[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 15]
[House]
[Pages 20768-20774]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          WORST CASE SCENARIO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Price of Georgia). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) 
is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to say a 
few words tonight, and I appreciate the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. 
Gingrey) for being here and his consistent approach to good government 
and good policy. I also understand that the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. 
Gingrey) has been down to the hurricane-ravaged region to see what is 
going on down there.
  I wanted to take an opportunity to say some words about Hurricane 
Katrina, about the disaster itself, how it came to that point, what has 
happened to get us to this point, and what we need to do to get ahead 
in America and rebuild and reconstruct the ravaged region of the gulf 
coast.
  As I speak, we have another hurricane that is swelling up to a 
category 4 hurricane. Who knows where it is going to make landfall, or 
if it will make landfall. If it takes a turn in the wrong direction, it 
could get the very location that is still underwater from Hurricane 
Katrina.
  I take us back to those days prior to Hurricane Katrina striking that 
region. I know back as early as 2002 there were significant documents 
published in the local paper that illustrated the structure of the 
dikes, the levee system, the protection from hurricanes and flooding 
that existed around the New Orleans area.
  For years they had been building miles and miles of levees and dikes. 
The original concept of the city, as the city got established and grew, 
like most cities, it was not the most scientifically identified 
location, but it was a location good for commerce. If you can pick a 
good location for commerce, then you will find out that the value of 
that commerce flowing into that city would be great enough to justify 
the construction of the infrastructure that was required to, at least 
within the vision of the people making the decisions and paying the 
taxes and appropriating the funds at that time, to protect the city 
with at least minimal advocacy.
  As the years went by, New Orleans grew. It began to settle below sea 
level. And as the Mississippi River would rise and bring its periodic 
floods, as I have seen in Iowa, and I have worked in the floods of 
1993, that water made its way down there and flooded that region too. 
They built protection, and each device was designed to protect the last 
flood, and seldom do we design to protect against the next flood.
  I do not take issue with the design of the Corps of Engineers, but 
New Orleans was a city that was growing. And as it grew, the land 
settled. As it settled, the levees were constructed and the protection 
was established; but it was more designed for something we had 
experienced in the past rather than something we might anticipate in 
the future.
  But it was not without anticipation. In fact, the newspaper articles 
in the New Orleans Times Picayune had laid out, I believe, five 
different editions of that newspaper that all dealt with the structure 
of the levee system, the protection of the levee system, and what would 
happen in the event of certain weather circumstances, particularly 
hurricanes. Each of those editions had five or six articles that laid 
out certain segments.
  As I sat through the night reading through those, it struck me this 
was a concise presentation of the circumstances. If one wants to go and 
visit and understand what happened around New Orleans, I highly 
recommend that they revisit those pages on the Web site of the New 
Orleans Time Picayune newspaper. I believe it was 2002, although the 
articles do not have a date I can find.
  What I saw was a Mississippi River leveed off from the city of New 
Orleans. The levees are 25 feet above sea level. They protect the 
flooding of the Mississippi River. It gets over 25 feet over sea level, 
it would spill out over the levees. And as far as I know, it has not 
done that, at least not from the river itself.
  There were also levees designed to protect the city from the surge 
from the gulf. It is unclear to me the elevations of those levees. Some 
of them were not as high as the 25 feet above sea level that is the 
level around the Mississippi River. There are also levees operated by 
the levee district and in conjunction with the Corps of Engineers. As I 
picked out of that article, there is cost sharing. First of all, the 
Corps of Engineers constructs, operates, and maintain the levees on the 
Mississippi River. The other levees, particularly the levees that are 
the boundaries of Lake Pontchartrain that keep Lake Pontchartrain from 
surging into New Orleans, those levees are managed and constructed in 
conjunction with the Corps of Engineers. And then there are lateral 
levees that run along some of the canals that are constructed and 
maintained by the levee district themselves, according to the published 
documents.
  As I look at those elevations, the river elevations, Corps of 
Engineers, 25 feet above sea level. The hurricane levees around Lake 
Pontchartrain, approximately 17.5 feet above sea level. The elevations 
along the 17th Street Canal, there was one elevation that was 4.5 feet 
above sea level. That canal needed floodgates at the inlet of Lake 
Pontchartrain to protect the surge from spilling out and breaching the 
levee on the 17th Street Canal. The other two canals fell in the same 
category.
  But as it laid out this system, the system of levees designed to 
protect a city that is settling and a city that had as much as 16 feet 
of water in the city, the idea was, of course, to plan for an expected 
or an historical event. But one article in there laid out the scenario 
that was called worst case scenario; and worst case scenario was if a 
category 4 or category 5 hurricane came into New Orleans from the south 
and sat with its center near the center of the city of New Orleans, or 
perhaps a little to the left or west where the counterclockwise winds 
of the hurricane would drive the ocean water up into Lake 
Pontchartrain, and there would be a surge of water that actually lifts 
water up out of the ocean above sea level, as that water comes up it 
raises an elevation. Water has a tendency to flow downhill. That is one 
thing I can say professionally: Water runs downhill. The south wind 
would push that water that was elevated up into Lake Pontchartrain and 
raise that lake up, a lake that might have a depth between 8 and 20 
feet deep, approximately 16 to 17 feet average depth, but

