[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 151 (Tuesday, September 19, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5850-S5853]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                        Hurricane Irma Recovery

  Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago this very evening, I had just 
finished my time as Presiding Officer over the Senate, and I made the 
decision that early the next morning I would be returning to Florida 
instead of staying here the following day. The reason was that at that 
time and in that moment, the strongest storm ever recorded out of the 
Atlantic was bearing down first on the Caribbean and headed not just 
toward Florida but actually toward the city in which I live. Then the 
Nation and State watched over the next few days as that storm took its 
track.
  There has been a lot said about Hurricane Irma since that time. I 
have heard some say that it could have been worse, and I imagine in 
some particular instances perhaps that is true. Had that storm entered 
through Tampa Bay, FL, the loss would have been incalculable. Had it 
hit directly throughout the southeast coast, right through the major 
metropolitan areas of Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties, the 
economic costs would have been very significant. So it is possible that 
the storm could have had an even greater impact, but it is difficult to 
say that to the people who were impacted by it.
  It was a unique storm in a lot of different ways, like the sheer 
scope of it. One of the things that really perplexed people in Florida, 
including myself--we were thinking perhaps we should move our families 
to another part of the State. We have a very good building code in 
Florida, but there are no structures under our building code that can 
withstand the hurricane winds of a category 4 storm. It is very 
difficult to do that, given the height and level of construction.
  One of the difficult things about figuring out where to go is that 
the whole State was covered by it. It was a huge storm in its size and 
an enormous storm in its impact. I know for a fact that dozens of 
people left South Florida, as an example, and drove to another part of 
the State, only to find themselves actually worse off than they would 
have been had they stayed home. There was no way to know that at the 
time.
  I can tell you, maybe it is because of our history with hurricanes. 
Obviously, in 1992, as a student at the University of Florida, I was 
home, the semester was about to begin, and Hurricane Andrew came 
barreling through there. It fundamentally altered what South Dade 
looked like.
  Whether it was the impact of the storms in 2004 or 2005 or perhaps it 
was the images from Harvey from just a few weeks ago and the impact it 
has had on Houston and the State of Texas, people took the threat 
incredibly seriously, and there was a massive evacuation, perhaps the 
single largest evacuation in the history of the United States.
  In any event, the storm did come. We measure the impact of the storm 
first and foremost by the loss of life, and there were 59 people who 
lost their lives--directly related to the storm in one way or another. 
Eleven of those people died after the storm from carbon monoxide 
poisoning. When power is lost, people run generators, sometimes even 
running them inside their homes. Carbon monoxide gets on them, and 
before you know it, they are dead. At least a dozen more didn't die, 
but they had been poisoned. It is an incredible threat after storms 
that we see every single time.
  Nine people died in Monroe County, some from natural causes, although 
it

