Political Quotes

“I come to the floor having been absent all week from the deliberations of the House due to two storms which hit my home island of Guam. The first typhoon, the eye of the storm, passed over Guam on July 5, 2002, Chamorro Standard Time, with sustained winds of over 110 miles an hour. Subsequently, Typhoon Ha Long was supposed to hit Guam on July 11, but, fortunately, it just veered a little bit to the south of the island. These storms, which frequent my part of the world quite often, of course, have caused a great deal of damage and a great deal of interruption of public services, and obviously I was not able to come back to the House this week as originally planned. I have just gotten off the phone with Mr. Joe Allbaugh of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, and they have assured me that FEMA is on the ground in Guam. In fact, they have chartered a plane with some 300 people to come out to Guam to try to provide all of the services that are necessary, including individual services for those who were directly affected by the typhoon. Historically, Guam has suffered a major typhoon nearly every decade.”