[[Page 20769]]

half again more water, 8 to 10 feet more water pushed into Lake 
Pontchartrain. And as the south wind drove that water to the north, and 
it is a huge lake, that lake had half again more water.
  As the hurricane shifted further to the right or to the east, that 
moved the eye to the east of New Orleans and to the east of Lake 
Pontchartrain. When that happened, the wind turned around to the north. 
When it turned to the north, it began to drive that water that was 
stacked up in Lake Pontchartrain, drive it back to the south. And when 
it did that, there was a 10- or 12-foot or greater wall of water 
because there was that much water in the lake, it was 155-mile-an-hour 
winds driving that water, pushing that surge over the levees, over 
where the floodgates needed to be and the inlets to the canal levee 
system.
  Mr. Speaker, that was the worst case scenario, and that was the 
scenario that was laid out in the newspaper in 2002. It was the 
scenario that hit with Hurricane Katrina when Lake Pontchartrain 
spilled over the levees. Once it breaches a levee and the water starts 
to flow, the velocity of the water erodes the soil out and creates wide 
gaps in the levees and lets more and more water come faster and faster, 
and New Orleans began to fill up. We saw the low parts of New Orleans 
on our television screens, and I saw them from the air a week ago last 
Sunday. That was the worst case scenario that hit.
  I pose one more thing into this question. There were a couple of 
other things with regard to how people responded, and perhaps we will 
get to that, but the scenario was this. By my information and I have 
not checked the actual river flows, but by my information, the 
Mississippi River was running at one of its lowest levels. It was at 
least a seasonal low, if not an historical low. As I flew down from New 
Orleans to the gulf, south about 90 miles of channel to get to the Gulf 
of Mexico, and looked at the devastated communities down there, the 25-
foot levees down below were breached. I would say they were topped. The 
river levees were topped by water that surged over the top, which said 
that this low-flow Mississippi River saw such a surge from the ocean 
that it came up and went over the top of the 25-foot levees, 25 feet 
above sea level, surged over the top of those levees and flooded the 
bottom ground between the gulf levee and the Mississippi River levee 
and washed out anyone that lived in that half-mile stretch that lives 
in between the two levees, all of the way from New Orleans down to the 
Gulf of Mexico.
  That surge in that river, that surged all of the way up into New 
Orleans and put pressure on the entire system, I wonder what it would 
have been like if the Mississippi River had been running at a high flow 
as opposed to a low flow. It would have been worse yet if that had been 
the case.
  I looked at what caused that disaster and how it came about and how 
it was predictable, it was predicted, and what we might have done and 
what we might well do. That will be something that I will commit a lot 
of my energy to in the upcoming months, to have some oversight on the 
planning process, since it is my background and my life's work and my 
history of having been flooded. I had four large construction contracts 
going on in 1993 in Iowa, and had them all underwater intermittently 
throughout that spring and early summer, and, by the 9th of July, 
having them all underwater with some of my equipment as well. That 
helps me empathize with the victims of this flood. My house did not 
wash away, my business nearly washed away. That season was washed away, 
and it put all of us through a lot of work and stress and economic 
hardship that I think served me well to have been tested in that 
fashion. Hopefully I will be able to use and draw on that experience as 
we reach out a helping hand to the people on the gulf coast.
  As far as that background and that history subsequent to the floods 
of 1993, we did flood mitigation work and worked in conjunction with 
the victim communities throughout the region in Iowa all through the 
balance of the decade. We were not able to do any flood mitigation in 
1993 because we were one of the companies that was underwater; but by 
1994 we had pulled ourselves up out of the water and we had gotten our 
contracts finished and we reached out and we did flood work.
  We have done work on all of the reservoirs in Iowa on the Missouri 
River and Mississippi River. So we have extensive experience in that 
kind of work and elevations and drainage and hydrology and water flows 
and elevations and the impact of the velocity.

