Political Quotes

“I appreciate the gentleman from New Orleans for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I rise for two reasons--one, to talk about what it is to be in the eye of a hurricane and to be without basic necessities for over 10 days because of a hurricane and, two, what it is that our government should do when those situations occur at the Federal, State, and local levels. In my comments, initially, I will talk a little bit about what happened in August of 2005--how, in fact, so many people were impacted as well as what we have done as a government, what we didn't do, and what we should do in going forward. As the gentleman from Louisiana has said, for the most part, both Hurricanes Rita and Katrina ravaged Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and a little bit of Florida, but I will limit my comments to Katrina. In Hurricane Katrina, there were over 1,800 people--from Florida to Texas--who died. In my home State of Mississippi, 238 individuals died. Basically, what we had after that is over 1.2 million housing units damaged, and in my home State, almost 120,000 were completely destroyed. In southern Mississippi, that meant that over 60 percent of the single family dwellings were either destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, and the statistics were worse for rental units. Along the Gulf Coast--the beautiful Gulf Coast where we have the largest manmade beach in the United States--there were over 1 million people displaced.…”