Commending the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its employees for its dedication and hard work during Hurricanes Charley, Frances, and Ivan.

Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 488) commending the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its employees for its dedication and hard work during Hurricanes Charley and Frances, as amended.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material

on H. Con. Res. 488, the resolution now under consideration.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, today we are considering H. Con. Res. 488, which commends the employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for their dedication and hard work during Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Ivan.

As chairman of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over the National Weather Service, I introduced this resolution 2 weeks ago, after Hurricanes Charley and Frances hit the State of Florida back-to-back, something that had not happened since 1964. The employees of the National Weather Service worked tirelessly during the storms to provide forecasts and warnings to alert citizens and help minimize loss of life during the storms.

I have here pictures of Hurricane Frances, and also, in a moment, I will get to Hurricane Ivan. But I would like to point out the immense extensions of Hurricane Charley, covering virtually the entire State of Florida and the entire State of Texas. And almost any Texan in this body would tell us, it is almost impossible to cover the State of Texas, but Hurricane Frances, in fact, would do that.

Fortunately, the winds diminished before it hit land, and that helped considerably in reducing the damage, but it was still, because of its large extent, a very damaging hurricane.

Last week, Hurricane Ivan hit the U.S., the worst hurricane to hit the U.S. since Hurricane Floyd in 1999. Hurricane Ivan, which made landfall near Gulf Shores, Alabama, was the sixth most powerful Atlantic tropical storm on record. It affected States throughout the southeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States, with flooding, high winds and tornadoes. Again, the hard work of NOAA's employees and the broadcast meteorologists was vital for getting out warnings and information to residents in the path of the hurricane.

The right-hand chart up here shows Hurricane Ivan as it came ashore near Gulf Shores, extensive spread through Alabama, Mississippi, nearly to the New Orleans area, and with a very well-defined eye, indicating very high winds, very compact, which means high intensity, and of course, it stretched all the way over to the Panhandle of Florida.

During these three hurricanes, an estimated 6 million people were safely evacuated. Without the warnings from NOAA, I suspect there would have been very few evacuated. While there were 90 fatalities and an estimated $14 billion to $23 billion in damages in the U.S. due to these storms, without the forecasts and warnings from NOAA, the results would have been much, much worse.

It costs about $1.4 billion annually for all weather forecasting at NOAA which comes to a mere 4 cents each day per household in the United States. This investment is well worth it, given the lives saved by NOAA's forecasts and warnings. Let me point out that the amount that this comes to per household in this Nation is, I would estimate, less than the amount that the average household expends on smoke detectors and batteries.

Let me specifically list the offices at NOAA and their Federal and private partners that play an important role in providing hurricane forecasts and warnings. The National Hurricane Center, the Southern and Eastern Region Weather Forecast Offices of San Juan, Miami, Tampa Bay, Key West, Melbourne, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile, Morristown, Charleston, Morehead City, Wilmington, Wakefield, Taunton, Lake Charles, New Orleans, Jackson, Nashville, and Houston.

In addition, the National Ocean Service provides services and, in this case, provided help with storm surge predictions.

The National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service provided the satellite images we all saw on television.

The NOAA Marine and Aviation Operation Hurricane Hunters and the Air Force Reserve out of Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, fly planes into the hurricanes to gather data.

The Southeast River Forecast Center provided flood predictions, and the many private meteorologists and information providers who disseminate the warnings and weather data and predictions from NOAA.

I must say, being a scientist, perhaps that affects me, but I watched the Weather Channel and the local forecasters for considerable amounts of time during this to try to evaluate for myself what the hurricanes were doing, what direction they were taking, what damage they might cause. So the private sector also deserves mention here.

The dedicated employees of all of these NOAA organizations and the private organizations deserve our utmost appreciation for their hard work and long hours to warn citizens in the line of these three storms and for all of their excellent work as they continue to track tropical storms, this and every hurricane season. I should note that today we are nervously watching Hurricanes Jeanne and Karl currently located in the Atlantic Ocean, and we will continue to depend on NOAA to give us information about those hurricanes.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MILLER OF North Carolina. Madam Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge).

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I first want to thank the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Miller) for ably managing the time on the minority side and particularly for his provision of the statistics which I find very fascinating, and I do not want to prolong my statement too much by including them, but it illustrates something very dramatically.

Often the public asks us what we do with all their tax money and why do we waste it so much. There are a good many things that the Federal Government does that are very, very good for people. This is one example of that. Funding NOAA is a very worthwhile enterprise. Given the statistics that the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Miller) gave and the statistics that I gave compared to what we do today, you can extend that to tornados as well and other types of disasters.