                              {time}  2215

  So these are things that I will pay close attention to as we move 
forward with putting a plan together for a solution for New Orleans and 
the region in the gulf coast.
  The gentleman that is here tonight that spoke briefly with a 1-minute 
speech is the gentleman from Georgia. And this gentleman is a doctor 
from Georgia, a colleague of mine, a classmate of mine, elected to come 
in for the 108th Congress together. A gentleman who has given a lot of 
his life for the betterment of this country, including who-knows-how-
many babies delivered, how many passionate speeches on the floor based 
on that experience, and the times that he has taken his profession to 
support his work here in Congress but also the times he steps away from 
his work in Congress to lend a healing hand to people who need that.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).
  Mr. GINGREY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Iowa for 
yielding to me in this Special Order tonight. Of course, he brings to 
us an expertise that few Members of Congress really have and an 
understanding of this rather complex system of levees. The city of New 
Orleans, how it is constructed and how it is protected, and the lower 
Mississippi, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King), of course, understands 
that and had an opportunity within the last 10 days to actually go down 
to the area of devastation, as he points out; and I am very happy that 
he is going to be working to try to restore and get it right as we seek 
to rebuild.
  I had, Mr. Speaker, an opportunity that I want to share with my 
colleagues. It was entirely different really, not from the engineering 
technical perspective, which I have very little expertise on. But as a 
physician Member of the Congress, I found myself going into the Labor 
Day weekend enjoying a dove shoot. The opening day of dove season in my 
great State of Georgia was that Saturday of Labor Day, the long Labor 
Day weekend. And as I was sitting in a dove field waiting for these few 
birds to come over that I had very little chance of hitting, I began to 
feel a little bit compelled to do something, especially as a physician 
Member.
  And I was fortunate enough, when I got back home, to call around and 
realize that there was an opportunity to go into Louisiana, into 
Mississippi, and to try to help out a little bit. A lot of folks have 
done that; and I am sure that they felt, coming back from that 
experience, just as I did, tremendously gratified to have made the 
effort.
  But I basically, Mr. Speaker, hooked a ride with an angel flight. 
Angel flights are private pilots or corporate pilots who are willing in 
an emergency situation to donate their aircraft to fly either medical 
personnel or supplies and equipment into an area. And that is exactly 
what I ended up doing. On Sunday morning of the Labor Day weekend, a 
good friend, a compassionate citizen from Rome, Georgia, Mr. Bob 
Ledbetter, Jr., allowed me to fly down on his plane, an angel flight, 
to Baton Rouge with medical supplies, three nurses, two from Emory, one 
from Cobb County.
  We basically went to one of the largest shelters in Baton Rouge, 
5,000 people there at the River Center, took those medical supplies. 
And then I spent some time seeing patients. No life-threatening 
emergencies, but stress patients that have been through a lot, fatigue, 
some who had swallowed the contaminated water and were suffering 
symptoms from that. But mainly I just had an opportunity to talk to 
evacuees to get a sense of what they went through and to also see 
volunteers who were just working day and night with very little sleep 
and doing it

[[Page 20770]]

in a most compassionate way. Not perfect order, but organized to the 
best of their ability.
  I want to give very high marks to the Red Cross, Mr. Speaker, at the 
River Center in Baton Rouge. If the gentleman from Iowa will allow me, 
I would like to mention some names of people that I felt need some pats 
on the back and some accolades.
  First, I met the director of the Red Cross effort at the River 
Center, Mr. Jeff Schnoor. His name is a little difficult to pronounce, 
but Jeff is a retired military man, 21 years in the military, a single 
parent, I think from San Antonio, had been working with the Red Cross 
for 12 years, been through a lot of disasters, but told me that this 
was the toughest assignment that he had ever had. And he handled 
himself in that entire center with 5,000 evacuees with such calmness 
and patience. It was a very difficult time, but he handled it extremely 
well.
  I also was able, Mr. Speaker, to meet with a group of physicians who 
had gone down from Atlanta, and I want to particularly mention Dr. 
Cecil Bennett. He had an organization that he put together through his 
Atlanta primary care practice, some of his partners, some of the nurses 
that work for him, and he called this Operation Brother's Keeper. And 
his focus was to not let these angel flights just come down with 
medical supplies and personnel and fly back empty, but he was 
determined to see that any evacuee, displaced person, that had family 
or friends in another State, particularly in Georgia, to be given an 
opportunity to fly back and to get into maybe a less crowded situation 
and join family or friends in another location.
  And so when I came back from Baton Rouge, it was with another angel 
flight pilot, Mr. Steve Stemmer, in a very small plane carrying the 
pilot, myself, and four evacuees, one of whom had just had a baby a 
week before the hurricane hit. So it was really quite a thing to see.
  There was a couple in Baton Rouge. We had worked all afternoon in the 
shelter seeing patients; and then, lo and behold, it got to the wee 
hours of the morning and we realized we had no place to sleep except 
maybe on the concrete floor. And this couple, Eva and David Kelley, 
took in six of us, and their teenage boys had to sleep on the couch, 
and they gave us their beds.
