This is 28 out of 63 counties in the State.

Just so you can get some idea of what is involved in this, this is the map of Colorado. The original storm originated in this area, near Palmer Lake, Colo. It was an unusal tornado situation, and a collision of a high pressure area from the northeast, and low pressure from the southeast, bringing in a lot of heavy moisture-laden atmosphere a cloudburst situation developed-very suddenly. It started dumping excessive amounts of precipitation.

The heaviest damage occurred downstream on the South Platte River, Plum Creek, and Cherry Creek. Although the dam held, it created a lot of damage in the Englewood and Denver area, putting the sewer completely under water, and continuing with its damage downstream. Some damage in Greeley, some damage along here. The Bijou Creek rampaged and further swelled the South Platte just above Fort Morgan causing severe damage to Fort Morgan and other towns downstream.

The light plant was under water. The town was partially evacu ated, and everything east of Fort Morgan to the State line had to be evacuated.

In east central part, there was damage to Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. Heavy rains fell throughout the entire area, as they did up here.

These rains in the Colorado Springs to Limon area drained down. through Fountain Creek here, Rush Creek, and Big Sandy, which comes back up to Peyton, and then turns south and dumps into the Arkansas at a point east of Lamar-which happens to be my home

town.

I am informed that there was 125,000 people evacuated east of Pueblo, down the Arkansas River, on Thursday and Friday.

Holly, the easternmost town in the State, down on the Arkansas, was completely under water-about 4 feet of water. All of the town south of the tracks is gone, and all of the main part of the town is heavily damaged. This flooding was also increased by the flood of rains from the north.

Granada was completely under water.

My own city of Lamar had four to four and a half feet of water over seven-eighths of the town, and although the John Martin Dam, which was 20 miles west of Lamar, remained intact, and was able to hold the flood flows along the Arkansas from the west-from Pueblo and down-the water which accrued in the area south and southwest of Lamar and north and northwest and which came into the river and caused Willow Creek to flood, and created this damage. My own office was under 4 feet of water.

I have personal reports on one home, because my father-in-law lives there, and he had 4 feet of water in his house, 8 inches of mud in the house now, at the present time. Water up over the beds and everything.

I only cite this one instance as an example, not that he is deserving of any more sympathy than anyone else. He is an elderly man, 86 years old, but if you multiply this by 3,000 houses in Lamar, or more, and multiply it by many, many, many times-the people in the Colorado Springs to Denver area, people down the Platte Valley and the people all down the Arkansas Valley-you get some conception of

rugs, flooring, walls, furniture, beds, all gone. You get some concept, then, of the damage that has been done to the individual people of Colorado.

In addition to that, of course, these two great areas, flood areas, are irrigated areas, and we are now attempting to make an assessment of the damages which will have accrued to the irrigation companies along these two great drainage systems, the Arkansas and the Platte. I have no way of estimating it, although water law has been my major portion of my life's work.

I am sure from my own knowledge that the amount involved in rehabilitating these ditches, where they have washed out, and in rehabilitating their diversion structures, will run into millions and millions of dollars alone.

The damage is simply immense, and this doesn't take care of the individual lateral ditches running out from the main ditches, and the erosion damage and silting which occurred to the farms and crops. Rough preliminary estimates of damage total $102 million, of which $10 million is to State and Federal highways alone.

I hasten to point out that this is an extremely conservative figure, since the hardest hit area-the Arkansas Valley-has not yet been able to assess its damage.

All of the towns were cut off, both by highway and by communications. It is still impossible, for example, to get a telephone call from here into Lamar or any town in the Arkansas Valley.

Between Denver and Colorado Springs alone, a distance of 65 miles, 17 bridges are destroyed. That is on the new Interstate Highway System, No. 25.

Water systems have been destroyed, or contaminated, throughout eastern Colorado, constituting grave danger to public health.

I was just on the phone a moment ago with some friends in Cripple Creek, and this is, of course, in the mountains about 9,000 feet elevation, west of Colorado Springs. They lost their entire water system, even up there.

Communications were totally out, and some of them, as I indicated, are still out in large areas of the State, and communications are still disrupted in a majority of the communities.

