Heidi Alexander: “I come to the floor to speak on two matters. The first is the matter of wildfires in Tennessee. Anybody who has been…”

“I come to the floor to speak on two matters. The first is the matter of wildfires in Tennessee. Anybody who has been watching television the last few days has seen the devastation caused by the runaway wildfires just outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Gatlinburg, TN. We are not used to that in Tennessee. I know we have debates on the floor, and we have colleagues who see the fires in the West where it doesn't rain much, a few inches of rain a year, but in the Great Smoky Mountains where I live--I live just outside of the park--we have 80, 83 inches of rain a year. We have dense forests, and this time of year the leaves are all over the ground, and usually there is a lot of rain to tamp that down. For the last few months, we have not had rain, and so the forest floor is like a tinderbox. On Monday, in the chimney tops area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a fire started--maybe it was a campfire--and then winds as high as 80 to 90 miles an hour came and swept the fire through the park and into the resort town of Gatlinburg. There were stories of firefighters getting back in their trucks to avoid the bears who were fleeing the fire. There were stories of cars catching fire as motorists drove to escape the fire. A couple from Alabama said they watched their windshield wipers melt on the car as they drove down the mountain. At least four people have been killed and others are missing.…”