  I guess what I want to say, and I appreciate the gentleman from Iowa 
for giving me the opportunity, is that I had a chance to see the best 
of human nature. I know right after the levees broke and we were all so 
shocked to see all that water in the city of New Orleans and 
particularly shocked by the looting and the kind of mob behavior that 
we see in situations like that, maybe that did bring out the worst of 
human nature in a very limited few; but what I saw, Mr. Speaker, was 
the best of human nature in the majority, the vast majority of people.
  And not just in the volunteers and the professionals, the Red Cross, 
who were doing their job, but really in the evacuees themselves. They 
are good people. They explained to me why they did not leave. I was 
very curious to know if they had been able to hear the warnings. In 
almost every instance, Mr. Speaker, they had clearly heard the 
warnings. Some of them had never been out of the city of New Orleans in 
their entire lives, and they had been through plenty of near misses 
without this big perfect storm flooding their city, and they knew that 
some of the neighbors in the past had actually left their property, 
only to come back and find New Orleans dry but their property totally 
ransacked and looted and destroyed.
  Even if they did not own. If they were renting property, everything 
that was in there was theirs. It was their stuff. They had that pride, 
that sense of ownership. So it gave me a much better understanding as 
to why these people did not leave. They were not stupid. They had a 
good reason.
  So we need to continue to be compassionate and realize that, while it 
is hard to look for any good out of such a tremendous disaster, natural 
disaster, I think we do have a chance, if we all pull together and do 
not get into too much partisan bickering over this and finger-pointing, 
to help New Orleans and the gulf coast and the State of Mississippi and 
Louisiana rebuild and maybe make the lives better for a lot of these 
people that did not have such a good existence prior to this storm.
  So I thank the gentleman for allowing me to come and share just a few 
thoughts tonight with my colleagues.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia 
(Mr. Gingrey) for his presentation tonight and also for his service and 
for getting in there as he did early and seeing the situation there and 
reaching out a helping hand. I know that his experience there and the 
perspective that he picked up down in that region will serve him well 
as this Congress makes decisions on the taxpayers' dollars and, when we 
appropriate those dollars, when we direct those dollars, that they go 
to the most good and to the greatest use that they possibly can.
  I also want to point out that many of us in this Congress recognize 
that there needs to be a private sector solution to this, that we need 
to help those people that need and deserve the help, but at the same 
time the government cannot be the solution to everything, that the 
human spirit will win out with all. And as the gentleman from Georgia 
(Mr. Gingrey) said, the spirit of the people down there showed very 
much the positive sides of this.
  I saw some things too that strike me in a way as a sense of humor 
that helps people adjust to the disaster. Having been through some 
disaster myself, I understand that psychology that one cannot just 
wallow in feeling sorry for oneself. The poor me's do not clean up 
anything. And after a couple of weeks of people coming up and saying, I 
am sorry, I am sorry, one gets to the point of saying all right, but 
now I want to go to work and it is time to start cleaning up the mess 
and putting this thing back together.
  One of the things that I saw was in a sporting goods store that was 
boarded up with plyboard in Slidell, Louisiana. It had a series of 
windows there with about a four by eight sheet of plywood over every 
one of them. And as I looked at that, the one on the left said in big 
red letters, ``Looters will be shot.'' And the next window to the right 
said, ``Survivors will be shot again,'' and there were three more 
windows with plywood on them painted on in big red letters, ``And again 
and again and again.''
  And I walked in there to talk to that gentleman, and he had not had a 
problem with looters. His sporting goods store was full of inventory, 
and he was open for business that day, and he was selling product over 
the counter. I did not notice that there were any lights on in there. I 
suspect there was not any electricity, but he was doing business, and 
he had protected his place. I think the signs on the windows had to 
help, and it also helped him send a message to the people that were 
looting and shooting in the city off to their south and west, and that 
would have been the city of New Orleans. I believe Slidell was pretty 
close to the center of the worst of it. Although a fair amount of the 
town seemed to remain intact, once we got out into the countryside, 
there was not much left in a lot of those regions to the south and 
somewhat to the west of there.
  As the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) has spoken about taking a 
ride back to Georgia with some of the evacuees and reaching out a hand 
to help, I wanted to point out, Mr. Speaker, the effort that we have 
done within the district that I represent, roughly the western third of 
Iowa. There are 32 counties there, and they range all the way from 
Minnesota down to Missouri. And we looked on television as we saw the 
tens of thousands of evacuees that were trapped temporarily in New 
Orleans that were being evacuated out. They were going to the 
Astrodome. They were going to the River Center, as the gentleman from 
Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) mentioned, in Baton Rouge, and around that region 
in the country. There were cities that more than doubled in their 
population in a matter of a few days.
  And we watched that unfold, and we saw that tens of thousands had 
been taken to the Astrodome in Houston and received their cot, and the 
cots were

