[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Page 358]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          FLOODING IN MISSOURI

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk for a few minutes at the 
beginning of my remarks about what the response to the flooding has 
been in our State of Missouri. I was in St. Louis County with 
Congresswoman Wagner on Saturday. I was in St. Charles County the week 
before that. I was in Cape Girardeau following up on the work 
Congressman Smith has done there. I was in St. Genevieve, Perryville, 
Cassville, and Monette. If you know anything about the geography of our 
State, those places are spread pretty far apart, but we had a flooding 
situation that was almost totally generated in our State--different 
from the floods we normally deal with--and the communities reacted with 
very little time in an impressive way. The Corps of Engineers was also 
there to help. The National Guard was there to do what they needed to 
do. Now we see FEMA and the SBA stepping in to see who qualifies for 
assistance.
  There was loss of life. More often than not, the loss of life 
occurred when somebody drove around a sign that said ``Don't pass this 
sign'' and then got caught in a situation they didn't anticipate or 
thought was less than it turned out to be. Some families clearly are 
grieving that loss of life. We had five international soldiers who lost 
their lives near Fort Leonard Wood. Maybe the whole idea of a low-water 
bridge that you and I would be used to was something they hadn't 
thought about.
  We had three interstate highways close--Interstate 55, Interstate 70, 
and Interstate 44. They were not all closed at exactly the same time 
but within somewhere between a 24- to 36-hour timeframe. We will have 
to look at that to be sure people don't lose access to where their kids 
are, where their jobs are, and where their health care is. The economic 
impact of that Interstate System that comes together in so many ways in 
Missouri shutting down is something that clearly, once we get beyond 
the immediacy of dealing with the flood itself, we need to look at and 
see how we can prevent that problem from happening again. I don't know 
of a time when any two of those highways were closed at the same time 
before, but I know Interstate 70 and Interstate 44 were closed at the 
same time, and it had a real impact economically on people traveling 
east to west or economic things happening east to west anywhere in the 
country.

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