Biden meets Kentucky families affected by devastating flooding
President Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden met with Kentucky families affected by the recent flooding. Biden delivered remarks on the impact of the devastation and response efforts.
Video transcript
JOE BIDEN: Folks, I was going to give more formal remarks. But can you all hear me? Is this on? You know, I got to meet several families. I got to meet the family back here on this side of the road. You see what's happened to their properties, their trailer, everything they had, and how they've come together.
No complaining, just getting up, just getting up and going to get done. I walked across the road, met another family. One family, gentleman, his trailer is all the way up at the other end of the property, gone. And you know what? When I started talking about what we could do, he said, well we, Kentuckians don't want to ask for too much.
Catch this. We don't want to ask for too much. We're used to having neighbors help us out. We don't know that the rest of you all, everybody else should be doing this. I said, what? You're kidding me, seriously. They're talking about. And pointed out that, here's the deal.
It is true that the people here in this community in Western Kentucky and the folks I met in the tornado, they're not just Kentuckians, they're Americans. They're Americans. This happened in America, American problem. And we're all Americans. Everybody has an obligation to help. We have the capacity to do this.
It's not like it's beyond our control. The weather may be out of control for now. But it's not beyond our control. And I promise you, we're staying, the federal government along with the state and county and the city, we're staying until everybody is back to where they were. Not a joke.
And one other thing I've raised with the gov. We've never done this before. But because of a number of things we got done on a bipartisan basis, like a $1,200,000,000 infrastructure project. Like what we're doing today, we passed yesterday, helping taking care of everything from health care to God knows what else.
What we're going to do is we're going to see, for example, if they've got to put a new waterline in the community, there's no reason why they can't at the same time be digging a line that puts in a whole new modern line for internet connections, why? Why can't we do that? So this is going to be different. We're going to come back better than before.
And I really mean it. That's the objective I have. Not come back to what we were before, come back to better than we were before. And I mean this, Gov, you know I mean it. And I'm confident with your leadership we can do it, along with the-- we don't call we call them county executives where I'm from, the judge here.
I'm finding this is something that we can all do. We can get this done. Because we're the only country in the world that has come out of every major disaster stronger than we went into it. We got clobbered going in, but we came out stronger. That's the objective here. It's not just to get back to where we were. It's to get back to better than where we were.
And we have the wherewithal to do it now with the legislation that's been bipartisanly passed. So I don't want any Kentuckian telling me, you don't have to do this for me. Oh, yeah, we do. You're an American citizen. We never give up. We never stop. We never bow. We never bend. We just go forward.
And that's what we're going to do here. And you're going to see. And I promise you, the bad news for you is I'm coming back because I want to see it. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
