Blake Farenthold: “I am here to talk a couple minutes about the best and the worst that I saw during Hurricane Harvey in the 27th District…”

“I am here to talk a couple minutes about the best and the worst that I saw during Hurricane Harvey in the 27th District of Texas that I represent. The worst was dished out by nature and high winds. The best was the spirit of the Texans who rose to the challenge. It was neighbor helping neighbor, friend helping friend, and stranger helping stranger. I live in Corpus Christi. It is a relatively large community of almost 400,000 in the metropolitan area. We were spared the brunt of Harvey. It missed us by about 20 miles. But just across the bay, communities like Port Aransas, Aransas Pass, Ingleside, Rockport, Refugio, Tivoli, and many more took horrible winds. Ninety-some-odd percent of the homes in the resort town of Port Aransas are uninhabitable right now. The brand new school in Refugio they just turned the keys over had the roof blown off and was severely water damaged, and it will be weeks before they are fully operational again in that school. Rockport, with their beautiful oak trees, had limbs and branches strewn all over the streets, and houses' second stories are gone. They looked great from the front, but then you would look in the back, and there would be no back. In Port Aransas, boats having risen and moved inland, an oil drilling platform loose in the ship channel, completely changing the skyline of the city.…”