Political Quotes

“a terrible tragedy occurred on Friday of last week. The District of Columbia fire chief resigned his position. I have known Tom Tippett for a number of years. I have come to respect him and admire him, as do all of those firefighters, men and women, who serve in local 36 of the D.C. Fire Department Union. Tom Tippett is a true firefighter. I first met him about 12 years ago, shortly after I first came to Congress and decided to try to work the issues involving fire and life safety in this country. To create a better awareness among our colleagues about the role of the firefighter in our inner-city areas, I started a tradition that each year would take our colleagues on a volunteer basis and have them run with one of the busiest D.C. fire stations. Mr. Speaker, one of those nights we assigned a group of Members to run with Tom Tippett's station, a truck company and a rescue company that was at that time the busiest station in D.C. As Members of Congress in their jeans and shirts, with their running gear assigned by the Department, sat in the station talking to firefighters and responded throughout the evening to drug dealings, shootings, emergency trauma situations, fires, accidents, HAZMAT disasters, every kind of incident we could think of, all of us were in awe, Democrats and Republicans, of the job these people do every day.”