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is hard to imagine that having a heart attack in the middle of the 
storm or in the aftermath wasn't somehow related to the stress such a 
storm brings.
  Of course, we all heard the horrifying news last week that eight 
senior citizens had lost their lives because a nursing home's air-
conditioning unit failed them in the middle of the night. The heat 
became unbearable, and they passed.
  You can only think, despite these horrible tragedies of losing 59 
people, how many more would have died had they not heeded the warnings 
to evacuate.
  So I begin talking about the storm today by thanking the men and 
women who responded before and after the storm--and even during it--who 
kept so many people safe, and they did so even though their own 
families were being impacted by the storm. If you see a police officer 
or a firefighter from a community in Florida, they have homes, they 
have children, they have families, and they, too, are concerned about 
the impact it could have on them. Even as they are out there getting 
the rest of us ready, they have to think about themselves and about 
their own families. We thank them for the extraordinary work they do 
every day but in particular--at this moment--because of the storm.
  We think about the National Guard. These were people who, on Monday 
or Tuesday of that week, were at the accounting firm or doing whatever 
their job might be. They were called up, and within a matter of hours 
found themselves on the road and headed toward an uncertain number of 
days that lay ahead.
  We think of all the people throughout the emergency operations 
centers--from the State center in the capital to all of the counties--
who put in over a dozen hours a day, if not more, preparing to handle 
the storm.
  We thank the Coast Guard for the extraordinary work they do and the 
Department of Defense, particularly the Navy, which were prepared to 
respond--and did so--to the storm, even as many of them were coming off 
similar duty just a few weeks earlier responding to Harvey.
  Of course, we thank the first responders, who came in from all over 
the country. I was in the Florida Keys on Friday, and I ran into 
firefighters and police officers from as far away as Colorado, and we 
thank them for coming all the way to Florida to help us. We could not 
have done it without them.
  I would also be remiss if I didn't thank the National Hurricane 
Center. The improvements that have continued to happen year after year 
have helped improve not just the forecast track of the storm but its 
intensity, even though I can tell you, all hurricanes are bad. 
Obviously, the stronger they get, the more damaging they become. I 
would just say that the work they do--we had 5, 6 days to get ready for 
this, and it all began because of the National Hurricane Center. They 
don't always have that much time, but they were able to give us and 
everyone proper notice. You can't carry out these evacuations unless 
you have accurate meteorological information, and they did an 
extraordinary job and continue to do so now, monitoring the new storm 
that tomorrow is going to make landfall over the island of Puerto Rico, 
potentially as a category 5 but certainly a category 4; I will talk 
about that more in a moment. We thank them and so many others. There 
are so many to mention that we would run out of time, but we thank 
them.
  Let's first talk about some of the challenges. The first challenge, 
as I said earlier, is the scope of the storm. If you know anything 
about Florida, it is a peninsula, the third largest State in the 
country in terms of population. But it is a peninsula that sticks out 
into the Gulf of Mexico and into the Caribbean Basin in the Florida 
Straits. It is a huge State.
  From Jacksonville, FL, in the northeast all the way down to Key West 
is a long distance, and we are talking about a storm that had damage in 
Key West, damage in Jacksonville and the southwest in Naples and the 
central part of the State and the southeast. Literally, the entire 
State of Florida was impacted by the storm because of its size and 
because of the route that it took, and that poses all kinds of 
challenges.
  Our emergency operations system is built on the idea that if two 
counties are hit, all the other counties help respond. Well, every 
county was being hit. Every county was getting ready. So that right 
away put a real strain on our emergency operations system. We were 
counting on other counties being able to help us, but they couldn't 
because they themselves were getting ready to deal with the impact of 
the storm.
  There were prepositioned assets in Alabama and Georgia getting ready 
to come down and help us, but they themselves were also in the track of 
the tropical storm and winds headed in their direction, not to mention 
the impact it had on their ability to get there. So it impacted the 
entire State.
  You know, we have gotten trained, in watching these storms, to see 
images of destroyed buildings. Obviously, that is a terrible thing. We 
lived through that with Andrew, and we have our share of that. If you 
see the images of the Florida Keys, you can tell quickly that a storm 
went through there. But underneath the surface, underneath the 
structures that might still be standing and the roofs that might still 
be intact are deep scars and damage that will be around and will impact 
us for months if not years to come.
  Think, for example, of the Florida Keys. If you haven't been there, 
it is an incredibly unique place. There is only one way in and one way 
out. It is a chain of small islands built on a coral rock formation, 
and it is truly unique. The further south you get in the Keys and the 
further southwest you get as it turns, the more unique it gets. It is a 
place where I have spent many days, especially with our family. Some of 
our best memories with the family were made in the Florida Keys. We 
spent a number of days there not long ago before the storm.
  If you know anything about the Florida Keys, this is not a place with 
Johnny Rockets or TGI Fridays. It has a lot of small businesses, not 
just in the restaurant industry but in the hotels, the bait shops, the 
charter captains, and everything in between. There are a lot of small 
businesses, and many of them are generational businesses. The families 
have been there and have been doing it for 60 years. Those businesses 
are literally going to have no customers now or for the foreseeable 
future. They still don't have power in many places. They don't have 
internet. They don't have fuel. They certainly don't have tourists.
  Imagine for a moment that you are the owner of a small restaurant and 
you have to go 30 to 60 days without any revenue. I can tell you that 
most businesses don't have that kind of reserve, not to mention your 
employees who may not get paid.
  When you think about the Florida Keys, it is an expensive place to 
live because it is a valuable piece of land right on the water, which 
is an enormous challenge for the workforce. The people who work in the 
Keys don't want to drive 3\1/2\ hours a day from South Dade to get down 
to the Lower Keys, or anywhere, for that matter, depending on the day. 
That housing stock in many places is trailer parks, mobile homes, or 
small apartments. The trailers are gone. The apartments have suffered 
water damage, and they certainly are not livable now, in many cases 
because of water and wind damage.
  Think about agriculture. I know Florida is not thought of as an 
agricultural State. I promise you, there is an extraordinary presence 
of agriculture in our State and a great variety of crops.
  Florida is one of the largest cattle producers in the country. You 
don't associate Florida with cattle, but it is an enormous part of our 
agriculture. Our signature crop is citrus, the sugar cane growers, 
fresh vegetables, and the nurseries. The nurseries produce tropical 
plants that you see in big developments or all of the indoor plants. 
Much of that is grown in Florida.
  There are also dairies. Florida is a dairy provider to much of the 
Southeast. Every single one of them has suffered significant damage 
and, in the case of a couple of them, catastrophic damage.
  The citrus industry was already being hurt by citrus greening, a 
disease that kills trees. Senator Nelson and I went to a grove two days 
after the storm, and more than half the fruit was already gone and more 
was dropping. That fruit is gone. Those farmers live off of that fruit. 
The whole fruit

