Click here or on the image above to watch Ranking Member Capito’s questions.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.),
Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, today
participated in a hearing to examine the response by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers to Hurricane Ida.
HIGHLIGHTS:
STREAMLINING PROCESSES TO
GET HELP: “But what we hear from our
local partners sometimes—and even FEMA in some sense—is that sometime the
processes to get help are so doggone complicated. And so you’ve got an
opportunity through the climate program that you said you wrote that has five
different aspects to it to really streamline some of these…What we found was
chaos but managed chaos. I think we could have done better with it and
recovered quicker had we had a bit more hand holding and a more simplistic way
to react to some of those.”
KEEPING TRACK OF TAXPAYER
DOLLARS: “We have just appropriated
$5.7 billion in supplemental appropriations as part of the continuing
resolution. I was wondering your process and timeline for expending these
funds, if you have any ideas on that? Will you make sure that information
regarding this funding when we make requests for information that that comes in
a timely fashion?”
IDA’S IMPACT ON THE
NORTHEAST: “We were all astounded
when we saw Hurricane Ida flooding the subways in New York City. I think that
was something we hadn’t ever really anticipated. What do you attribute that to?
Was there something pre-disaster that could have been better conformed to
mitigate that?”
ADDRESSING AGING WATER
INFRASTRUCTURE: “The bill that we
passed—[the Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act]—that was
incorporated into the BIF, in terms of trying to manage and modernize some of these
old storm systems. I don’t know how old New York City’s storm system is, but I
would imagine it’s in the excess of 100 years. Certainly we have systems that
old in our state.”
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