Cloture Motion

Floor Speech

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, Senator Sullivan and I have just returned to Washington after an almost surreal 24-hour period up in the State.

We went up on Sunday night, Monday morning. We hadn't anticipated being there, but the State of Alaska--and more specifically Southcentral Alaska--experienced a powerful earthquake on Friday. It was certainly an unsettling event, a frightening event to many, and it caused significant damage in the most populated part of our State.

Last Friday, at 8:29 in the morning, we had an earthquake that struck the community of Anchorage with a magnitude of 7.0 on the Richter scale. The epicenter was about 7 miles north of Anchorage. It was about 25 miles deep. That shock lasted anywhere, folks were saying, from about 40 seconds to 1 minute; that was the initial hard jolt. Then, movement after that depended on where you were and what kind of ground you were located on, but it was a very significant earthquake by all standards.

I heard about the earthquake, not because I got an alert on my phone but because my phone rang when my son called. He lives and works in Anchorage. He had been at his shop, and he called me right after the shaking stopped. My son is a pretty calm young man, but I could tell that something was wrong, something was different. I could hear it in his voice. He was clearly rattled. His comments to me reflected so many of the comments I have heard from so many with whom I have had a chance to visit.

As we were speaking on the phone, it was about 7 minutes after the initial jolt that we had another earthquake, a 5.7 that followed. He literally said: You have to hold on, Mom, because we are having another one. These are significant at any time, but to have a 7.0 followed by a 5.7 and then to know that the aftershocks have been continuing--they have continued until today. As of this afternoon, the total number of aftershocks we have had is about 2,500.

Think about that. From Friday morning to midafternoon Alaska time, about 2,500 aftershocks, and we have had 14 above 4.5 in magnitude. We have had 14 in that time period that were over 4.5. Now, 4.5 is going to get anybody's attention.

Yesterday morning, when I was leaving Alaska to come to Washington, I was getting ready in the bathroom, and there was another shaker then, and that was a 4.8.

People have asked me: How are things back home?

I said: Well, we had the big jolt on Friday, but it is still rocking and rolling.

People are anxious, but the report I would like to share with folks today is that there has been an incredible response at so many different levels. The initial response was pretty intense.

After I spoke with my son, I talked to a staff member whose pipes had burst in her home, and she was dealing with flooding. One of the main arterials in Anchorage, Minnesota Drive, is one of the access roads to get to the airport, and parts of that had collapsed. Many people have seen the picture of the vehicle sitting in the middle of a depressed area where the bottom literally has dropped out the overpass of that road.

Across Anchorage and in the Mat-Su Valley, school had just started for the middle schools and the upper grades, and kids were doing what the kids have been trained to do for decades now. Since the 1964 earthquake, believe me, every kid in Southcentral Alaska--I think probably every kid in Alaska--knows what the earthquake drill is, to duck and cover. But during this quake, they were ducking and covering as books from the bookshelves were crashing to the floor and as ceiling tiles were coming down. It is extraordinary to think that during all that we saw and all of the damage in the schools, there were two injuries. There are 48,000 kids in the Anchorage School District and about 17,000 or 18,000 in the Mat-Su district--and two injuries. One was somebody cleaning up glass; another was a student who was putting his arm up to shield himself from a ceiling tile that was falling down, and he injured his wrist. It is absolutely extraordinary--nothing short of a miracle--that we suffered no loss of life.

It was pretty dramatic. Transformers blew, and much of the city went dark. A tsunami warning was issued for the Kenai Peninsula in the low- lying areas in the Anchorage Bowl, even down past Kodiak. We got a call from friends in Kodiak out on a hunting trip, and they got word that they needed to hike to higher ground. Hike to higher ground. Of course, there is no communication and no way to know whether it is all safe. These stories are coming in from all over the State.

What we heard in those first hours, the first reports coming in from our first responders, who truly jumped into action and were responding to calls as they were coming in--the civil engineers were dispatched to go out to check on the highways, the bridges, and the essential infrastructure, such as the hospitals. We had almost immediate updates from the U.S. Geological Survey and NOAA--the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--about the earthquake and what was happening with the subsequent tsunami warning, the aftershocks. All of these were in realtime. We kept waiting to hear whether there were any reports of serious injuries or fatalities, but fortunately--amazingly, miraculously--they never came.

Meanwhile, the utilities were working to restore power and to test the cities' water systems. ENSTAR, which is our natural gas supplier, received over 700 requests to check on broken gas lines. They went house by house to make sure that they were safe.

It was extraordinary in terms of the immediate on-the-ground response by the Alaskans who were there in place, the teams that are at the ready because that is what they are trained to do, and those who were just being good neighbors and knew that when you have something hit, we are all hands on deck.

Congressman Young, Senator Sullivan, and I gathered on Friday afternoon. We got updates from the Vice President, who was traveling. We spoke with FEMA Administrator Brock Long and Secretary of Transportation Chao. All of them--all of them--were all in with their promises of help from throughout the Federal Government with resources. President Trump also--his support in promising to spare no expense as we work to recover from this natural disaster went a long way to providing levels of assurance there.

Senator Sullivan and I, as I mentioned, flew up on Sunday evening. We waited until the weekend was over to fly back home. We didn't want to get in the way of the immediate recovery efforts. I got in at 1 o'clock in the morning and went to work cleaning up the glass and broken things in my house, as many of my neighbors and fellow Alaskans had been doing all weekend long.

