(The statements referred to are as follows:) STATEMENT OF J. G. ANDERSON, JR., REALTOR AND DEVELOPER, NEW TOPSAIL BEACH, N. C. New Topsail Beach, N. C., unincorporated, located at the extreme lower end of Topsail Island, 25 miles long. The ocean front shoreline of 7,705 feet got its start toward development during 1949. Streets were laid out and paved, electric street lights and telephone service were installed. From 1949 until October 15, 1954, the date Hurricane Hazel struck this New Topsail Beach, over 200 new homes, with construction to build, "with key in door," from $10,000 to $25,000 each, were built. Seven business structures received major damage. Of the 200 homes built and occupied until Hurricane Hazel struck on October 15, 1954, 175 homes were completely destroyed. The 25 homes which remained standing received major damage. Since October 15, 1954, 106 new homes have been built to date. Three places of business completely destroyed were unable to rebuild and resume their normal business for financial losses. In addition to property damages, resulting from 2 tornadoes and 6 hurricanes from May 1954 to September 11, 1955, damage to furniture, to electrical appliances, personal effects, to boats, automobiles, etc., and evacuation expenses to the individual were tremendous. A terrible amount of looting took place. There was considerable damage to public property caused by the 6 hurricanes and 2 tornadoes, such as to roads, beach erosion, telephone and electric power service, removal of debris, etc. Due to continuous erosion of the beach strands at New Topsail Beach, caused by the 6 hurricanes during a period of 16 months, from 30 feet in some places to 75 feet in other places have been lost to the sea, taking with it front lots bought and paid for by individuals. After Hazel, for example, 31⁄2 miles of paved roads were covered with sand from 3 to 5 feet deep, in addition to all sorts of debris. Several large shoals now exist in Banks Channel and much debris, making navigation to commercial fishermen, and private boat owners for recreational purposes, most hazardous, and impossible for some boats drawing 22 feet of water or more to safely navigate Banks Channel. Real-estate sales and new owner construction has declined at least to 75 percent. It is now most difficult to buy property insurance. Rebuilding of new homes on lots previously sold where homes were completely destroyed by Hurricane Hazel, and the building supply business is about equal to the first half of 1954. Immediately after Hurricane Hazel on October 15, 1954, the property owners held a meeting and it was agreed to form an improvement committee. Property owners were assessed at the rate of $25 per foot lots on the oceanside and $15 per foot for all others. This was strictly on a voluntary basis, since our beach resort is unincorporated. We had no other method of raising money. At this meeting about $5,800 was raised and it was all used for clearing of debris, moving sand and repair to the bulkhead along Banks Channel. To sum up this report, let me say that it is impossible for any of us to put a value on our losses for the past year, caused by hurricane winds and high flooding waters, causing terrible erosion to our sand dunes and our beautful beach strand. I feel that our local business firms, including fishing piers, have suffered, conservatively speaking, a 60-percent loss in business as compared to 1954– due to the destructive forces of nature. We, at New Topsail Beach, feel that some adequate protection along our ocean front is vital to not only the survival of our beach resort, but from a national defense standpoint. We feel that the Federal Government which had loaned billions abroad to the peoples of the world for civilian projects, should seriously stop and consider some form of financial aid as an excellent investment for its own citizens and taxpayers. If we can obtain Federal financial aid for some form of permanent protection, it will not only afford better and stronger "first line" defenses for our continental shorelines, but I am confident that we will have a very large building boom and will be able to attract more tourists and sport fishermen to our beach resort. Thus aid in restoring the tremendous losses in tax revenues to our county, State, and Federal Government. During the course of our recovery which will take time, planning and building new buildings and other structures, restoration of our beach strands and sand dunes, cleaning out the debris and deepening of Banks Channel to this normal depth for the safe navigation of our 100 or more commercial fishing boats, and hundreds of our privately owned boats used for recreational purposes, we will be depending on the Wilmington district office of the United States Corps of Engineers for advice and engineering survey work of our water resources. The United States Corps of Engineers cannot be praised too highly for their efficient work in making such surveys, going at them from the grassroots approach, without undue delays, and for the fact their resident engineers know this coastal area, are personally acquainted with the local people. The Corps of Engineers has more than paid for its existence and operations having to do with civil-works projects having to do with water resources problems on the Atlantic seaboard, especially along the 400-mile coastline of North Carolina. Under no circumstances will the people stand for any curtailment of the present district operations of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The following statistical table will show the tornado and hurricane losses to private and public property occurring at New Topsail Beach, N. C., from May 1954 to September 1955. STATEMENT OF ALDERMAN R. F. MEIER, WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH, N. C. Memorandum to Alderman R. F. Meier, on expenditure and estimated damages by Hurricanes Hazel, Connie, Diane, and Ione Hurricane Hazel, Oct. 15, 1954: Expended under law 875, approximately_. Expended by town of Wrightsville Beach funds, approximately_ Hurricanes Connie and Diane, Aug. 11 and Aug. 15, 1955; Application filed for Public Law 875, Sept. 6, 1955 $120,000.00 25, 000. 