I went to a grove two days after the storm, and more than half the fruit was already gone and more was dropping. That fruit is gone. Those farmers live off of that fruit.

The whole fruit goes to the whole fruit market, and the bulk of it goes to the juicing market. Much of it was green. So it wasn't even ready to pick. But once it hits floodwater, it cannot be used or sold. The FDA says it can no longer be consumed safely. They lost all of it, on top of the fact that their yields were already lower because of greening. They lost the fruit they had.

It gets worse. They lost trees. It is not simple. You don't just go to Home Depot and buy an orange tree and next year it produces oranges.

These new trees take at least 4 years before they begin to produce the fruit to sell, if it survives greening. They lost trees, and they are still losing fruit, and they will still lose more trees because all of those groves are under water. All that water is sitting on the roots, and those trees will not survive. This is a catastrophe.

I don't mean to leave anything out. I can tell you the truth that there will be no Florida fresh vegetables. There will be no Florida vegetables in November. Those green beans that many of you eat on Thanksgiving Day will not come from Florida. We will have to make up the gap from foreign producers because that crop is gone entirely. I don't mean to leave anything out. I am just stating that the hit to agriculture was extraordinary. Unfortunately, for agriculture, this has happened, but there has not been a lot of media coverage about it because not a lot of agriculture is near metropolitan centers. There is not a lot of media coverage.

Look, I am not here to beat up on the media. I thank the media, and I have done so because a lot of the work they did on the national and local news was what got people motivated to get up and go and get out of harm's way. But there are not a lot of camera crews stationed live in a citrus grove. So the power gets put back on and the schools reopen, and most people forget that these farmers--most of them--are not wealthy landowners. Some of these are fourth generation growers who have been on that land and are producing and are already stretched because of some of the challenges they have, whether it is with trade or citrus greening or whatever the challenges might be. It has just gotten worse for them.

Do you know who else got hurt? The entire industry that serves them. Everyone in the towns built around them. This is big trouble. It is truly a catastrophic agricultural event in every part of the State. Virtually none of Florida's agriculture went without being impacted by this.

I think about the migrant workers who work there. Some were afraid to come forward because of their immigration status. They thought that, if they showed up at a shelter, they would be deported, but more importantly, in terms of life, some of them have nowhere to live. Their housing, to begin with, is precarious. A lot of the mobile homes are damaged by water. There is no electricity. They are not near a metropolitan center, and they are afraid to come out. Thank God for so many groups that have come forward to try to help them.

We scoff about power outages. I don't know how people lived in Florida before the invention of air conditioning with the heat and humidity. It is an inconvenience for a lot of people, but it is life threatening in the case of senior citizens or people who require refrigerated pharmaceuticals for their survival. It has had an extraordinary impact on them.

All of these circumstances have a true impact and are among many of the challenges that we now face. There is a special focus, for example, on Monroe County, in the Florida Keys. This storm threatens to fundamentally alter the character of Monroe County if we do not help the Florida Keys, because these trailer parks are on valuable land, and the owners of that land are going to be tempted to build on them, not mobile homes, again, but to build structures designed for visitors that have more money. That means that we will lose our housing stock, but ultimately it means that we will lose the character of the place--all of the small businesses that service the fishing boats and the diving.

We have some of the greatest collections of coral reefs in the world right off Marathon, by Sombrero Key in the Florida Keys. All of that will be out of business for a long time. Can they survive? I don't know.

There are small business owners that might own an apartment building. They use it in the summer for their family and rent it in the winter. It is damaged. So they can't rent it this year. So guess what. They may not be able to pay the mortgage, which will lead to foreclosures.

I mentioned agriculture. I don't know how Florida agriculture-- particularly citrus--can recover from the storm without significant help.

This storm exposed a real vulnerability to a State with so many senior citizens. It is not just the nursing homes and the ALFs. We have apartment buildings, section 8 HUD housing and the like--entire apartment buildings with 13, 14 stories. There are towers of apartment buildings populated by senior citizens. What happens when the power goes out? The first thing is that all of the food in their refrigerators rots. So within 48 hours, I don't care how much they stored for the hurricane, they can no longer eat a lot of the food they need for their nutrition.

You might say: Why don't they get up and go see to a relative's or go somewhere where they are handing out food?

They are on the 13th or 12th floor of a building where the elevator doesn't work. They can't walk down 13 flights of stairs. This exposed a real vulnerability that we will have to examine.