Over the course of the day on Monday, we were able to see some of the damage that this earthquake has caused. You think about the words when you are trying to describe something that--the scenes are just so, so different, and it is words like ``gut-wrenching'' and ``astounding'' and then ``remarkable,'' but it was really gut-wrenching being in the school.

We went out to Houston Middle School. This is an area out in the Mat- Su Valley. This is one of the schools that will not be opened, at least not this year and perhaps for longer. But you are standing in a building--this is the library there in the middle school, and you see all of the books that have fallen to the floor. You see the guts of the ceiling that have come out. The sprinkler system is activated, so not only do you have the chaos of the books but now you have got the saturation.

There is another picture here of the group of us who went in.

The ceiling literally disintegrated on top of the library there.

When you think about the time that this all happened, there were students in the library. There were students who were passing in the hallway. This school is cinderblock construction, and the actual concrete cinders popped out and crashed to the floor and broke. The metal struts coming out of the ceiling, the panels--this was all happening at 8:29 in the morning. It is dark in Alaska at 8:29 in the morning. The lights had gone out, and they had this crashing all around them.

When I use the word ``remarkable'' to describe some of it, how the students and the teachers responded was remarkable, the calm. The kids knew what to do. They got under their desks. They did what they were trained to do. When they got the order that they needed to get out, to evacuate, what they did was exactly what they were trained to do. And no injuries. No injuries. It is absolutely extraordinary.

The schools in Anchorage are going to be closed for the entire week. Mat-Su is opening some of theirs this week, but more than 85 of them sustained damage that clearly needs to be cleaned up, needs to be repaired.

The schools were one aspect of the damage that we saw, but what many have seen out there has been the damage to the infrastructure.

This is a picture of a collapsed road. This is Vine Road, out in the valley. This is kind of a boggy area that runs through here, but it is just as if there were a big suction that came underneath and literally sucked the ground out from underneath that.

This is an area that we visited. We took this picture from above, in the air. This is it up close. As you are standing here on these slabs of asphalt, the crevices you are looking down into are extraordinary, and you realize the intensity of the action of the Earth.

You see scenes like this, and you say: How are we going to get through all of this? And the work that is ongoing now, whether it is the on-ramps, whether it is the bridges, whether it is roads like this on Vine Road, our department of transportation is working to firm up the roads, to, believe it or not, fill them in, repave them, even restripe them, and get folks back on their way. What we saw in just those first 72 hours is absolutely extraordinarily impressive.

The Alaska Railroad is assessing their damage. They are operational. They are going to be going much slower than they would like, and that is going to cause complications, but they are up.

The Port of Alaska is undergoing an expansion right now. It has been complicated by this earthquake. That is something that, again, is very critical. As you look to how goods move around our State, 85 percent of them come through that port. So being able to allow for functionality is critical.

We look at our assets. We look at the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. That was closed down temporarily just for precaution, but it is up and running.

You know, when I think about all this, given what happened, the visible damage we saw earlier this week, I find myself thinking that we are so lucky--not that we were hit by this major earthquake but that it could have been so much worse.

We talk a lot about resilience--resilience of a people. I think we learned a lot from the 1964 earthquake, the Good Friday earthquake. That registered at 9.2 on the Richter scale and lasted 4\1/2\, almost 5 minutes. Extraordinary. What we have been doing--we are the most seismically active State in the country, so we work to be prepared.

Again, I mentioned that last Friday's earthquake was deep, and that mitigated some of the shaking that was associated with it, but the proximity to our State's population center put people and infrastructure at great risk.

The depth of the source and the mechanism of the fault helped reduce the damage. That is one part of it. The other part of it is being prepared, and this is where I am so proud of the resilience of Alaskans. Whether it is at the schools that practice these earthquake drills where the students get under the desk, they hold on to the leg of a chair or their desk, and they cover their heads to protect themselves--I know we have one Alaskan as a page. She has gone through this drill. I know you have. So even in the dark, even in the chaos, with all the noise and the crashing, students knew what to do, and they did it not only for themselves, but they did it for other students as well.

There are some stories of some very young heroes out there, and I have a young nephew who not only took care of himself but made sure that a fellow student who had severe mobility issues was able to get under a desk. I think about the calmness and the presence that so many exercised.

I am going to end by noting again how we have worked as communities in our State to be prepared for disasters when they come. We have some of the most stringent building codes in the world, and for the most part, our buildings held up. Families have earthquake kits in their houses. They have batteries, flashlights, nonperishable food--all of which came in handy as folks kind of hunkered down over the weekend.

I will end my remarks by noting how grateful I am for the first responders who took action in the aftermath of the earthquake, even amid all of the ongoing aftershocks, even with their households totally turned upside down--and not only for our first responders but for all those who acted as first responders, the neighbors who came together. It is Alaska at its finest when we all work together.

I am very grateful that we had no tsunami. I am very grateful that the damages, at least on the surface, are not worse. And we are certainly grateful that there have been no reports of major injuries or fatalities. I am grateful that we have strong Federal partners who have committed to helping us in any way that they can. I also appreciate the reach-out from so many colleagues here in the Senate who sent me texts and who called and said: Is everything OK in Alaska? Is there anything we can do? Thank you for that.

We know we are tough in Alaska. That is the reputation we have. We are kind of proud of that. We know we are hardy and resilient. But knowing that others are going to be with us as we go through this recovery period makes that much better. I thank so many who have been there to help Alaska.
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