Sen. Bill Nelson's remarks on Hurricane Irma

After spending more than a week crisscrossing the state of Florida to meet with residents and local officials, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) took to the Senate floor today to update his colleagues on what he’s seen in some of the hardest hit areas of Florida.
“Senator Rubio and I have been together quite a bit this past week,” Nelson said on the Senate floor this afternoon. “No doubt FEMA is stretched to the limit because FEMA is having to deal with the problem in Texas and now the enormity of this storm affecting almost all of Florida, FEMA is stretched. But that’s what FEMA is supposed to do is to bring emergency assistance to people, to organizations, to local governments in the aftermath of a natural disaster.”
Following is a rush transcript of Nelson’s remarks. Video of Nelson’s speech is available here.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson
Remarks on the Senate Floor
September 18, 2017
Sen. Nelson: Mr. President, I want to speak about the defense bill, but before I do, I want to give the Senate a report.
Senator Rubio and I have been together quite a bit this past week as Florida has not only encountered a hurricane that was quite unusual in that it basically affected almost all of the state of Florida.
Florida is a big state. If you went all the way from Key West to Pensacola, that’s as far as going from Pensacola all the way to Chicago. That’s how big our state is. Almost 21 million people, the third largest state, 75% of that a population is along the coast and of course you know what coasts do when hurricanes start threatening those coasts.
This was an unusual one because it was first going to hit the east coast of Florida. That was the track. The National Hurricane Center has gotten quite good in their ability to project the path and the actual velocity of the winds. But indeed it took — once it took a turn unexpected as a category 5 hitting the north coast of Cuba, it reduced its velocity and its forward motion and then took a more westerly coast first hitting landfall in Florida at the middle Lower Keys where the winds were category 3 approaching category 4. And of course the residents were not even let back in to that part of the county to see their homes until Sunday morning.
And as of this moment, although FEMA is present in both the Lower Keys, Key West, in the Upper Keys, Key Largo, Individual Assistance help disaster teams were still trying to get into the places that had the biggest impact of the winds. The area around Big Pine Key and around Marathon.
It is a slow process. It is painfully slow. No doubt FEMA is stretched to the limit because FEMA is having to deal with the problem in Texas and now this enormity of this storm affecting almost all of Florida, FEMA is stretched.
But that’s what FEMA is supposed to do, is to bring emergency assistance to people, to organizations, to local governments in the aftermath of a natural disaster. That will be a work in progress as we go on.
There are some places that both Senator Rubio and I have gotten personally involved in asking FEMA to come in. The areas in Lee County, Collier County, areas where FEMA had not visited, they now have come in in Lee County. That’s east of Fort Myers, Lehigh Acres.
The little farming community of Immokalee was exceptionally torn up. There was a great story that students at a nearby university opened up — the university president opened up the field house so that a lot of the poor people in Immokalee had a place to go if they didn’t have another shelter. Indeed they took in some 400 people, elderly people in an apartment complex that their caregivers had left were picked up by the sheriff and taken to the university and the students took them in and took care of them for four nights.
This is a great example of Floridians helping Floridians and we have seen that throughout. This senator having been all over the state, much of it with my colleague demonstrating that the two senators in a bipartisan way actually get along and were there to try to help the people.
At first, right after the storm into the Florida Keys. And we saw the damage in Key West and Boca Chica, but that was the back side of the storm. The eye of the storm had gone further to the east so the damage of the northeastern quadrabt being the most severe winds were on up into the Big Pine Key and the Marathon area.
And, yet, already the military, the Coast Guard, and FEMA and the engineers were coming in immediately after the storm. Floridians helping Floridians. Americans helping Americans.
Then Senator Rubio and I were up in the Jacksonville area. Quite unusual. All the extra rainfall had flowed into the St. John’s river basin. That river had swollen. And all of that water trying to get its normal outlet into the Atlantic Ocean at Jacksonville. But, lo and behold, the winds covering up the entire peninsula moving northward, now the eye over land between Tampa and Orlando and that northeastern quadrant of those winds coming from east going west, what did it do at Jacksonville? It pushed all of that water that needed to get out into the Atlantic, pushed it back. That combined with the incoming high tide and what you had was a phenomenal flooding, an overflowing of the banks of the St. John’s river in many places in the upper St. John’s at considerable loss of property and at considerable distress to the citizens. A good part of Jacksonville itself downtown itself was flooded.
Senator Rubio and I then went the next day and we ended up in a citrus grove, Lake Welles, Florida. This citrus grove, 50% of its fruit on the ground. You go further south, 75% of the citrus crop on the ground. They can’t salvage that. That’s a huge percentage of the loss.
And so it made Senator Rubio and me all the more determined that we are going to try to pass an amendment to the tax code that would give the citrus growers of Florida, not only because of this loss but because of every grove now infected by a bacteria that will kill the tree in five years called citrus greening, to give the citrus industry a chance to start over by plowing under the grove of those diseased citrus trees, replanting in new stock that has new promise to outlast the bacteria at least for a number of years more than the five years that will kill the tree until we can find the cure. And we’re working on that. But to do that in the IRS code by allowing them to expense in the first year, that plowing under and replanting in order to save the citrus industry.
Senator Rubio and I in that grove, seeing all of that crop lost, this was going to be a promising crop for the first time in ten years of decline of the citrus crop because of the bacteria. This was going to be a good year. And yet we saw in that grove, half of that on the ground, lost, gone. Citrus crop insurance, that’s not going to really help them. Only that insurance if it’s a much greater loss is what happens.