Then there is debris removal. Some of these counties are small counties. Some of these counties still owe money from storms last year.

FEMA dispersed the funds to the State. The State hasn't dispersed it to them yet. Now they have to go out and hire, and they need hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up these roads, and they don't have that in their budget. There is a huge strain in that regard.

Senator Nelson and I spent 2 days together traveling last week. We will continue to work together to help so many different people. On Friday we had an event in Immokalee, which is a migrant community in Southwest Florida, and 800 people applied for assistance.

We were in St. Augustine yesterday, and close to 1,000 people applied for assistance.

In Jacksonville today, there were 1,800 people applying for assistance. We will be going to Naples, FL, and Fort Myers later this week. We will be back in Immokalee again on Friday, and we are about to start out in the Florida Keys helping people.

It is funny. They say: FEMA--go online and apply there. Here is the problem, when you have no internet and no power, how do you go online and apply? So we are trying to get out there to help as many people as we can.

Now, I don't want to leave on a negative note. There is nothing positive about a storm, but there are some uplifting things to point out. I will be brief and to the point. I am uplifted by these crews sent down by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or the LDS church, who are out there helping people who can't afford it or who don't know how to do it.

Professionals are out there helping people cut down trees and remove debris from their homes and put tarps on their roofs. They are volunteers who came on their own to do it. I was uplifted on Saturday by visiting the North Carolina Baptists' men's relief society, who were in South Florida, and 120 people were preparing hot meals to send down to the Florida Keys. They have fed thousands of people in a very impressive operation. I am uplifted by the Red Cross volunteers from New York and New Jersey who I have run into who flew down, rode out the storm, and were there working in the shelters. I am uplifted by stories of school principals who took over these shelters because people didn't show up to run them who were supposed to show up. So these principals, custodians, and cafeteria managers showed up and took care of all these people. I am uplifted by stories like the one today in Jacksonville, where a gentleman and his wife who were disabled came forward. They lost their home and they had to be saved from floodwaters. They were living in temporary housing. A donor had put them up for a week. It ran out, and they had nowhere to go tonight. We were able to match them with a donor, who insists on remaining anonymous, for another week of temporary housing while, hopefully, we can get them the housing they need.

One of my favorite stories--and I believe Senator Nelson shared this the other night--is this one that I wanted to close with. He and I ran into this at Ave Maria Catholic University, which is literally out in the Everglades, between Naples and Miami. We went out there to visit, and we were told extraordinary stories of some of their students.

On the night before the storm, there were about 300 migrants from nearby communities--many of whom are probably undocumented, in the country illegally--who didn't want to evacuate. They were afraid of being deported. Ultimately, they saw that the storm was bad. They showed up at Ave Maria. Ave Maria opened its doors and welcomed them into the gym. There were students who stayed behind and played with the kids, entertained the kids throughout the storm, and took care of them.

What was really uplifting was the story of two nursing students.
Right before the storm hit, right before you could no longer go out, the sheriff's office shows up at Ave Maria with eight seniors from a nearby ALF. The staff at the ALF quit. They literally left. They didn't show up. They abandoned them. The sheriff's office brings them, and these two nursing students bring the eight seniors into their dorms.

They brought them into the women's dorm and cared for them for two days, triaging the medicine they needed to take, understanding how to do this, that, and the other. These are amazing stories about these young people. If there is any doubt about the future of America, think about the extraordinary work these young people put in. Nobody told them to do it. They could have left. They could have gone back to wherever they were from, but they stayed and took care of them.

We have a long way to go, but we want to thank all the people for the great wishes we got from all of my colleagues and from people around the country. This is a storm that impacts Florida in ways we are going to feel for a long time.

Let me close by asking all of you to take a moment tonight, if you can and you wish, to pray for the island of Puerto Rico, a U.S. Territory, where millions of our fellow Americans are staring down the barrel of the most powerful storm that ever has perhaps hit that island, and this after already getting hit by Irma just a week ago. It has the potential to be an extraordinary catastrophe. We pray that is not the case. I hope we stand ready to assist our fellow Americans on the island of Puerto Rico. Let's pray for them tonight because tomorrow morning is going to be a very difficult time for them as this extraordinary hurricane, Hurricane Maria, is about to slam right into them.

With that, I yield the floor.

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