Hurricane Irene
Floor Speech
Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, as I suspect you know, Vermont has been hit very hard by Hurricane Irene. The storm caused widespread flooding, resulting in a number of deaths, the loss of many homes and businesses, and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to property and infrastructure.
I have visited many of the most hard-hit towns in the past week, including Ludlow, Wilmington, Brattleboro, Berlin, Moretown, and Waterbury. I was shocked and moved by the extent of the damage I saw.
Many towns still have very limited access because the roads and bridges that link them to the world have been destroyed. This disaster will go down in history as one of the very worst natural disasters in the history of the State of Vermont.
Let me take this opportunity to personally thank the emergency rescue teams and all those aiding the victims of the floods for their outstanding work. Local crews, along with the Vermont National Guard, and Guard units from other States, such as New Hampshire, Maine, and Illinois, have airline-lifted food, water, blankets, and medicine to the worst hit towns. Police, fire, and local officials have also done an extraordinary job.
We still don't know the cost of this disaster--it probably will not be tabulated for a while--but let me share a few figures in terms of what we have experienced. Just days after the declaration of a major disaster by the President, more than 2,000 Vermonters had already registered with FEMA--2,000. To date, there have been more than 700 homes confirmed as severely damaged or destroyed.
I had the opportunity to go to some trailer parks in Berlin, in central Vermont, and I was down in the southern part of the State in Brattleboro and it is an incredibly sad sight to see. Mobile homes, where senior citizens were living, have been destroyed. They are now forced to relocate. It was a very tragic circumstance.
Further, the storm has knocked out 135 segments of the State highway system, as well as 35 State bridges, completely isolating 13 communities for several days. An unknown number of farms and businesses have been destroyed.
I was down in Wilmington, a beautiful town in the southern part of the State on Route 9. Virtually their entire downtown business community has been severely damaged, and that is clearly undermining the fabric not only of the economy of that town but of towns throughout the State.
Our Amtrak and freight rail services were completely suspended as tracks literally washed into rivers. So we had tracks underwater. The State's largest office complex is located in Waterbury, VT, a few miles from our capital, Montpelier, and I visited that facility. It had been completely flooded. There are 1,700 people who work there. For a small State, that is a lot of people--1,700 people--who work in our major office complex in Waterbury. That has now been shut down for an indefinite period of time. That impacts, obviously, the State's ability to provide services to the people of Vermont.
At least 65 public schools were impacted and could not open on time. School is just beginning, with 65 public schools not able to open on time. This is just a short list of some of the devastation that is going on in the State.
I also want to call to the attention of the Senate another extraordinary tragedy in our State, and that is the death of a gentleman named Michael Garafano. Mr. Garafano was an employee of the city of Rutland, and Rutland was very hard hit by this disaster. He and his son went up to a local dam to inspect the condition of the dam. They were hit by a flash flood and both of them lost their lives. So here we have an extraordinary public servant, trying to protect the well-being of the people of Rutland, and he gave his life in that effort. Mr. Garafano's effort will never be forgotten.
As we go forward--not just for Vermont but for New Jersey, for North Carolina, and we know upstate New York was also hard hit--I have every confidence the Senate and the House will do for Hurricane Irene as we have done for other natural disasters that have impacted different parts of our country, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to make sure, as Americans, we rebuild the communities in Vermont and in other sections of the country that were devastated by this terrible flood.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source