The average lead time for tornados was 10 minutes during Hurricane Ivan, and frequently it is earlier than that for tornados in the Midwest where I live. Flash flood warnings average 57 minutes; 38 tornados occurred across Florida during Hurricane Ivan, so we really saved a lot of lives in this particular case; and it makes the expenditures for NOAA look small by comparison.

It is very important for all of us, especially the appropriators, for all of to us recognize that this is money well spent. It does save lives. It does save properties. It saves injuries, and it is very important for us to continue that.

Madam Speaker, in closing I want to thank my colleagues from the Florida delegation, virtually all of whom co-sponsored this legislation; and I particularly want to thank the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) for his enthusiastic support of the resolution. I would also like to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert) and the ranking member, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Gordon), of the Committee on Science for their support,

and the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Udall), the ranking member of my subcommittee.

Madam Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Let me thank him and my colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers), for bringing this resolution to the floor because it is so important.

I rise to add my voice in praise of the staff and leaders of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, for the job they have been doing during this remarkably challenging time during this hurricane season.

We talk about hurricanes; but the truth is when a hurricane comes ashore, we have an awful lot of tornados that spawn from that. As any Member from a southern Atlantic coastal State can tell you, this has been a very busy season; and, unfortunately, it does not appear to be over with yet. And if the predictions are right, we are in for some pretty bumpy times in the years ahead.

The folks at NOAA and the National Weather Service have done a fine job in letting our citizens know when the storms are coming, where they would most likely strike, and they have been pretty accurate about how much wind and storm surge they can expect. As a consequence, NOAA has saved millions of lives through its timely reporting and storm tracking, and it has an awful lot to do with saving of property.

I can tell you at my office, and I expect it is true of most offices that are in the line of fire, the staffs check the NOAA Web site, NOAA tracking at 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. each day because they are the ones that have the information.

While NOAA has performed well, one of the things that could be improved is predicting the potential flooding consequences of the rain associated with these storms. That is why in the 107th Congress I introduced and Congress passed into law legislation to improve the forecasting of inland flooding and to develop an inland flood-warning index similar to the Saffir-Simpson Scale that we use for wind with hurricanes. Unfortunately, we have not seen much progress with the development of the inland flood-warning index. Congress has not provided the funds necessary to develop a warning index that can better alert Americans of flood hazards associated with tropical cyclones, and NOAA has taken only a few steps to implement this legislation.

If we had had an inland flood-warning index in place, many of the more than 70 lives lost from Bonnie, Charley, Frances, and Ivan could possibly have been saved. We heard of what has happened in recent years from what we did at the turn of the century. We still can do better.

In 1999, Hurricane Floyd killed 48 people in the State of North Carolina with heavy floods, almost all of them lived hundreds of miles from the coast and died from fresh-water flooding. That can be corrected.

In Richmond, Virginia, last month the remnants of Tropical Storm Gaston was predicted to drop 4 inches of rain. Instead, it produced more than a foot of rain and resulted in flooding that cost millions of dollars in damage to the city's historic downtown, and much of that damage could have been mitigated had the public been better prepared and had known what was going to happen.

Madam Speaker, as the appropriations process winds down, I urge you to fully implement and fund the Tropical Cyclone Inland Forecasting Improvement and Warning System Development Act, similar to what we did with the Saffir-Simpson scale for hurricanes in providing warning on the coast. This will make a difference in the inland areas. This Congress has shown and has spoken with an overwhelming majority, and I also call on NOAA to move forward aggressively to implement this legislation.

We should never again suffer a hurricane season without adequate prediction tools where life-saving technology exists just beyond our current grasp. It is available. All we have to do is spend just a few dollars and it would be there. NOAA already saves countless lives. Working together we can help them save even more. I urge my colleagues to adopt this resolution.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers), for bringing this resolution to the floor today. In the last month or two, all of us in the eastern United States have been glued to our television sets watching weather reports as one Atlantic storm after another moved westward from the west coast of Africa across the Atlantic towards the United States. Three storms have made landfall in the United States and done great damage, great property damage and great loss of life.

We have learned more and more about storms just from watching the weather reports, watching with fascination the symmetry, the amazing symmetry of the storms, learning about the definition of the eye wall, how that told us whether the storm was strengthening or weakening or maintaining its strength.

There has been great damage and great loss of life from these storms. Hurricane Charley, which struck and made landfall in Florida as a category 4 storm, resulted in 31 deaths. Hurricane Frances made landfall in Florida as a category 2 storm but stalled over Florida and just rained and rained and rained with great, great damage. And, most recently, Hurricane Ivan struck the Panhandle of Florida and Alabama as a weak category 4, and then moved upward and caused a total of 49 deaths, including about 10 in my State, in flooding in western North Carolina.