00 231, 603. 56 Total 376, 603.56 Hurricane Ione Sept. 18, 1955 (estimated), $15,000 to $25,000. The approved applications under hurricane Hazel in the amount of $121,782.59 have been disbursed in temporary repairs with the exception of just a few final estimates. Work contracted for and done under civil-defense authority in pushing up sand dunes in the amount of $8,046.25. This amount has not been paid the contractors pending approval of application under Connie and Diane as listed above. Mr. JONES. Our next witness is Mr. Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer. STATEMENT OF JONATHAN DANIELS, EDITOR, THE RALEIGH NEWS AND OBSERVER Mr. DANIELS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Gentlemen of the committee, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you on a subject which seems to me to be more important than almost any other with which the American people are concerned today-water. I doubt that you could have found a better place in which to consider it. During the summer a year ago in North Carolina whole cities were panting with thirst. Industries, which today seem almost more dependent upon water than upon power, were allowed to run only on limited schedules. In some places even bathing was regarded as antisocial. And, as is very well known to you, this summer North Carolina was hit by three hurricanes. Unfortunately, they were not intrastate hurricanes. I happened to go up to Pennsylvania, near where you recently held hearings, soon after Diane went through North Carolina helling north. There I saw at Yardley, near where Washington crossed the Delaware, a steel bridge across that river which looked like a Meccano set a child had kicked over in a playroom. We are interested in water resources and water development in North Carolina. We know, as the citizens of every other State know also, that we cannot develop them for American security and American development on a local basis alone. Other witnesses have already testified to you with more technical information than I possess with regard to the report of the Hoover Commission on water resources and power. I speak only for myself as a concerned citizen. As such I found much valuable information in the documents the Commission prepared on this subject. I realize that the strongest supporters of the Hoover Commission's recommendations in this field are most anxious to separate themselves from some of the extreme reactionary statements made by the task force. But unfortunately it seems to me the not very limited recommendations which the Commission itself made provide a design for a stunted America at the very time when only an expansive program can meet the needs of a nation which must surge or stagnate. Others have given their views on the specific recommendations of the Commission. I do not disagree with all its recommendations. Indeed, long before the Hoover Commission was ever invented, everybody familiar with government realized the faults involved in overlapping jurisdictions in the executive branch of the Government and of logrolling on public projects in the Congress. To the reiteration of warnings about such ancient problems in this report I add my pious approval. But it seems to me inescapable that the basic purpose of this report was to serve what a great American called in a news story in the papers this morning "the talk about a basic antagonism between American business and government." My opposition to it lies in my agreement with him that we "must replace such nonsense with a recognition of the common purposes and obligations of these two cornerstones of democratic capitalism." Among the many useful items in this report is the clear demonstration that the Government did not enter these important fields after Karl Marx, but before American independence. And here in the so-called States rights South it is well to recall that almost the first thing the South sought after the Civil War was Federal aid in flood protection. Of course, not every project upon which the Federal Government has embarked in developing our water resources or any other resources has been sound. And, as understatement, it might be added that neither has every private enterprise proved its public worth or even its private profit. What I object to as North Carolinian and American in this report is its emphasis upon the antagonism of free government and free enterprise in the development of America and even more to the evident effort to prove that some Americans are subsidized and others cheated when the Government brings the blessings of water development to any region. Wind and water in America made a dramatic parable of that sort of divisiveness not long ago. When Diane left us, it dumped more water into the rivers of Pennsylvania and practically washed away whole towns in Connecticut. It is true that that water did not come up to Pennsylvania and