From there, the two of us went on to a poor part of Florida, east of Lake Okeechobee, Belle Glade. A lot of residences had been torn up. This was a hurricane whose winds affected virtually all of the peninsula of Florida and even reached over into the panhandle as far as Tallahassee and even other parts west. And there in Belle Glade, we served a meal that charities had come together to bring food to hungry people because they had no power, they had no refrigeration, and it had been several days since the hurricane, and, therefore, they had no food.
From there to another very poor part of Florida, Immokalee, Florida, which I had described earlier had been torn up considerably.
Mr. President, whether it was what I just described or whether it was also feeding poor people in Apopka, Florida, that at this point had been without power for five days and they had no food because of no refrigeration or whether it was going down to Lehigh Acres where the Florida National Guard had organized the distribution of MRE’s, meals ready to eat, and gallons and gallons of fresh water because so many of those homes out in Lehigh Acres east of Fort Myers were on water wells and without to give them water. All of these things that so often we take for granted, you take away power, not only are you suffering because of the 90 degrees plus of heat and the humidity, but you can’t even get any water because you’re on a water well.
And so, too, what a privilege to be there with the Florida National Guard handing out that food, handing out that water and talking to those local residents that are living paycheck to paycheck, and now they have no paycheck, and where is the FEMA assistant to help them because there’s no power. They can’t go online to apply for Individual Assistance. They can’t, in fact, pick up the phone because of intermittent cell service. And even if they could get a cell signal, they couldn’t get through to the FEMA number. And that’s why we wanted the FEMA representatives to come in and, fortunately, just yesterday they finally did come in.
Mr. President, it’s been quite a couple of weeks, first anticipating the storm coming in and getting all of the emergency operation centers ready. And fortunately people obeyed the evacuation orders. It was estimated only 10,000 people out of a population of almost 100,000 in the Keys, only 10,000 left. That was a huge evacuation. But those folks never got in to find out what was left of their homes until yesterday. You can imagine, after a week, it being that the storm hit the weekend before the key Keys, the weekend, the heat and the humidity, the mold and the mildew, you can imagine the mess to clean up.
And FEMA all the while having to worry about Texas, now Florida, and maybe another hurricane that’s going to come up that looks like it’s going to turn out to sea but is still going to have some of the wind effects along the northeast Atlantic coast.
Mr. President, Floridians helping Floridians. And then there was a great, great tragedy.
This occurred four days after the hurricane. Why there is not a requirement that every nursing home or assisted living facility, an ALF, have a generator, not only for power, for things like lights, but have a generator capacity that will run air conditioning units, why there is not a requirement for that in Florida I think is going to be the subject of great debate and I hoping changing that requirement in the state of Florida because eight people died. Eight people died in a nursing home right across the street from a major hospital in Hollywood, Florida. Eight frail elderly from ages 70 to 99, eight needless deaths as a result — we will know — a criminal investigation is under way. All the phone calls that had been made that were not answered, both to the government as well as to the power company, as reported by the press — specifically a Miami television station. We don’t know all the facts. It’ll come out in the criminal investigation. But it is inexcusable that eight frail elderly people would die over heat exhaustion by being left to their condition to deteriorate over the course of three or four days. What is wrong with the regulatory scheme that does not have a backup generator that would kick in? I mean, in fact, the hospital right across the street had it. So what was the disconnect there? Why did it take days and days until 911 was called? This we will find out in this great tragedy, but I can tell you that The Miami Herald had done a series over the last couple of years, three investigative pieces, that in fact point out that these ALF’s in these nursing homes and have not properly managed or regulated by the state of Florida. To be determined.
And so Hurricane Irma is just another reminder that we are going to confront huge natural occurrences and maybe, just maybe, people will realize that there is something to the fact that the earth is getting hotter. And because of that, two-thirds of the earth covered by oceans, the oceans absorbing 90% of that heat, and what happens to water when it is heated? It expands. And, thus, the sea levels are rising.
And so, as we turn to this defense bill, this is an issue for national security. As Secretary of Defense Mattis has said, and I quote, “Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today.”
Maybe we should pay attention to things like I’ve just described in Florida. Or maybe out in Texas, or what about tornadoes causing damages to military depots in Georgia, or what about the severe heat canceling military training and hailstorms damaging aircraft in Texas? What about the coastal erosion not only in Florida threatening early-warning radar in Alaska? What about the wildfires causing ranges to be closed and the flooding not only that we saw in Texas but flooding military logistics rail in Louisiana and warehouses in Virginia containing hazardous materials?
And so that’s why in this version of the defense bill that we will pass today, there’s a provision in there that this senator had something to do with which calls for the defense department to conduct a comprehensive assessment of threats to the training and readiness of our armed forces and the military infrastructure caused by climate-related events.
It’s critical that we recognize the threat so we will ensure our forces and installations are resilient enough to withstand and quickly recover from all of these natural disasters that we’ve been talking about. Not only must we ensure that our military infrastructure is resilient, we must also ensure that it provides our war fighters with the space that they need to train and the technology they need to stay ahead of our adversaries.
And so, Mr. President, I have opined on this subject over and over in speeches to the Senate. I’ve opined over and over about Gulf Test and Training Range that the Air Force needs to make rouge investments in for the precise measurements of all of our sophisticated weapons and our systems.
I want to thank Chairman McCain and Ranking Member Reed for their good work on the bill, and it begins to address some of the training and readiness shortfalls in our military. And I look forward to continuing to discuss this.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.