[[Page S5852]]

goes to the whole fruit market, and the bulk of it goes to the juicing 
market. Much of it was green. So it wasn't even ready to pick. But once 
it hits floodwater, it cannot be used or sold. The FDA says it can no 
longer be consumed safely. They lost all of it, on top of the fact that 
their yields were already lower because of greening. They lost the 
fruit they had.
  It gets worse. They lost trees. It is not simple. You don't just go 
to Home Depot and buy an orange tree and next year it produces oranges. 
These new trees take at least 4 years before they begin to produce the 
fruit to sell, if it survives greening. They lost trees, and they are 
still losing fruit, and they will still lose more trees because all of 
those groves are under water. All that water is sitting on the roots, 
and those trees will not survive. This is a catastrophe.
  I don't mean to leave anything out. I can tell you the truth that 
there will be no Florida fresh vegetables. There will be no Florida 
vegetables in November. Those green beans that many of you eat on 
Thanksgiving Day will not come from Florida. We will have to make up 
the gap from foreign producers because that crop is gone entirely. I 
don't mean to leave anything out. I am just stating that the hit to 
agriculture was extraordinary. Unfortunately, for agriculture, this has 
happened, but there has not been a lot of media coverage about it 
because not a lot of agriculture is near metropolitan centers. There is 
not a lot of media coverage.
  Look, I am not here to beat up on the media. I thank the media, and I 
have done so because a lot of the work they did on the national and 
local news was what got people motivated to get up and go and get out 
of harm's way. But there are not a lot of camera crews stationed live 
in a citrus grove. So the power gets put back on and the schools 
reopen, and most people forget that these farmers--most of them--are 
not wealthy landowners. Some of these are fourth generation growers who 
have been on that land and are producing and are already stretched 
because of some of the challenges they have, whether it is with trade 
or citrus greening or whatever the challenges might be. It has just 
gotten worse for them.
  Do you know who else got hurt? The entire industry that serves them. 
Everyone in the towns built around them. This is big trouble. It is 
truly a catastrophic agricultural event in every part of the State. 
Virtually none of Florida's agriculture went without being impacted by 
this.
  I think about the migrant workers who work there. Some were afraid to 
come forward because of their immigration status. They thought that, if 
they showed up at a shelter, they would be deported, but more 
importantly, in terms of life, some of them have nowhere to live. Their 
housing, to begin with, is precarious. A lot of the mobile homes are 
damaged by water. There is no electricity. They are not near a 
metropolitan center, and they are afraid to come out. Thank God for so 
many groups that have come forward to try to help them.
  We scoff about power outages. I don't know how people lived in 
Florida before the invention of air conditioning with the heat and 
humidity. It is an inconvenience for a lot of people, but it is life 
threatening in the case of senior citizens or people who require 
refrigerated pharmaceuticals for their survival. It has had an 
extraordinary impact on them.
  All of these circumstances have a true impact and are among many of 
the challenges that we now face. There is a special focus, for example, 
on Monroe County, in the Florida Keys. This storm threatens to 
fundamentally alter the character of Monroe County if we do not help 
the Florida Keys, because these trailer parks are on valuable land, and 
the owners of that land are going to be tempted to build on them, not 
mobile homes, again, but to build structures designed for visitors that 
have more money. That means that we will lose our housing stock, but 
ultimately it means that we will lose the character of the place--all 
of the small businesses that service the fishing boats and the diving.
  We have some of the greatest collections of coral reefs in the world 
right off Marathon, by Sombrero Key in the Florida Keys. All of that 
will be out of business for a long time. Can they survive? I don't 
know.
  There are small business owners that might own an apartment building. 
They use it in the summer for their family and rent it in the winter. 
It is damaged. So they can't rent it this year. So guess what. They may 
not be able to pay the mortgage, which will lead to foreclosures.
  I mentioned agriculture. I don't know how Florida agriculture--
particularly citrus--can recover from the storm without significant 
help.
  This storm exposed a real vulnerability to a State with so many 
senior citizens. It is not just the nursing homes and the ALFs. We have 
apartment buildings, section 8 HUD housing and the like--entire 
apartment buildings with 13, 14 stories. There are towers of apartment 
buildings populated by senior citizens. What happens when the power 
goes out? The first thing is that all of the food in their 
refrigerators rots. So within 48 hours, I don't care how much they 
stored for the hurricane, they can no longer eat a lot of the food they 
need for their nutrition.
  You might say: Why don't they get up and go see to a relative's or go 
somewhere where they are handing out food?
  They are on the 13th or 12th floor of a building where the elevator 
doesn't work. They can't walk down 13 flights of stairs. This exposed a 
real vulnerability that we will have to examine.
  Then there is debris removal. Some of these counties are small 
counties. Some of these counties still owe money from storms last year. 
FEMA dispersed the funds to the State. The State hasn't dispersed it to 
them yet. Now they have to go out and hire, and they need hundreds of 
millions of dollars to clean up these roads, and they don't have that 
in their budget. There is a huge strain in that regard.
  Senator Nelson and I spent 2 days together traveling last week. We 
will continue to work together to help so many different people. On 
Friday we had an event in Immokalee, which is a migrant community in 
Southwest Florida, and 800 people applied for assistance.
  We were in St. Augustine yesterday, and close to 1,000 people applied 
for assistance.
  In Jacksonville today, there were 1,800 people applying for 
assistance. We will be going to Naples, FL, and Fort Myers later this 
week. We will be back in Immokalee again on Friday, and we are about to 
start out in the Florida Keys helping people.
  It is funny. They say: FEMA--go online and apply there. Here is the 
problem, when you have no internet and no power, how do you go online 
and apply? So we are trying to get out there to help as many people as 
we can.
  Now, I don't want to leave on a negative note. There is nothing 
positive about a storm, but there are some uplifting things to point 
out. I will be brief and to the point. I am uplifted by these crews 
sent down by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or the 
LDS church, who are out there helping people who can't afford it or who 
don't know how to do it. Professionals are out there helping people cut 
down trees and remove debris from their homes and put tarps on their 
roofs. They are volunteers who came on their own to do it. I was 
uplifted on Saturday by visiting the North Carolina Baptists' men's 
relief society, who were in South Florida, and 120 people were 
preparing hot meals to send down to the Florida Keys. They have fed 
thousands of people in a very impressive operation. I am uplifted by 
the Red Cross volunteers from New York and New Jersey who I have run 
into who flew down, rode out the storm, and were there working in the 
shelters. I am uplifted by stories of school principals who took over 
these shelters because people didn't show up to run them who were 
supposed to show up. So these principals, custodians, and cafeteria 
managers showed up and took care of all these people. I am uplifted by 
stories like the one today in Jacksonville, where a gentleman and his 
wife who were disabled came forward. They lost their home and they had 
to be saved from floodwaters. They were living in temporary housing. A 
donor had put them up for a week. It ran out, and they had nowhere to 
go tonight. We were able to match them with a donor, who insists on 
remaining anonymous, for another week of temporary housing while, 
hopefully, we can get them the housing they need.