These were powerful storms, but we were relatively well prepared for them. The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) referred to the great, great savings in life that resulted from the preparation that we had as a result of the work of NOAA, but let me tell my colleagues how much of a difference that made.

When we look back early in our history, a much less densely populated country, a nation that was not prepared, had no forewarning when storms struck, let me tell my colleagues the loss of life. In 1893, a storm of unknown intensity struck Louisiana, made landfall in Louisiana. The estimate was that there were 2,000 deaths from that storm. That same year, a storm also of unknown intensity made landfall in South Carolina and Georgia with a loss of life of 1,000 or 2,000. In 1900, a storm that we now estimate to be a category 4 struck without warning Galveston and resulted in an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 deaths. In 1928, a storm struck again with very, very little warning in Florida, and resulted in more than 1,800 deaths.

Again, this is a striking contrast. We can thank the people of NOAA, the employees of NOAA for the forecasts and the warnings that we have relied upon to prepare for the storms that have struck the United States this year. It is not an exaggeration to say, because of the work of the employees at NOAA, that there are thousands of Americans alive now who would not have been alive had we not been prepared for these storms, and the way that we have not been prepared for storms before we had that capacity to see storms coming, to know their intensity and to prepare for them.

We now see more storms moving towards us. Hurricanes Jeanne and Karl and storms behind them seem to be taking a number as they are in line, moving towards the United States.

So this resolution is a modest gesture of appreciation for those employees of NOAA who are working around the clock to monitor the paths of hurricanes, the strength of hurricanes, to make sure that we are ready when those hurricanes reach the United States.

So I urge my colleagues to support this resolution.

Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Eddie Bernice Johnson).

Madam Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, today I rise to introduce H. Con Res. 488, a resolution recognizing the hard work and dedication of the employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (better known as NOAA) who provide hurricane forecast and warnings to our citizens. In the past month, the state of Florida was hit by back-to-back hurricanes, a tragedy which has not occurred since 1964. The employees of NOAA worked tirelessly to provide timely and accurate warnings to residents of the affected areas. They remain hard at work even at this moment as another tropical storm, Hurricane Ivan, is heading towards the U.S. coast.

Let me name the various offices in NOAA that contributed to accurate forecasts of Hurricanes Charley and Frances: The National Hurricane Center; The Southern and Eastern Region Weather Forecast offices of San Juan, Miami, Tampa Bay, Key West, Melbourne, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile and Morristown; The National Ocean Service, which provided help with storm surge prediction; The National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service, which provided the satellite images we all saw on television; The NOAA Marine and Aviation Operation Hurricane Hunters, who fly planes into the hurricanes to gather data; and The Southeast River Forecast Center, which provided flood predictions

And I would be remiss without acknowledging the additional hurricane reconnaissance missions flown by the Air Force Reserve out of Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. Also, I want to acknowledge the work of the local and national media in disseminating NOAA's hurricane forecasts and warnings.

The dedicated employees at these offices worked round the clock, spending days at a time in their offices away from their families and homes that were often directly affected by the hurricanes. I commend these government employees for their service to provide life-saving warnings and information to the people in the hurricane's path and support them as they continue to provide us with critical information during this (and every) hurricane season.

Madam Speaker, this hurricane season was predicted to be an active one. Unfortunately, the prediction is being fulfilled. We have not yet come to the end of the season and already the eastern half of the country has experienced widespread damage due to three of these storms--hurricanes Charley, Frances and Ivan. In addition, two other offshore hurricanes are being monitored as we speak.

The severe coastal damage in Florida and Alabama, widespread inland flooding, and tornadoes have resulted in loss of life and property throughout the eastern part of the nation--including my home state of Tennessee. We should move quickly to provide assistance to our citizens who are now beginning to assess the damage and make plans to rebuild their homes, communities and businesses. They have a daunting task in the days ahead.

The effects of these storms are devastating, however, without accurate forecasting and time to prepare the toll in human lives would have been unimaginable. Our investments in research and development, weather satellites, specialized aircraft and computer modeling capability coupled with the dedication and professionalism of NOAA's employees has paid off in the timely warnings that we rely upon.

Madam Speaker, with this resolution we express our gratitude to the federal employees and their partners in the commercial weather business for their efforts in bringing the life-saving warnings and forecasts to our citizens. I urge my colleagues to support this effort to recognize the important work done by the employees of NOAA.