Connecticut through interstate rivers. But it dropped out of an interstate sky on people who were just as helpless-as if they only had the promise of this Hoover Commission report to protect them in the future. Then there was a sudden-and it seems to me very sad reaction based on the whole idea of divisiveness in America. The cry came from New England that the South, looting with the zeal of Sherman's soldiers, was trying to lure industries away from desolated townstowns which dramatized the whole dramatic meaning of water control in America. If the South grabbed a single machine out of that tragedy it was, indeed, grave robbing in the mud. Oddly enough, the only evidence I have seen of readiness to grab from the destitute was an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal urging plants to move to Utica, N. Y. A much more relevant statement today appeared in the Official Guide to the State of Connecticut in the American Guide Series published in 1938, under the administration of Gov. Wilbur L. Cross. It appeared about the time when another hurricane out of the South did the worst damage done before this year. In it this statement appeared: The State is alive to the necessity of long-term planning for eliminating the menace of floods such as have twice swept the State during the past 9 years. More years have passed since then. And it is evident now as it was then that there will be more wind, water, floods, in the future. It may be perfectly true that in those years the intelligent development of rivers elsewhere have disadvantaged New England in terms of power and security, water supply, pleasantness, and prosperity elsewhere. To that comparative disadvantage may be added the complaint that New England taxpayers have been required to subsidize the development of America in other regions. That to some may seem a more serious looting than so-called luring of factories southward. But the picture emphasizes the possibility that what is required in New England and America is not complaint, but creativeness. The South and every other region should gladly share in any such creative program. In our times the American scandal is not that TVA has blessed the South, but that so great and good a State as Connecticut, long warned, repeatedly warned, has not been alive to the need for American development of its river basins, its water resources, wherever they threaten the safety of people and industries or wherever such development could serve the pleasantness and productivity of this land. That need will not grow less unless America does also. Our population grows. We hope devoutly that the time may come when peace will make it unnecessary for our productive plant to pour so much of our labors and our treasure into arms. For such a future we need a report on our water resources. I regret to say that at much cost, with much work, on much printed paper, the Hoover Commission and its task force do not seem to me to have presented it. It seems to me a report designed in an extravagance of financial fears for some people, not in imaginative design for a republic which will require the combined efforts of free government and free enterprise to fulfill the possibilities of our land for our people. This report not only does not provide that. It is, indeed, a monumental misunderstanding of the country's need and, as such, an item of waste in Government which if it does not get Mr. Hoover's attention, deserves somebody else's. Mr. JONES. Thank you very much, Mr. Daniels. Do you have any questions, Mr. Lipscomb? Mr. LIPSCOMB. No questions. Mr. JONES. Mr. Daniels, may I direct your attention to recommendation No. 9? That is a recommendation to Congress. Mr. DANIELS. What page is that on? Mr. JONES. Page 111. Mr. DANIELS. Yes, sir; No. 9. Mr. JONES (reading): That the Congress empower and direct the Federal Power Commission to fix the rates on Government power sales at such levels as will— (a) Eliminate the inequities now imposed upon the great majority of the people; Do you sense that there are any inequities in the development, generation, sale, and distribution of power by the Federal Government? Mr. DANIELS. Mr. Jones, the greatest thing that has happened to to this part of the South has been that, although we are outside the TVA area, we have been blessed by the example of TVA. TVA taught the power industry the way of its own salvation. For generations we had had the power industry believing that it could make great profits by selling a small amount of power to a relatively few people. The low rates of TVA, which the power companies followed, enabled the power companies to put appliances in homes throughout America. They have been blessed, and I think the power companies have done an excellent job in selling power at the low rates that they never believed possible until TVA taught them it was. Mr. JONES. It continues: (b) Amortize and pay interest on the Federal investment in power, plus an amount which will equal Federal tax exemption based upon the Federal taxes paid by the private utilities; Would you like to comment on that section? Mr. DANIELS. It seems to me that while there is much debate about how much taxes TVA or other things of that sort ought to pay, that the return to the whole people of the Nation from these projects in their example, serves to give the Government all it should hope to receive from such projects. Mr. JONES. How would you put in operation this recommendation? By putting it into effect you would create a Federal operation the 70818-56-pt. 2- -10 |