On the recordJuly 15, 2010
As you know, Mr. Brady, Port Arthur, especially Port Arthur, Texas, is a refinery town; but it has high unemployment. The whole area has high unemployment for a lot of reasons. One reason, of course, is we've been hit by numerous hurricanes. Just since I've been in office, we've had Katrina, Rita, Hubert, Gustav and Ike all come through my congressional district and your congressional district. Because of that, it's affected the economy. And now these workers are trying to get back to work. Many of them work offshore, and then they work onshore in oil-related industries. But the effect of the shutdown in the deep water causes economic hardship, not just on the workers on those platforms, but for the people on shore that supply parts and maintenance and other industries, other commodities to those people who work offshore. And so we don't know yet how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of jobs would be lost because of this. But one thing that we also need to understand is the loss of energy, the lack of having crude oil that we were producing in the deep water; 17 percent of the Nation's domestic crude oil production comes from deep water. That is now going to be gone, and we'll have to make that up some other way. So we should expect gasoline prices to rise, probably in 2 years, maybe less because of that. And I think it's imperative that we understand that the folks that are affected want to continue to work.
