National Construction Safety Team Enhancement Act of 2024

Floor Speech

I rise today in support of my bill, the National Construction Safety Team Enhancement Act of 2024.

Last year, there was massive flooding along California's central coast, which left communities really across the State vulnerable. In my district, the Pajaro River's levee failed, forcing over 1,500 people to evacuate and putting thousands of homes at risk. Many of them were flooded.

In May 2023, I joined Representative Panetta, Senator Padilla, and the late Senator Feinstein in asking the Army Corps of Engineers to provide emergency assistance to help with the levee.

Last August, the Biden-Harris administration heeded our call to action and committed $20 million to repair the levee and address erosion on the left bank of the Pajaro River. That has now been concluded, and these communities have been protected, at least with the emergency repairs.

As with this small rural community in my own district, the climate crisis continues to put massive strains on aging infrastructure across the United States.

While recovery and reconstruction efforts continue, we have to do more to understand the causes of destructive and life-threatening events, like the Pajaro River levee failure, to make sure it doesn't happen again. Unfortunately, there's no agency currently authorized to conduct thorough technical investigations of failure of general infrastructure, like levees, dikes, bridges, or dams.

When it comes to buildings, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has been charged by Congress with conducting investigations in order to improve the building codes and standards used to design and maintain them. The National Construction Safety Team, or NCST, dispatches experts to work alongside other agencies to investigate major building disasters, to improve the scientific understanding around these failures, and to prevent future catastrophes.

This bill expands NCST's existing authority to include investigations of general infrastructure failures. These teams will investigate incidents involving other structures that we also rely on every day in order to improve the safety and resilience of American communities.

The tragic destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge into the mouth of the Patapsco River in Baltimore underscores the immediate need for this legislation. The impact of that catastrophe is being felt all across the United States.

NIST needs the authority to investigate major infrastructure failures so that they may improve future engineering standards and building codes to guard against such failures in the future.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Lucas for his partnership on this bill and so many other things.

Mr. KEAN of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Ms. LOFGREN. Stevens), my colleague on the Science Committee.

In closing, I am proud of this bill. If we make this the law, America will be safer, full stop. I am happy that we were able to do it on a bipartisan basis, and I am looking forward to quick action in the Senate.

I thank again the chairman of the committee, Mr. Lucas, for his collaboration on this and so many other things.

Mr. Speaker, I urge passage, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KEAN of New Jersey.

This is a commonsense, practical policy that supports science and innovation to improve people's lives. I encourage my colleagues to support this bipartisan legislation to ensure that NIST can utilize its unique expertise to conduct these technical investigations on major failures to our infrastructure.

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