[[Page 20771]]

lined up side by side with barely enough room to walk in between them, 
where people's new home was a small bag of some possessions that sat 
underneath their own personal cot, which was laying out there in the 
middle of everywhere with hundreds and hundreds of people all in one 
room sleeping together and set up with food lines and passed drinks and 
receiving medical care and doing all we could do at the time.

                              {time}  2230

  But they needed to be relocated some place more permanent, some place 
that they could call home.
  I know that there were some States that set up cots within their city 
centers and some of those were used and they needed them. But we looked 
at it from a different perspective, where I am from, and we looked 
around and asked the question, how could we best serve some people? How 
could we best reach out to people in need?
  We came up with the idea that I call the ``package deal.'' We sent a 
message out to each of the county seat mayors in the 32 counties, asked 
them to hold a meeting and ask to come to that meeting their emergency 
manager in the county, several of their top employers, their pastors, 
the school administrator, and any other volunteers and groups that 
would like to, especially the service clubs that are very effective in 
our region, such as the Rotary and Kiwanis and the Optimists and the 
Lions who all have a significant role to supplement the work of the 
churches.
  We asked them to identify the package deal, as I referenced, and that 
is, with this vision in mind that we could invite people into our 
communities and save family units. So that when the plane landed or the 
bus pulled in, the mayor would be standing there to greet the family or 
families, and alongside them would be the pastor of their choice, if 
they had a choice, and next to the pastor would be the sponsoring 
family that would be sponsoring the newly-arriving family or the 
sponsors of the families, and perhaps a school administrator there.
  But the essential core would be the mayor for the ceremonial duties, 
so to speak, and the formal welcome; the pastor for the spiritual 
support which we know that everyone needs; and the sponsoring family 
would help the new family get acquainted and be absorbed into the 
community, so that they would know when they set foot on the ground 
that they could lay their head on a pillow that night that would be 
theirs and a home that they could call home, at least for a while, and 
a refrigerator that had food in it, and that the kids could go to 
school the next day.
  As we put that package together and the inventory came together, we 
have since identified perhaps two dozen households and sponsoring 
families of the package deal, and I would think there are that many 
again in Iowa that are almost ready to say, yes, we will be happy to 
sponsor a family.
  So we are moving forward with that process. We have some families who 
are placed in the region. Most of that comes from family connections or 
church connections, and we are reaching out to expand them. It is 
important for us to do all we can to donate money, commit our time, and 
it is also important for us to identify the resources in our 
communities and be able to offer a package deal where a family needs a 
new community and a new home to adopt them, either temporarily or, if 
they choose, permanently. All we ask from them is be a good citizen and 
you can stay here as long as you want or need to, and we are going to 
help you find a job. Part of the job prospects was part of the offer 
that we put together.
  As one of my district people who will be heading this up had to say, 
whether or not we get a long line-up of people that are willing to come 
and accept this offer and take a trip to get relocated in our part of 
the State, as long as we offer them an option, it gives them at least 
some power. People that do not have options do not have hope, people 
who have been loaded onto planes and flown across this country and 
landed into cities in different States and when they got on the plane, 
they did not know where they were going, and I am told that sometimes 
they did not actually know where they were when they arrived. They 
found out soon enough. Mostly, though, I can confirm that in the heat 
of the evacuation attempt, which was a successful effort, it was not 
practical to be negotiating with people that were under stress on where 
they would go. It was just important to find a place for them to go, 
and the rest could be sorted out later.
  So even though it sounds a little bit inhuman to load people on 
airplanes and fly them places, by the same token, when you go into a 
situation where you have that many tens of thousands of people in one 
place, and if you begin to negotiate and you say, here is the offer, I 
want to fly you off to Minneapolis, for example, somebody is going to 
hold out for Las Vegas or Des Moines, or wherever it might be, and then 
you end up with a chaotic situation when you have to act, act fast, 
load the plane, get going so that plane can get out of the way for 
another one to land and get turned around.
  So I visited the area, and I left Ames, Iowa in a small plane at 
about 6:15 in the evening on Saturday, it was September 10, and flew 
down there and landed at Little Rock that night, pretty late, and left 
Little Rock early in the morning at 5:15, in keeping with the flight 
plan that we had filed. We flew on in to Louis Armstrong International 
Airport and landed there about 7:26 a.m., Sunday morning, September 11. 
Somehow, it seemed that we had not come all that far in 4 years when I 
got a look at New Orleans, but certainly that thought came to mind, 
that reverent day to commemorate September 11, it became September, 
2005, and a great, great city was under water, and a huge, huge area of 
the gulf coast had been destroyed and blown away and washed away by the 
surge of the storm, an area roughly 90,000 square miles, perhaps the 
size of Kansas.
  But as we landed there that morning, I got out of the plane and 
walked into the airport service center there, and there were three men 
that had spent most of their time working there, had not really been 
outside that area that I could tell. Some had lost their homes, or at 
least they were flooded, wind damaged, temporarily at least. They were 
living off of military meals, ready to eat, they seemed to be 
everywhere down there and there was not much of anything else, but 
there was plenty of water. So there was bottled water and food, the 
essentials of life; there was shelter there.
  Their telephones, I believe their land lines were not functioning, 
but their cell phones were working, and my cell phone did work. So I 
called over to the joint operations center, which was across the other 
side of the air strip, and they sent a car to pick me up. I arrived at 
the air strip there sometime after 8 o'clock that morning, perhaps 
8:15, 8:20. As I walked into that center, I met officer after officer 
that was there on duty in that center where they are controlling the 
communications for the rescue and recovery and the evacuation of New 
Orleans.
  It took about an hour to discuss some of that through with the 
officers that were there, and they asked if I would stay for the 9 
o'clock briefing, which began precisely at 9 o'clock, and I did stay 
for the briefing. It seemed as though they directed a lot of their 
briefing to me, and I say that because some of the details that they 
went into I suspect everyone in the room knew those answers except for 
myself. So as they directed that briefing on me and invited me to ask 
questions, I did ask a few; and in the end, they asked me if I would 
say a few words, and I did.
  Good people there. They had pulled that together. I am going to guess 
that there were 40 to 45 people in the room, each representing their 
own government agency which would have been Federal and State and city, 
as well as the nongovernment agencies, the nongovernment organizations, 
the NGOs that were there. As I listened to them talk about what they 
had done, how they adapted and what they were planning to do, and I 
looked at the list, the checklist, the problems that had been

[[Page 20772]]