[[Page S5853]]

  One of my favorite stories--and I believe Senator Nelson shared this 
the other night--is this one that I wanted to close with. He and I ran 
into this at Ave Maria Catholic University, which is literally out in 
the Everglades, between Naples and Miami. We went out there to visit, 
and we were told extraordinary stories of some of their students.
  On the night before the storm, there were about 300 migrants from 
nearby communities--many of whom are probably undocumented, in the 
country illegally--who didn't want to evacuate. They were afraid of 
being deported. Ultimately, they saw that the storm was bad. They 
showed up at Ave Maria. Ave Maria opened its doors and welcomed them 
into the gym. There were students who stayed behind and played with the 
kids, entertained the kids throughout the storm, and took care of them.
  What was really uplifting was the story of two nursing students. 
Right before the storm hit, right before you could no longer go out, 
the sheriff's office shows up at Ave Maria with eight seniors from a 
nearby ALF. The staff at the ALF quit. They literally left. They didn't 
show up. They abandoned them. The sheriff's office brings them, and 
these two nursing students bring the eight seniors into their dorms. 
They brought them into the women's dorm and cared for them for two 
days, triaging the medicine they needed to take, understanding how to 
do this, that, and the other. These are amazing stories about these 
young people. If there is any doubt about the future of America, think 
about the extraordinary work these young people put in. Nobody told 
them to do it. They could have left. They could have gone back to 
wherever they were from, but they stayed and took care of them.
  We have a long way to go, but we want to thank all the people for the 
great wishes we got from all of my colleagues and from people around 
the country. This is a storm that impacts Florida in ways we are going 
to feel for a long time.
  Let me close by asking all of you to take a moment tonight, if you 
can and you wish, to pray for the island of Puerto Rico, a U.S. 
Territory, where millions of our fellow Americans are staring down the 
barrel of the most powerful storm that ever has perhaps hit that 
island, and this after already getting hit by Irma just a week ago. It 
has the potential to be an extraordinary catastrophe. We pray that is 
not the case. I hope we stand ready to assist our fellow Americans on 
the island of Puerto Rico. Let's pray for them tonight because tomorrow 
morning is going to be a very difficult time for them as this 
extraordinary hurricane, Hurricane Maria, is about to slam right into 
them.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.

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