Some of the communities, particularly in the Arkansas Valley, have been totally isolated, and supplies, even emergency supplies, have had to be taken in by helicopter.

They are still, for example, supplying groceries to my own home city by helicopter.

In order to illustrate the magnitude of the disaster, I have had reports, as I indicated, that 125,000 people were evacuated from the lower valley alone, and it is probable that a similar number were evacuated from the Platte Valley, because on Thursday night all people east of Fort Morgan in the Platte Valley were evacuated.

We have been very fortunate in a comparatively small loss of life. It is estimated by this morning's Wall Street Journal at 21, and for a disaster of this magnitude it is a very small number, but, of course, this is no consolation to those who were affected by the deaths and casualties.

The greatest immediate problems in the public health areas were typhoid and encephalitis. Inoculations by the Public Health Service

are being given the entire populace of the Arkansas Valley area, and the Platte area, and wherever there is apt to be a problem.

Cleanup is already underway due to the very fine cooperation among the various local, State, and Federal agencies.

I would like to compliment particularly the Office of Emergency Planning, the Department of the Army, the Public Health Service, and, of course, our fine Governor, John Love, who assembled his team of State experts, for the amazing promptness with which they responded to this emergency situation.

I hope no one will be offended if I fail to include them-there were so many, all doing a magnificent job but my poor memory may cause me to inadvertently omit some. I must say that we have been helped immensely by the Office of Civil Defense, the National Guard, the 5th Army units at Fort Carson under General Maroon, and by many others. As a matter of fact, there has not been a State or a Federal agency which has not been very cooperative in getting relief to the flood victims.

There is one group that I forgot to thank, and that is the Colorado National Guard.

It would be impossible to put in the record here everybody who worked and sacrificed themselves during those few days.

The Colorado National Guard, and we even had 25 Youth Corps men from Fort Custer in Wyoming who volunteered and came down. I might also say that on Thursday morning I informed the White House of this situation, as did Governor Love, and the President, with almost unprecedented speed, announced that he was declaring these 28 counties as a disaster area.

To put this in another context, since the map will not be in the record, the counties affected constitute almost entirely the east half of Colorado.

Now, this is only one and the most recent of a series of disasters which have hit the United States, beginning in March of 1964 with the earthquake in Alaska, moving on to the floods in the Pacific Northwest, the floods in the Upper Middle West and Montana, the series of killer tornadoes experienced by the Midwest, and the annual hurricanes which strike the gulf and Atlantic coast areas.

As members of the committee know, we do have provision for Federal aid in such situations, but the measures introduced into the Congress after each of these major disasters testify to the fact that the presently existing legislation is inadequate.

Senator Mansfield has recognized this need for many years, since 1953, and has sponsored legislation to provide the necessary tools for the President to render the assistance commensurate with the

emergency.

While I have not had the opportunity to fully evaluate the specific provisions of your S. 1861, there obviously is a need for general legislation along these lines. And it would seem much more orderly to provide standards applicable to all natural disasters than to introduce legislation for each specific case.

In this respect, I recall that both the Interior Committee and the Appropriations Committee-I am privileged to serve on both of these committees spent many hours of many days, in fact, over a period of several months, working specifically on special legislation for each of these disasters.

For this reason, I commend you, Senator, and others of my colleagues who have sponsored S. 1861, and I also commend the members of this committee who are concerned with this problem.

I urge your early action to provide permanent legislative authority for the necessary relief to victims of these natural tragedies.

Now, Mr. Chairman, I would like to comment on how I have seen this matter work at firsthand in these last few days, and this comes from sitting on the phone almost constantly here with various governmental agencies, and with the State of Colorado relative to this great tragedy, from which it will take the State of Colorado many years to recover.

It does seem to me that the Office of Emergency Planning is a sensible concept and way to go about this. Of course, their responsibilities extend far beyond, as the Chairman is well aware, the idea of what I would term natural disasters. They go to our very safety in matters of defense, and planning for any kind of military exigency which we might encounter.

But the concept of centralizing this in one office, as it has been in the OEP, to me is a very sound one.

