[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 19680-19681]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    GOVERNMENT FAILS MOST VULNERABLE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, this is a very special time in American 
history. We have experienced one of the greatest catastrophes in the 
history of this country. We have lost lives, and we have seen this 
catastrophe mismanaged in ways that most of us could never have 
imagined.
  Mr. Speaker, I was sitting at home watching television, and for 3 
days or more, I saw almost 30,000 people in front of the Convention 
Center in New Orleans waiting for food, waiting for water, waiting for 
some assistance.

[[Page 19681]]

They waited and they waited and nothing happened.
  I decided to leave Los Angeles and join with some of my friends in 
New Orleans to see what was going on. After all, I am the ranking 
member of the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity of the 
Committee on Financial Services; and when people are homeless in 
America, particularly 30,000 as a result of a catastrophe, I need to 
understand what I can do to make sure that those people are housed, 
that they get some kind of shelter.
  So I went to New Orleans and was met by State Senator Cleo Fields, 
and he and his staff and others, we joined together and we went to the 
State Police compound, motor vehicle compound where people were 
gathered. All of our agencies were gathered there. The governor of the 
State was there. Mr. Chertoff was there, representing Homeland 
Security. Mr. Michael Brown was there, representing FEMA. The National 
Guard was represented and on and on and on.
  I had an opportunity to speak with the governor. I had an opportunity 
to speak with Mr. James Lee Witt, who is now advisor to the governor, 
who was once head of FEMA, to try and find out what was going on and 
where the breakdown was.
  What became very, very clear in my interactions there early on in one 
of my visits was that there certainly had been a breakdown, that 
responsibility had not been accepted, assumed, implemented in ways that 
we expected. And what surprised me more than anything else was the fact 
that we have spent a lot of time organizing Homeland Security. We have 
spent millions of dollars making sure that there are plans in cities 
and States. We have spent millions of dollars identifying the first 
responders and their responsibility. But all of the sudden we have a 
catastrophe that could have been a terrorist attack.
  The levee that broke, that was vulnerable and could have been 
attacked by a terrorist, and this is the operation that was supposed to 
respond, it had fallen apart. It did not happen. And poor people, the 
most vulnerable of people, were left without any protection.
  By the time that I got there, they had started to move the people to 
the Louis Armstrong Airport. This had become a staging ground, and the 
buses were supposed to go there to take them to shelters that had been 
identified all over the State. And they were supposed to have airlifts 
that were taking them even farther out of State.
  Cleo Fields, a State senator was trying to get them to open England 
Air Force Base. It is an Air Force base that is right there in the 
area, Alexandria, Louisiana, that is all boarded up, has 450 
dormitories unused. He brought with him three huge buses, and he told 
the governor and everybody else, Mr. Chertoff and everybody else, that 
he was going to fill these buses up with people from the Convention 
Center and people along the highway and people at the airport, and he 
was going to take them to England Air Force Base and he was going to 
force them to open it up and let them in and give them some safe and 
secure place to live until they could get permanent housing.
  We put them on the buses and we drove into the Louis Armstrong 
Airport and it was a sight that I shall never forget in my life. There 
were thousands of people on the sidewalks, in wheelchairs, people who 
did not know what their future held. We finally got inside the airport. 
Thousands of people, people who needed medication, people who needed 
insulin, there were people who had not been attended to.
  Well, we stayed there a few days and we went to a number of shelters 
up and down the State. We were not only in shelters in Louisiana, the 
top part of the State, but the bottom line is this, Mr. Speaker, our 
government failed us, and they failed the most vulnerable people.
  We cannot let this get swept under the rug. We have to keep this 
before the American people. It does not appear that the attitude exists 
here that we will pay attention in the way we paid attention to 9/11. 
But we have to make sure that we do not fail the people again and 
again. We have got to get them out of these temporary shelters. We have 
got to get them into permanent housing and that is some responsibility 
that we are going to accept.

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