The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“WINTER STORMS IN THE DAKOTAS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the Senate section on pages S688-S689 on Jan. 23, 1997.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WINTER STORMS IN THE DAKOTAS
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today the agricultural statistical folks who have been doing surveys in the Dakotas have told us that the winter storms--successive, bitter, awful winter storms that have hit one after another--in our State have killed somewhere around 13,000 cattle in North Dakota. It has been a rugged difficult time for North Dakotans and for livestock producers in our State.
I spoke the other day about the kind of bitter storms that we face, almost unlike any that most of us in North Dakota can remember. And again, within the last 24 hours, another storm has hit. Both interstate highways, the east-west highway in North Dakota and the north-south highway, were closed down completely. Snow, 50-mile-an-hour winds, and bitterly cold temperatures make this an awfully difficult time for North Dakotans.
Thousands and thousands of volunteers in North Dakota have responded to the crisis. And the Federal Government has too. President Clinton has declared that our entire State is suffering from a major disaster. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is in North Dakota. They are rounding up heavy equipment from around the country to come and help us open roads to help protect the lives of people and the livestock herds.
The Department of Agriculture has provided some feed assistance and some other aid to try to help producers get to their cattle and feed them. So we have had some help. But we need more. And today we are going to be visiting with the Department of Agriculture once again because the assistance they have offered so far--feed assistance for livestock--is simply too narrowly drawn to be of very much help to anybody. It is of help to some but it is just too narrow.
It is interesting. In the last Congress when the freedom to farm bill was passed these emergency feed programs were abolished. I thought it was the wrong thing to do. And it was. But they were abolished. Now we have gotten the Department of Agriculture to try to jury-rig an emergency approach to try to give us some help. But they need to broaden that substantially so the livestock producers--farmers and ranchers out there, many of whom have been operating on very thin margins anyway--have the capability of getting their roads open, getting the feed in, and feeding their herds.
We really do need some help not just in North Dakota but in our whole region of the country.
So we are going to be visiting with the Department of Agriculture again this afternoon to try to broaden this approach to see if we can't get some help in there. Mr. President, 13,000 cattle have died in North Dakota. Many more are at great risk because they have survived five or six blizzards now and are hit with another at the moment. We expect other storms. So this is a very difficult problem.
I spoke the other day about the heroes in our part of the country during this difficult winter, and talked about going out on a snowplow with a crew in conditions in which you couldn't see 2 feet in front of you; nearly whiteout conditions with 50-mile-an-hour winds, bitterly cold; going up by a trailer court where you could not see any trailer houses because even their roofs were not to be seen; snow was over the roof line. Conditions were about as difficult as they could get, and yet people made an emergency run to help get a 2-year-old boy, about whom I talked the other day, to a hospital who would have died had he not gotten there, a 20-mile trip that took 6 hours with four people driving two ambulances, two snowplows and two trucks plowing through roads that were impassable, in zero visibility conditions, with 40- and 50-mile-an-hour winds. The people who do that are public servants out there to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude and who are really truly heroes.
I also wanted to mention another fellow in North Dakota who I think deserves mention because when we have these tough times it is not just the program that is put in place to help people; it is the people who help people, neighbors coming together and doing things to help each other.
On Tuesday night this week, at 10 o'clock in the evening, Jan Novak was driving home, having just finished her work, in Grafton, ND. As Jan Novak was driving home--and that was a point when the blizzard was hitting and the interstates were being closed and giant winds were coming up--she lost her way and could not see much in front of her. She had to pull off the road and became stuck in a snowbank.
And there she was in the middle of this raging blizzard. This was just Tuesday evening of this week.
She did say she had blankets and she had some gas. She was not feeling that she maybe would not be found. She felt that she would be able to hold out, and she started her car intermittently in the terribly cold weather, but then she worried about whether her car was going to start just based on the sounds from her engine.
Her husband called the Walsh County Sheriff, Lauren Wild, about 1 o'clock in the morning, and the sheriff tried to get some people out to take a look to see where she was. They tried to search the road she might have taken to go home out in the country from Grafton, ND, and they searched for several hours, and in conditions of almost no visibility and could not find Jan Novak, who was then out there stuck in the car.
And they also called people along the route. They called a fellow named Halvorson, Don Halvorson, at 3:30 in the morning--he is a farmer--got him out of bed, woke him up and told him that there was a woman lost along this route and they could not seem to find her. Of course, Don Halvorson had not seen her, nor had anyone else passing along the way, and because nobody could see the roads they eventually had to call off the search.
Don Halvorson could not sleep, he said. So at 3:30 in the morning, after having gone back to bed and not being able sleep, he got up, put his clothes on and went out in the yard and started his tractor, which had a cab on it, and went out to look. And with the tractor, in conditions of almost zero visibility, for 3 hours he searched up and down his road and up and down his area of the country, and somewhere around 6:30 in the morning this fellow named Don Halvorson, in his tractor, pulled up to Jan Novak's car. And he got out of the tractor and rescued her, took her back to his home. She says that he is a true hero, and he said he just could not sleep knowing there was somebody out in that storm.
It is interesting to me that these stories of people helping each other seem to get so little attention. This one did get a little attention. But bad news travels halfway around the world before good news gets its shoes on, they say, and I understand that. But there are wonderful stories of people who cannot sleep when something is wrong and who want to go out and help other people.
In our part of the country, and I expect in the part of the country that is represented by the Presiding Officer, we face some pretty difficult times. And the only way you get along is to work with each other, neighbors helping neighbors, folks helping folks. Don Halvorson could have gone back to sleep, I suppose. He did not know where Jan Novak was. He did not know Jan Novak. Instead, he got up, put on his clothes, got in his tractor in bitterly cold weather, with raging wind and zero visibility, and risked his life to go search for a woman stranded in the blizzard whose life was also at risk.
Even as I talked today about the need for some help from the Department of Agriculture for livestock feed and for ranchers and farmers out there who are struggling, I also wanted to pay homage to some heroes who are out there. Some are on road crews today working shift after shift. Some are also in farmhouses helping neighbors get along in about as difficult a winter as I can remember in the history of North Dakota.
Mr. President, with that, I yield the floor and make a point of order that a quorum is not present.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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