Congressman Bachus delivered this statement on the floor of the House of Representatives on October 30 in support of H.R. 2787, CJ’s Home Protection Act. Bachus is the lead Republican sponsor of the legislation, which requires the installation of NOAA Weather Radios in all new manufacturing housing built or sold in the U.S. The bill was introduced by Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-IN), and is based on an Indiana law that Kathryn Martin championed after her two-year-old son CJ lost his life in a tornado that struck Southwest Indiana in 2005.
Congressman Ellsworth said a picture is worth a thousand words, and he held up a picture of CJ Martin. When the Congressman brought CJ’s mother, Kathryn Martin, to my office, he brought that picture with him. It brought back memories to me of another picture, of not a little boy but a little girl, and I have that picture with me today.
This is a picture of Whitney Crowder. Unlike CJ, she survived the storm that swept away her home and today she is an eighth grader in a Tuscaloosa school. She is doing well, but she had a lot to overcome. Just like CJ, she and her family lived in manufactured housing.
Let me tell you, manufactured housing in the South has replaced a lot of substandard housing. It provides affordable housing for a lot of Alabamians. As many as one out of five Alabamians lives in a manufactured house. It is affordable. It is clean, and it provides a very good home.
Whitney was living in one of these manufactured houses. An alert went out that said a tornado was 30 miles off. She had approximately 20 minutes, but the TV wasn’t on. She didn’t have a weather alert radio. And although the TV stations were able to track the storm and to tell within a quarter mile where it was going and when it would arrive there, she and her family didn’t receive a warning. Some people say, why don’t you require these in cars? Why just in manufactured housing? Well, in fact studies show when people are in cars they have the radio on and more often than not they receive an alert.
But as is the case in Alabama with this storm and another storm that took 32 lives a few years before that, people were asleep. I think the Martins were asleep. They had no idea that a killer tornado was bearing down on them, even though warnings were going out.
As I said, although I am happy to say that Whitney survived the tornado, her brother Wesley, 16-months-old, and her father did not. They were killed.
We have come to a time in our country where we really have no excuse not to do the few elementary things we can do to prevent the death or at least lessen the likelihood of the death of CJ Martin in Indiana or Wesley Crowder and his dad, Whitney’s father, in Alabama. Technology today in an F-5 or F-4 storm gives 30 to 40 minutes’ warning. With that warning, you need only two things: You need shelter from the storm, you need a place to go, and you need to receive that warning.
Now, in 2003 this Congress passed the Tornado Shelters Act, which allows communities to use community block grant money to build shelters, a shelter from the storm, a shelter that could exist for the Martins or the Crowder family, and a mobile home community.
I am happy to report in my district, the Sixth Congressional District of Alabama, we now have six of these shelters in or near manufactured housing communities. But people don’t have to go to those. If they are in manufactured housing, they can go to a nearby building with a basement or interior room. Manufactured housing, a mobile home as some of us call them, don’t have basements or interior rooms. It is not wrong; it is just something they are not designed to have. But there are permanent structures nearby, whether it be a school, a tornado shelter that we authorized in 2003, or maybe even their parents’ house. The Crowders had an aunt and uncle that lived only about 400 yards away in a site-built house with a basement. They would have been safe from that storm. The technology was there to warn them. The shelter was there to receive them, but there was no weather radio.
Now, what’s the cost of a radio? Some people have talked about the cost that you are imposing, although the manufactured housing industry as far as I know has said they support this bill. Well, Wal-Mart just came out with a weather radio for $12. So that’s the cost if you buy them in bulk. You can put them in for $12 in a mobile home, manufactured housing, $12. What is the cost of not acting? For the Crowder family, there are all sorts of costs. The greatest cost was the loss of two individuals, a little 16-month-old boy, Whitney’s little brother, and her father. Also the cost to Whitney and her mother and the 12 other people injured by this storm. The cost was several million dollars in health care costs.
Now, we are not here to save money; we are here to save lives. But this bill will not only save lives; it will save money. A killer tornado like this hit Oak Grove and killed 32. An additional 250 were injured and among the things it did was paralyze a man who suffered paralysis and brain injuries which resulted in disabilities and long periods of rehabilitation. That gentleman’s treatment alone totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars. One radio in his home could have saved him a life of paralysis and disability. But instead, the tornado took 32 lives and denied him mobility for the rest of his life.
As the Congressman from Indiana said, this is not about Republicans or Democrats. There are certain things we ought to say, it is time to do this; and technology has reached that time. When 40 percent to 50 percent to sometimes as many as 60 percent of the deaths every year from these killer tornadoes are in mobile homes, manufactured housing, and our families live in these houses, whether they be our grandparents, our parents, our children, our neighbors, our loved ones, or people we don’t even know, you see the devastation here. There were site-built homes here. This is a manufactured house. Twenty-seven manufactured housing units in the area, a mobile home community, no longer existed.
As the gentleman from Indiana said, looking at this picture really doesn’t do it justice. People actually commented when they came upon this area which was about a half mile long and 400 yards wide, it looked like a garbage dump. You couldn’t tell there had been a community there. It looked like there were a few junk cards because the cars were rolled over and over.
We can rebuild these communities; but CJ, we can’t bring him back. We can’t bring Whitney’s little brother and father back, but we can do our best for literally pennies to prevent some of these deaths.
I think that is why 35 TV stations throughout this Nation have made this their cause. They visited us in Washington this year. They said, look, we will get the warning out and there are shelters available. But please require the installation of a $12 radio so we can bridge the gap between warning and safe shelter.
That is what we are here to do today. In this House where we sometimes are in conflict and at loggerheads, can’t we this time come together in a united way in an effort that will cost almost nothing and which the manufactured housing industry said we are willing to do this, and require these radios. And not only when a tornado comes but when a devastating flood comes like the one that came to Texas and people were asleep in a mobile home community and several of those homes were slept away. This will save lives.
So I commend CJ Martin’s mother. That’s what America is about, someone saying I lost my son but I don’t want it to happen again. It is about the Crowder family who wrote me a letter, a grandmother saying please push this bill.
We will never go back and know whether CJ could have survived had this legislation been passed. We will never know whether Wesley Crowder and his father would survive, but we do know by talking to people throughout the United States that these radios have in many, many cases already saved lives and will save lives if we install them in manufactured housing.
We have a shot at significantly reducing over half the deaths from tornadoes simply by taking the step together united, Republicans and Democrats, and passing this legislation.
I commend Chairman Frank for expeditiously moving this legislation, and I commend the Member from Indiana for his thoughtfulness and his care and dedication to this issue.