NASHVILLE, TN – United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, today joined Cavuto: Coast to Coast on Fox Business to discuss the impact of Hurricane Helene on East Tennessee and the current need for immediate federal emergency relief and resources for the Southeastern states hit by the catastrophic storm.
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Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the impact of Hurricane Helene on Tennesseans: “The amount of damage, devastation, and heartbreak that is happening here in Tennessee is just unbelievable. We’ve never seen anything like this before. Often, they’ll talk about events that would occur once every 100 years, once in a 200-year period, once in a 500-year period, we’ve seen those. This is a once in a greater than 1000-year event. Nobody has seen anything like this in recorded history. The amount of damage, the flooding, is just hard to imagine. We’ve got to have resources quickly. We’ve got whole communities that are cut off, bridges that are out, roadways that are out, no water supply, electricity is down, inability to communicate because we don’t have cellular connection. We don’t have broadband. Everyone is working at pace. It’s very, very challenging, and we’ve got to get resources to this as quickly as we possibly can.”
Hagerty on Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) potentially running out of resources for Hurricane Helene relief: “I’m more than willing to come back [to Washington D.C.] tomorrow from a legislative standpoint to make certain that we have the funding appropriated and ready to go. FEMA needs to look at every possible angle that it has as well to move the funds necessary, to pre-position assets […] We’ve got National Guard assets that are here. We’ve got state level emergency management assets. Everybody’s pulling together. Everybody’s going to be looking at this from a resource allocation standpoint, but we very much need to prioritize Tennessee, North Carolina, again, these states that have never seen anything like this before. It’s going to be very, very challenging. And I’ve got to say this: my appreciation is so great for people from other states, leaders from other states, Florida Governor [Ron] DeSantis is sending teams up to help us here in Tennessee. Everybody’s pitching in. Everybody wants to do the right thing, and as a member of Congress, my job is to make certain we have the resources to get that done. So we need to be on this post-haste to make certain that we don’t have a resource problem at FEMA that in any way constrain our ability to address the devastation that’s happened here.”
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