Thousand-Year Flood in Louisiana
Floor Speech
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Mr. GRAVES of Louisiana. Mr. Speaker, August 20th of this year was a Saturday, and I was in Denham Springs, Louisiana. I was gutting a home, ripping out Sheetrock, tearing out floors, throwing out furniture, throwing out photo albums, appliances, and family heirlooms. Mr. Speaker, I did it in a home and literally stripped out every foot of Sheetrock in the house, from the floor to the ceiling and ripped out all the floors. Everything in the house was gutted down to the studs.
This was a house where a woman, who recently retired in June or July of this year, was living. She has been living there since the early 1970s. Never has she had even a single foot of water in her house or a single inch of water in her house. Yet, on the floods that we had in south Louisiana around August 11th, this home received over 6 feet of water in the entire home, everything.
Outside the house, we stacked up piles of debris from 6 to 8 feet high. I call it debris, but in reality it was memories. It was that woman's life that was piled up in the street. Everything that she owned was thrown out.
Mr. Speaker, we had a storm that was a 1,000-year event. We experienced over 31 inches of rain in some of the peak areas in 36 hours. To translate that to snow, you are talking about 25 feet of snow. To my friends from the North, that is what we experienced the equivalent of in just 36 hours. This is on track to be the fourth most costly flood disaster in United States history, and, again, it was a 1,000-year storm.
Now, this happened in south Louisiana last month, but this could happen anywhere. Whether it is a snowstorm, it is a blizzard, it is a tsunami, it is an earthquake, it is a tornado or it is a terrorist attack, it could happen anywhere in this country.
Now, historically when these catastrophic events have happened, the country has stepped up to provide assistance. Whether it is September the 11th, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Katrina or other disasters, the Nation has stepped up whenever these disasters have crossed over into catastrophic territory.
In this instance, we have had over 100,000 homes and businesses flooded. So that story I told about the home that we went in and stripped and gutted--one of many homes that we worked in--you can multiply that same exact scenario tens of thousands of times over.
Now, in this particular case, this house is probably worth $150,000, maybe. It is probably going to cost them $80,000 to rebuild the house to get it back. It is going to cost them $30,000 to replace the car that they lost. It is going to cost them $20,000 to replace their clothes and contents of the house.
Because this home is in a floodplain--at the time when it was built, it was not, but now it is--it is going to probably cost them $100,000 to elevate that concrete slab and lift it up to the higher-base foot elevation. You can do the math. You are talking about over $200,000 just to get themselves back to where they were the day before this storm.
I am going to say it again, Mr. Speaker, this is happening in south Louisiana. While the water has receded, their lives remain upside down, and it is hundreds of thousands of households.
This is a parochial issue to me. It is my hometown. It is my community. It is my neighbors. It is my relatives. But the next disaster, whether it is next week, next year, next month, next decade, it is going to be in your town. It is going at your home. It is going to be your relatives, your neighbors.
The American people need to know that when we have a catastrophic disaster like this, that the country is there to offer a hand up. Let me lay out this financial scenario. I talked about the $200,00 for this one homeowner, not including the other businessowners and others that are affected by this disaster. Because of HUD rules and some of the rules put in place by the mortgage companies, folks are going to have to make a decision on whether they are going to have their home foreclosed upon or they are going to try to get out of this financial predicament that they are in by the beginning of November.
A $2.6 billion budget request has been made to offer a hand up to these people that rescued themselves, sheltered themselves, cooked for themselves, and gutted their own homes. Now is the time for America to offer a hand up, just like we have done in the past and just like we need to let other Americans know we are going to do for them in the event of a crisis like this.
Mr. Speaker, lastly I want to say this: This was somewhat unique in that the Federal interstate held 6 feet of water back, therefore, further inundating people. The Comite River project and other flood control projects, which the Federal Government failed to construct after 30 years, and coastal land loss also contributed to this flood disaster.
Now is the time for us to act. November, December timeframes are too late. This needs to be part of our negotiations right now to offer certainty and to assure Americans in the future that we are going to be there to offer them a hand up.
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