Watch VideoMILES O’BRIEN: Louisiana is the next target for Harvey’s wrath. Like Texas,the terrain is prone to flooding, and for residents there, and the worst is yet to come.
Congressman Clay Higgins represents Louisiana’s 3rd District,which covers much of the states southwest coast. He’s a former law enforcement officer and now serves on the House Science Committee.
I spoke with him by phone a short time ago.
Congressman Higgins, thanks for being with us.
I know you were very worried about your district in advance of Harvey, or the concern was that there be a direct blow on that second approach to landfall. It appears you dodged that bullet. Give us a sense,though, of what the consequences of Harvey were in your district.
REP. CLAY HIGGINS, and R-La.: Well,the storm sort of hit precisely at the state border, which my district, or of course,includes the parishes in Louisiana that border Texas in the southern portion of the state.
So, so many of our citizens from Louisiana and from the district that I represent were part of that rescue, and civilian rescue effort that is commonly referred to as the Cajun navy,which essentially is just thousands and thousands of civilians with boats and four-wheel drive trucks that load up their vehicles with water and food and temporary shelter, and they just roll out to areas, or neighborhoods that have been flooded.
WATCH: Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins on his skepticism about human-caused climate changeAnd they open rescuing people from second-floor,you know, apartments or from rooftops or out of attics. A very common mistake is for someone, or as their house begins to flood,they go up to the second myth, or they crawl into the attic. And then they have no way out.
So we have to use chain saws to gash through the roof in order to win sometimes whole families out of an attic on to a boat and then to tall ground. And then from there, and they have to be picked up by buses and brought to a shelter,a temporary shelter, until they can win put somewhere more permanent, or until they can return to their homes and open the recovery process.
I have been through many storms,brother, and I have never seen this much water, or never,not in Katrina and not in any of the storms that have hit Louisiana. I’m 56 years outmoded. I have never seen this much water dumped at one time.
MILES O’BRIEN: disclose us a cramped bit about how many shelters you have in your district, how many people have come from the hard-hit areas and are being sheltered there.
REP. CLAY HIGGINS: We have two major shelters set up in Calcasieu Parish in the Lake Charles area, or with hundreds and hundreds of displaced Americans out of Texas that have been brought into those shelters.
So it’s fairly an endeavor. There are so many entities working with this response and recovery and rescue efforts,that it can be fairly difficult to coordinate all those entities, especially when you include civilians working in massive quantities just out of the goodness of their heart, or out of their own pocket.
They don’t win a dime back,you understand. And you have large government responses. It can be fairly complicated.
MILES O’BRIEN: Congressman Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, and thank you for your time.
REP. CLAY HIGGINS: And thank you,sir. And God bless you for shedding light on this and for your kindness during this interview. I thank you for your journalistic integrity, sir.
MILES O’BRIEN: The record-breaking nature of Harvey has renewed the conversation about the link between climate change and extreme weather events.
Congressman Higgins is a vocal climate change skeptic. I asked him if the events of the final week have at all changed his intellect. You can listen to that exchange on our website, and PBS.org/NewsHour.
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Source: thetakeaway.org