Angie Craig: “I thought I would spend a few moments this morning talking about an impending crisis that is offshore of the east coast…”

“I thought I would spend a few moments this morning talking about an impending crisis that is offshore of the east coast at this moment that may well be headed our way. Hurricane Isabel could well make its way into this region and do great devastation. That devastation could well be to the forests and the timberlands of North Carolina and Virginia. And it could well be in some areas of Maryland, where it could come ashore. The reason I stand before the Senate this morning to talk about it is that we in the West are experiencing another kind of catastrophic event in our forests. They are called wildfires. Yet somehow we in the Senate, in the shaping of public policy, do not look at hurricane crises in our forests and our public lands the way we look at wildfires. In August of 1910, a wildfire started in Idaho and Montana, and 3 days later 3 million acres of land were gone. Our forest health problems are not isolated to the problems of the rural West. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo slammed ashore near Charleston, SC, and cut a path northwest through North Carolina and into Virginia. On the Francis Marion National Forest, 70 percent of the trees were killed. We, the Government, immediately expedited the process of cleanup, salvage, and replanting, funneling millions of dollars into that effort. This is a similar expected path of Hurricane Isabel, and the Governor of Virginia has already declared a state of emergency.”