This past December, as you all know, a powerful rain and wind storm brought severe flooding, power outages, and extensive damage to central and western Maine.
Then, in January, two more powerful storms brought rain, wind, and flooding that once again ravaged our state, damaging coastal communities and working waterfronts, and altered the very landscape of our iconic coast.
Hello, this is Governor Janet Mills and thank you for listening.
So, this week, I wrote a letter to President Biden, and I formally requested a Major Disaster Declaration to help ten Maine counties recover from the severe December storm, which caused an estimated $20 million in public infrastructure damage alone. Most of that damage was in Androscoggin, Franklin, Hancock, Oxford, Penobscot, Piscataquis, Somerset, Waldo, and Washington Counties.
So, if the President approves my request, we can then use federal funding to repair damaged roads and bridges, as well as public buildings and other public infrastructure in those counties.
In addition to public assistance, I also asked for help for individual families hit hardest by the storm. In my letter, I told President Biden that families who are trying to recover from the December storm are having a hard time finding local, skilled contractors and affordable housing alternatives while they make repairs. And they’re struggling to pay the high cost of replacing major household items or removing mold caused by the flooding.
So, to help those families, I asked the President to make assistance available to eligible people who experienced property damage in Androscoggin, Franklin, Kennebec, Oxford, and Somerset Counties – because those are the counties the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, verified as reaching the federal government’s threshold for individual assistance.
In addition to my letter to President Biden requesting both public and private assistance for December’s storm, I also requested FEMA conduct a damage assessment of last week’s storms which brought historic flooding to the Maine coast, destroying homes, roads, buildings, docks, and iconic landmarks.
If FEMA agrees that the costs resulting from the back-to-back storms in January are beyond our ability to address, as they did after the December storm, I will formally request another Major Disaster Declaration from President Biden.
Look, if you experienced storm or flood damage in these most recent storms, I ask you to report it by dialing 2-1-1 or visit my Administration’s Flood Resources & Assistance Hub at maine.gov/governor/mills.
Your information will help us as we prepare to seek the maximum amount of federal assistance available. My Administration is working closely with local officials to assess and repair damage as quickly as possible and to seek any and all available Federal support.
Unfortunately, extreme weather events like these are becoming more and more common, and our state is certainly not immune.
By burning fossil fuels – like gasoline, oil, or natural gas – we are pumping harmful greenhouses gases into our environment. Those gases in turn envelop our planet like a blanket, trapping in heat and raising global temperatures.
In Maine, we are feeling the effects of climate change in many ways — the Gulf of Maine is getting warmer, faster than any other ocean waters on the planet. Storms are wilder, becoming more powerful and more frequent. They pick up energy over the ocean before they slam into our coast. Our growing seasons are more unpredictable, threatened by both droughts and downpours. Our farmers, our fishermen, and our coastal families are all feeling the impacts of climate change.
Over the past five years, we’ve been working on addressing the effects of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and investing significant resources to make our communities more resilient.
So, in the wake of these storms, and in anticipation of those to come, we must have a serious conversation as a state about what we can all do to make sure our state and communities are prepared for the impact of these weather events and climate change in general.
This is Governor Janet Mills and thank you for listening.