raised and posted and the solutions that were proposed and how they 
arrived at that, it was a textbook study, I think, on how to put 
together a rescue and recovery operation.
  The communications had been wiped out in New Orleans. In fact, 
Michael Chertoff stood here and gave us a presentation on the disaster 
of Katrina in a session of Congress in his briefing and, as he 
described this, he said that if the military were going to attack a 
city, the classical attack would be to go in and wipe out the power and 
the communications, which Hurricane Katrina did for the city of New 
Orleans, wiped out the power and communications; and then it would wipe 
out the transportation routes, destroy the ability, disturb the ability 
to get in or out of the city of New Orleans, and then attack. That is 
exactly what the storm did. It wiped out the electrical power, wiped 
out the communications, took out the cell phones even, and then wiped 
out the access to and from the city, even including the part of the 
causeway; flooded the approaches to the bridges, you could not get in 
or out of New Orleans, it was a stranded city, and then the attack was 
the water that flowed in and filled that city up, as much as sometimes 
16 feet of water.
  So that classical attack that came to New Orleans shut off all of the 
communications, made victims of hundreds of the rescue workers whom the 
rescue plan was designed to put to work to help save others, but they 
were victims of the storm and the attack, so to speak, themselves. I 
would describe what happened, and each of us, I think, in this country 
now could go down the path of criticizing a number of public figures in 
this event; but in lieu of that, I will take my colleagues back to the 
storm that I described earlier. This storm that was the worst-case 
scenario, that was the classic military-style attack on the city of New 
Orleans, the hurricane that positioned itself so that it was almost 
perfect.
  If you were on the side of the hurricane, you would say it was a 
perfect storm. It was a perfect storm in that it came with the velocity 
and the power and the intensity and the speed and exactly in the 
location that it could do the most damage. It positioned itself so that 
it stacked all that water up in Lake Pontchartrain, then it positioned 
itself to surge the water back out of Lake Pontchartrain, flowed over 
the levee dikes, breached the dikes, and then began lowering the water 
level in Lake Pontchartrain while it filled the city of New Orleans.
  That all took place, and it took place even though man had prepared 
for a bad disaster. But it was the perfect storm; Katrina was almost 
the perfect storm. It could have been a little more intense, it could 
have clearly been a Category 5, but it was nearly the perfect storm to 
destroy New Orleans and destroy the gulf coast and destroy the whole 
flow of the channel in the bottom ground all along from New Orleans all 
the way down 90 miles to the Gulf of Mexico along the Mississippi.
  That perfect storm, Mr. Speaker, and then I would add to that another 
perfect storm, another perfect storm, which was the chain reaction of 
disaster that came when the plans for the storm and the plans for the 
hurricane reaction, the evacuation of people and then the recovery and 
the response to the storm, broke down. And it can be argued that it 
broke down at nearly every level at one point or another.
  Having been in business for 28 years, I have seen a number of times 
when I have called it in business a chain reaction of disaster. In my 
business, the earth-moving business, I talk about this scenario: 
somebody forgets to load the grease tubes onto the maintenance trailer, 
and then they show up at the job and there is no grease. Then the man 
who is doing the greasing does not grease. Then, because of that, then 
a bearing goes out. Because the bearing goes out, the machine breaks 
down. Because the machine breaks down, it is not there to support the 
other machines; and when that happens, the whole job and the whole 
operation breaks down, and all for want of a grease tube.
  Sometimes, the disaster could have been worse for want of better 
communication. As the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) spoke here 
earlier in his Special Order perhaps 30 minutes ago or more, they did 
not have the ability, the interoperability to communicate across the 
different levels of law enforcement. I know that we had law enforcement 
sometimes standing on one side of the river or even opposite sides of 
the road with water in between and could not get to each other because 
their radios would not communicate because of frequency problems. We 
have the technology today to tie that all together and make that work. 
That was not the case down in New Orleans in many of those cases.
  So because of that lack of ability to communicate between the law 
enforcement officers, because the power was out, the lights were out, 
because we had vandals and because we had looters and, in fact, on 
Monday, and the storm was still passing through on Monday, by Monday 
afternoon at 3:30, there were looters in the streets with guns, 
shooting, robbing, breaking in, and stashing that loot in places where 
they thought they could go back and get it, and many of them did. That 
was another piece that broke down, was the public order.
  But, also, the worst-case scenario that was in the paper described 
that small boats would have to come in as volunteers and penetrate into 
the city and haul people out. Yet there were 1,000 people outside the 
city on Thursday morning I think, 1,000 people outside the city with 
boats preparing to go in, and the first boat that went in got shot at. 
So they were turned back and prevented from going into the city.
  I happen to know that there was a fleet of air boats that came from 
Georgia, and they waited to get the orders to go in. They wanted to go 
in and save people. They could not get orders to go in, partly because 
of the security, and I think partly because the communication was 
breaking down; but, nonetheless, they decided to take matters into 
their own hands, went into the city, and that small group of air boats 
rescued 800 people. That was a point of light in this disaster of the 
storm, and it happened over and over again, people taking charge, 
people acting, reacting, responding, taking initiative the American 
way.
  Sometimes when top-down management is destroyed because of 
communications or the plan just does not work, people have to take over 
and recover. We have done that in wars from the beginning of time, or 
the beginning of this country; and we have served ourselves well with 
that kind of initiative and that kind of inspiration that comes from 
that.
  But the communications broke down, the plan that was there for 
evacuation filled up the civic center, filled up the Superdome. There 
did not seem to be adequate water or supplies or medicine or order in 
the Superdome, and it filled with people and put a lot of pressure on 
the people that were in there. We know that bad things happened inside 
that building, and they will unfold as time goes on.
  The Superdome was surrounded with water, and yet I have reports that 
some people drove to the Superdome presumably before it was completely 
surrounded with water, parked their car, and walked in. If they could 
drive to the Superdome and park their car, they could drive out of New 
Orleans and evacuate themselves. Why did they not do that? So the 
questions remain, and many of them that are critical of government have 
been publicly aired, and I will not dig down into that.
  But I will just say that from a weather standpoint, Mr. Speaker, we 
had a nearly perfect storm, from a chain reaction of disaster, from a 
break-down of communications and power and cutoff of the transportation 
routes, and then the inability of the local law enforcement people and 
the local security people, those who were not already victimized by the 
flood that were on duty, their inability to communicate with each 
other, and then their inability to communicate with the chain of 
command, going up from the city to the State to the Federal Government.