We are confronted in a situation of this sort with combining and coordinating all of the elements of the Government into a focal point. Utilizing one office such as the Office of Emergency Planning seems to me to be a logical way to do it. They operate at a level even above the Civil Defense Office in this area.

We would ordinarily think of Civil Defense and utilizing their agencies, but in contacting Governor Ellington, Buford Ellington, and Frank Dryden, his very capable assistant, I must say that we found complete cooperation and received immediate action.

It is impossible for one agency to do this job by itself, in my opinion, because you have to tap the complete resources of the Government in order to do it.

You were discussing this with the Department of Agriculture people just a few moments ago. You have to tap their resources. You have to tap the credit facilities of the Farmers Home Administration.

I am happy to say that the Allott-Cooley credit bill, which became a part of the general farm bill of 1961, has fitted this and the other tragedies this year very well. Under the emergency loan provisions, farm victims are able to get credit for the restructuring of farm buildings, both the dwellings, the livestock pens, the barns, and all that go with it. So you have to tap the Agriculture people for people that.

When it comes to clearing away debris you have to have heavy equipment, and of course no single agency has all the heavy equipment available to do the job in a given agency.

So you have to tap the resources of the Army. You may have to tap the Air Force, and other parts of the defense system, as well as the Civil Defense, to take care of the emergency matters.

Senator ALLOTT. We had to tap in this instance both the Army and the Air Force for helicopters.

I would be very remiss if I did not pay my respects to the pilots and mechanics who kept these choppers operating for some 36 straight hours before they got additional help and relief.

You have to tap the civil defense for their hospitals. You have to tap the Public Health to come in and do, as I said, the job here, with inoculations against whatever it might be, and to assist in other health measures. In our area it happens to be typhoid and encephalitis.

And you go clear around the whole gamut of Government activities, and it seems to me that in such a thing as this, a central office such as the OEP, beefed up to handle these disasters, would be of great assistance. This is not critical in any way of the OEP. Their people have been operating through the Governor's office in Denver, and they have been of great help.

But a central office with authority to utilize the facilities of all the agencies does seem a logical way, to me, to go about it.

There is one great area here, which is probably the saddest of all, and that is the number of people who can't insure against these dis

asters.

We in our area can insure against tornadoes. We can't insure against floods.

As a matter of fact, I don't know whether I said this before, but my own law office is under 4 feet of water. There is no insurance for anything of that sort, or for the homes there. So one of the things I think that may well be considered in this is, How do you help the individual?

Loans, disaster loans, are available through the Small Business Administration to businesses. Loans are available to livestock people. Loans are available to ditch companies through the Farmers Home Administration, and irrigation companies, but we have no way of measuring the impact against the individual.

Those who have either direct loans from the Government, such as HHFA, or insured loans through the Veterans' Administration, can of course receive favorable consideration in the adjustments of those loans.

But people who have private loans which are not insured by the Government, or people who simply own their homes outright, are left with an almost impossible loss, and one which they may never be able to replace.

And this is probably, as I see it at the moment, the weakest link in our chain. The Federal Government can come in and help rebuild the public roads and share in that cost under present law. But the most difficult, of your tasks, I think, is going to be in determining what and how we assist the individuals in the classifications that I have de scribed.

Mr. Chairman, I will be happy to answer any questions I can. Necessarily, I have had to get my thoughts together rather quickly, but it is all very fresh to me, having been in it for the last 4 days. You may want to consider some of these suggestions.

Senator BAYH. Senator Allott, I appreciate very much your taking the time to let us have the benefit of your thoughts. I know from firsthand experience how you must feel, having just gone through this, inasmuch as we had a disaster, as you know, that hit our State earlier this year.

We are trying, in this bill, to beef up two or three areas in the public sector. I would be glad to have your analysis as the water goes down in Colorado as to whether you are in agreement with us that in a time of inundation such as you are going through now, a typical disaster situation and flood, that the State funds will be completely needed, or used, for replacement of State and county farm-to-market roads, as well as city streets and this type of thing, and that thus we could use more Federal funds for replacement of highways.