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Morning News

Arizona Department of Emergency Management Director Discusses Clean-up and Recovery Efforts in Wenden

Aired October 23, 2000 - 10:22 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN ANCHOR: Flooding has forced about 300 people from their homes in the small town of Wenden, Arizona. Heavy rains put dozens of homes, businesses and vehicles underwater. Evacuees were bussed to a high school gym that was turned into a Red Cross shelter.

With the latest on the clean-up and recovery efforts, we go to Michael Austin. He is director of the Arizona Department of Emergency Management. He is with us by phone from Phoenix this morning.

Good morning to you, sir, thanks for joining us. How are things?

MICHAEL AUSTIN, ARIZONA DEPT. OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT: Good this morning. Obviously, the town suffered a lot of damage and our major effort today is to begin a short-term recovery process for the citizens of Wenden.

SAVIDGE: Do you believe that the threat of any further flooding, the situation getting worse, has passed you by now?

AUSTIN: Absolutely. There may be some showers throughout other parts of Arizona today, the low level is still kind of parked over Baha. We don't expect it to move off to the east until perhaps even tomorrow.

SAVIDGE: And have you been able to sort of visually inspect and find out just how bad things are?

AUSTIN: Yes, I flew over these yesterday, and took a look around, and it's -- it's as bad as I've ever seen, and I've been through several large floods here in Arizona.

SAVIDGE: Was this totally unexpected?

AUSTIN: We knew that it was going to rain, obviously. And we knew that the -- that some parts of the state would have a lot of rain. It's always unexpected when a particular wash runs completely out of its banks and inundates a pretty large town.

SAVIDGE: What do the people do now? how will you try to pick up and carry on?

AUSTIN: Well, today, I think what we are going to do is go back to the community and try to put together step one through step five or so on how to help the people get back together. To a large extent, it will be dependent on how much flood insurance each of the families has. We expect that that ratio is probably going to be quite low. But we are hoping that they have flood insurance.

SAVIDGE: Michael Austin, who is with the Arizona Department of Emergency Management, thank you very much. And we wish you and the people of Wenden well. Thank you.

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