                              {time}  2245

  It had to have been extraordinarily difficult to get enough 
information to

[[Page 20773]]

make an informed decision in a time of crisis like that, and it was 
immobilizing.
  So the perfect storm of the weather, and almost the perfect storm of 
the chain reaction of disaster that flowed from lack of communications, 
inability to communicate with each other, and then sometimes the 
inability to agree on what the next appropriate action was, not having 
had thought this out in advance, in my history I will look back and 
tell you that much of what I have seen in the form of people who appear 
to be quick thinking, were really people who had thought ahead and 
simply reacted to the scenario that had played out in their mind.
  And I do not know that this scenario had been played out in the minds 
of the local leadership, but I did read this scenario in the newspaper. 
And again these questions will be asked. They will be answered. And I 
think that America will get a reasonable perspective when Congress gets 
finished with our hearings sometime in the future. Right now, we are in 
the recovery and planning the reconstruction mode.
  A few other things that come across my mind. I stopped and talked to 
a shrimper down at Slidell, Louisiana. He had five boats. Two of them 
were west of New Orleans; they survived the storm. Three of them were 
east of New Orleans; all of them were blown up on high ground.
  He had a friend who had been running a video tape on the day that the 
water surge came in. I think there they said the surge was perhaps 17 
feet. As the water began to come in the house, he turned on the video 
player. And within 3 to 5 minutes the water had filled the house to the 
point where he was going up the stairs. His wife was trying to save the 
dogs and go up the stairs, and the last sounds in the film, I am told, 
and I hope to be able to see that film, is the sound of this individual 
that is chopping a hole in the roof so he can get out on top of the 
roof with his wife and the dogs, to save themselves from the flood.
  That 17-foot surge of water there, which in some cases was as high as 
27 feet, that filled the House up in just a few minutes, in 3 to 5 
minutes the water came up. It is not quite like a tsunami that breaks 
like a surfer's wave, and it is not quite like a wall of water, but I 
understand, and wish I had seen film of this, it is more like a big 
surge of water, a big belly of water that just rolls up and goes over 
the top of anything in its path.
  And the power, the power of that water, of the wind too, but of the 
water is awesome. I have spent my life in the construction business. I 
have worked with asphalt, base courses and overlays. And I saw hundreds 
of feet of asphalt surfacing, 4-inch overlay, that had been washed off 
of the highway down along the levee east and south of Slidell on the 
road going to New Orleans.
  Any water that hits powerfully enough on the top of a levee to wash 
off 4 inches of asphalt in great slabs and wash it several hundred feet 
out onto the land, is a powerful, powerful wall of water.
  And I want to take you down, in your mind's eye, Mr. Speaker, down 
south of New Orleans, down along the Mississippi channel, along that 
channel where I flew that Sunday, September 11, with the Corps of 
Engineers as they went down to review the levies and the places where 
the levies had been breached going south. It is perhaps 90 miles of 
river from New Orleans south down to the Gulf of Mexico. There is a 25-
foot-high levee along on each side of the Mississippi River that 
contains the river, and there is also a 25-foot-high, approximately 25-
foot-high levee that keeps the gulf from washing out the back side of 
that levee.
  Now, as you fly down there, the communities that used to exist in 
that stretch, and this stretch is perhaps, it varies in width, but 
perhaps a half a mile wide, on average, with the bottom ground in 
between the two levees, the gulf levee on the west side, and the 
Mississippi River, that is the west side of the Mississippi River, 
about a half mile of bottom ground in between. There are similarities 
on the east side of the Mississippi too, but just speaking of the west 
side.
  When you fly down through there, on that bottom ground you will see 
the places where the communities used to be. And these communities used 
to be communities, because the wind came up and blew hard and blew a 
lot of these communities away. Shattered the buildings and tore the 
buildings down and blew them away. And anything that stayed was 
flooded. The water surge in the Mississippi River surged over the top 
of the Mississippi River levee, and filled that area up in between 
those two 25-foot-high dikes with water; then the surge came from the 
gulf side and did the same thing.
  Heavy winds blowing almost everything out of its path, and destroying 
almost everything, and then the water in from the Mississippi River 
side, from the east side sloshed in, and then the surge from the gulf 
side sloshing in as well, and filled that area up twice. And there is 
no place for the water to get out, Mr. Speaker.
  And the communities as we flew along there, I saw the water towers, 
and could read the water towers of most of them. As you go south from 
New Orleans, it goes Belle Chasse, is one community; next community is 
Port Sulphur; the next community is Empire; the next community is to my 
left, Mr. Speaker. This is what is left of the community of Buras, 
Louisiana.
  This is the best side of the water tower. This water tower has been 
blown down, crushed. The other side is dented and caved in. The legs 
are wandering back across over here. This picture is the best side of 
the water tower, because that is the side that has the city's name. 
That is why we chose this picture to put here tonight. This is what 
used to be the City of Buras. These homes that are here, it is unlikely 
that they are sitting on their own foundations, but there were a few 
that were, but most of them were just gone, washed away, blown away, 
double flooded, and destroyed.
  But I have never, in the tornados that I see, living in the part of 
the country I do, I have never seen a tornado take out a water tower. I 
have never seen a wind take out a water tower. I have never seen a 
force take out a water tower. But this force took out this water tower. 
And I do not know whether it was the trash that was blown into it or 
washed into it, or the wind itself, or the combination of the trash, 
the wind, and the water. But it caved this water tower in.
  By the way, there is your dish up here on top. Perhaps the cell phone 
tower was on top of the Buras water tower too, and they were out of 
communication. But that gives an example of how bad it was.
  In these communities, as I mentioned earlier, Belle Chasse, Port 
Sulphur, Empire, Buras, and then from there further south, Buras is 
about 65 miles south of New Orleans, then Boothville, then Venice. 
Venice, by my math at least, is the last community before you hit the 
Gulf of Mexico, perhaps another 18 or 20 miles.
  Here is another sign of the spirit of the people in Louisiana. And as 
you can see, as I could see from the air, still flooded, this water 
surge, this is the Mississippi River right here on top. And the surge 
has come over the top and dropped silt up here on top. This is all 
trash that has been pushed in from the flooding. This is in between the 
two levees. It goes half a mile width. This set of homes is essentially 
nothing left here. Shattered shards of what used to be buildings, and 
water standing perhaps 6 or 8 feet deep in this area. Yet after it has 
been up as high as here, you can see the trash has floated to here from 
the inside.
  But one thing that did survive, Mr. Speaker, was the flagpole. And 
the first thing that had to happen was, the person that owns this land 
had to come in by boat and bring in Old Glory and run her up the 
flagpole as a sign of patriotism, as a sign of God and country, as a 
sign of defiance, that they were not going to let this storm get the 
best of them, Mr. Speaker.
  And I am encouraged by the spirit of the people that I met, and awed 
by the power of the storm, and by the breadth and the magnitude of this 
disaster, Mr. Speaker. And I am also motivated by the challenge that 
lays before us all as

