Kay Bailey Hutchison: “I rise in morning business to talk about a situation in Texas, the wildfires and the drought. Since we were mostly home…”

“I rise in morning business to talk about a situation in Texas, the wildfires and the drought. Since we were mostly home during the August recess, I saw the floods in the Midwest and on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. I saw the hurricane that hit New York and all along the East Coast. At the same time, with all the extra water in the East, we have had as much as 60 days in parts of Texas with no rain whatsoever. The drought is killing livestock. It is killing land. It is a sad situation. What has happened, of course, is, from that, the wildfires have been able to go farther than we have ever seen in Texas before. Just in the past 7 days, the Texas Forest Service has responded to 176 fires, destroying nearly 130,000 acres. This year alone, over 2,000 fires have burned more than 2 million acres in Texas. We have high winds and drought conditions, which are a terrible combination in this instance. Yesterday, the Texas Forest Service responded to 20 new fires, which consumed nearly 1,500 more acres. One of the hardest hit areas is Bastrop County, which is near Austin. I was talking to some of my constituents in Houston, which is not near Austin, and they were talking about seeing and smelling the smoke in Houston from these fires in Bastrop.…”