On the recordDecember 19, 2012
today I am introducing the STRONG Act of 2012, or the Strengthening The Resilience of Our National on the Ground Act. This legislation will build upon existing extreme weather resiliency efforts to provide State and local actors with the tools and information they need to help prepare, plan for, and more quickly recover from extreme weather events. Hurricane Sandy has shown us that extreme weather remains a major challenge for our Nation. Recently, extreme weather events have battered the nation, resulting in record-high losses for 2011 and more broken records in 2012. In the past 30 years, there have been more than 130 extreme weather events in the United States that generated at least $1 billion in devastating damages. Most recently, Hurricane Sandy resulted in more than 100 deaths, the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people, power outages affecting more than 8.5 million homes, massive flooding, gasoline shortages, and a crippled regional energy and transportation infrastructure. Extreme weather ravaged every region of the United States this year, with drought conditions in more than 60 percent of the contiguous United States; deadly floods; destructive wildfires on more than nine million acres across 37 States; and deadly heat waves. By building stronger communities, we can reduce the serious economic and human costs of extreme weather over the short and long term.…