[[Page 20774]]

we reach out to the people of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
  And I visited the shelters also the next day, and I slept on a Red 
Cross cot, and appreciated their hospitality. I was not aware until the 
next day that there were people sleeping without a cot, perhaps not too 
many miles from where I was. As I looked at that effort that was done 
by Red Cross people and volunteers of all kinds, some of them had been 
working 18, 20 hours a day for 13, 14, 15 days in a row, now more days 
than that. They have committed and sacrificed a lot to help others out. 
And we all need to do the same. I am going to continue in my efforts.
  And I am going to look forward to the challenge of rebuilding. And I 
am going to look forward to, in 10 years, 20 years, going back down to 
the gulf coast, Mr. Speaker, and seeing what has been brought about by 
the reconstruction effort that we will see.
  And I want to be sure that the work that we do builds adequate 
levees, adequate protection, adequate hurricane walls and flood walls 
so that a category 5 hurricane can be withstood by the protection that 
will be reconstructed around New Orleans and around the other 
communities in that area.
  I do not know if they will rebuild Buras. I do not know if they will 
rebuild these communities down there. I will say, I cannot imagine them 
not. But it is still highly vulnerable, and I do not know that there is 
very much more that we can do to protect the people of that area.
  So as I add it all up, I would say, in summary, that we have to be 
prudent and responsible in the spending that we provide. We have to 
look to the private sector to contribute as much as it can. We have to 
get a handle on how many insurance dollars are there. A handle on how 
many people will not be going back to New Orleans, and I believe that 
number will be significant.
  We need to reconstruct New Orleans in the areas where it is not 
likely to go underwater again first, and get a handle on how many 
people the population of New Orleans will be in the short term, say 
within the next 2 to 5 years; and the lower part of the bowl may be 
better used, instead, for some public purpose like a park, a golf 
course, rather than housing, which is going to be very, very 
vulnerable.
  But we can do three things to protect New Orleans and protect them 
from an engineering prospective. One is to build a hurricane levee and 
hurricane walls at the outlet of Lake Pontchartrain, so when another 
hurricane comes, the low pressure center and the southern wind that 
pushes that water up into and surges into Lake Pontchartrain cannot get 
into Lake Pontchartrain. Keep the water out of Lake Pontchartrain is 
number one.
  Number two is build hurricane gates at the inlet of the canals, like 
the 17th Street Canal and the other canals along that area, so that if 
the water does get into Lake Pontchartrain, or there happens to be a 
high wind that comes from the north, that we can protect the inlets of 
those canals as well as the rest of the area along Lake Pontchartrain 
was protecting.
  And then the third thing is to raise the pump stations, the many pump 
stations that are there in New Orleans that found themselves 
underwater, out of commission, and we fit those pump stations with a 
backup redundant system so that if the power goes out they can still 
run, whether they be diesel engines or whether they be generator run, 
the city power that might run the pumps needs to be backed up with a 
generator on that location. They need to be well above the elevation 
where the highest likely water can be.
  So those are the things that I will be taking a look at and weighing 
in on. These will be the things that I think Congress has the 
responsibility to consider. And as we encourage the people of New 
Orleans to keep the faith, keep the spirit, show this American spirit 
you have for the most part. And sometimes on television the best side 
of New Orleans was not shown.
  But as this saga unfolds, Mr. Speaker, we will continue to see the 
best side of humanity, and a lot of it exists in the people in 
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

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