[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 17]
[House]
[Page 22711]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




            TRIBUTE TO THREE JEFFERSON COUNTY, TEXAS, HEROES

  (Mr. POE asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. POE. Mr. Speaker, when the second lady of the gulf, Rita, hit 
Jefferson County, Texas, first responders hunkered down to wait out the 
storm. They did not leave during this hurricane. After the storm, the 
first responders began working 12-hour shifts and slept in their cars. 
The county had and still has no power or water. The responders had no 
food. So three local heroes took control.
  Port Arthur police officer Marcelo Molfino, Port Arthur fire fighter 
David Barclay and a lawyer by the name of Everett Sanderson of 
Nederland, Texas, took control. Molfino and Barclay worked 48 straight 
hours looking for meat and finding it before it got thawed. Sanderson 
opened up his beat up, old damaged restaurant and used a generator and 
set up a barbecue pit outside in a National Guard tent.
  These three worked 7 days a week, 15 to 20 hours a day, cooking. 
Local grocery stores donated more meat during the weeks. One day last 
week, they fed 6,500 police officers, firefighters, Red Cross and FEMA 
workers, National Guard troops, Coast Guard and other responders from 
as far away as Maine, all eating Texas barbecue.
  They did so without any government bureaucracy, no red tape forms, no 
permission and no committee meetings. These three heroes got her done.

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