Corbett Calls For Flooding Infrastructure Probe

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

Governor Corbett wants the General Assembly to examine how Pennsylvania’s infrastructure failings contributed to last month’s flooding along the Susquehanna River and its tributaries.
Scores of wastewater treatment facilities failed during the deluge, pouring toxic waste into the river.
The governor made his comments during a tour of flooding damage in Pine Grove, Schuylkill County, where his wife Susan grew up.
From the Times Leader:

“I want to take a thorough look. I think the House and Senate can help,” Corbett said Thursday in Pine Grove, where he toured flood damage. “I think some hearings on what we need to do to address this on a holistic aspect would be good to have here during the course of the fall and the winter.”
Corbett surmised that intensive development and a lack of maintenance of storm drains may have contributed to the severity of the flooding caused by the remnants of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. Thousands of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed.
“I think we have to take a look at how developments are made, and how much water is running down into streams that frankly wasn’t running down into streams maybe 10, 15, 30 years ago,” Corbett said. “We have to do a little bit better planning.”

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