Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, August 20th of this year was a Saturday, and I was in Denham Springs, Louisiana. I was gutting a home, ripping out Sheetrock, tearing out floors, throwing out furniture, throwing out photo albums, appliances, and family heirlooms. Mr. Speaker, I did it in a home and literally stripped out every foot of Sheetrock in the house, from the floor to the ceiling and ripped out all the floors. Everything in the house was gutted down to the studs. This was a house where a woman, who recently retired in June or July of this year, was living. She has been living there since the early 1970s. Never has she had even a single foot of water in her house or a single inch of water in her house. Yet, on the floods that we had in south Louisiana around August 11th, this home received over 6 feet of water in the entire home, everything. Outside the house, we stacked up piles of debris from 6 to 8 feet high. I call it debris, but in reality it was memories. It was that woman's life that was piled up in the street. Everything that she owned was thrown out. Mr. Speaker, we had a storm that was a 1,000-year event. We experienced over 31 inches of rain in some of the peak areas in 36 hours. To translate that to snow, you are talking about 25 feet of snow. To my friends from the North, that is what we experienced the equivalent of in just 36 hours. This is on track to be the fourth most costly flood disaster in United States history, and, again, it was a 1,000-year storm.…”