Declarations
“Now that we’ve had this incident, does that put a target on our back, kind of, for more bad guys to hit our system?”
— Louisiana state Sen. Sharon Hewitt, a Republican from Slidell, asked regarding the Nov. 18 cyberattack on Louisiana’s state government computer servers during a legislative committee meeting. Neal Underwood, Louisiana’s deputy chief information officer, replied that the state gets “thousands of attempts to access our system every single day, 365 days a year.”
“It’s the best decision we ever made.”
— Tammy Kilgore, who, along with her husband, James, accepted a buyout of their often-flooded home in Mosby, Missouri. The city of Mosby estimates it’s faced 40 floods of varying severity over the past two decades. Kilgore said she has lost count of the number of times her home got wet.
“There are few railroads you will find who have done more to mitigate these types of issues.”
— Patrick Goddard, president of Florida’s new higher-speed passenger rail service, comments on the number of deaths involving the train, which travels at speeds up to 79 mph. The train has the worst per-mile death rate of the nation’s 821 railroads with 40 recorded since the train officially launched, or more than one a month. The majority of deaths have been suicides, while the others involved impatient motorists, pedestrians or bicyclists. The railroad will experiment with infrared motion detectors and drones to patrol tracks.
“We remain deeply sorry about the role our equipment had in this tragedy, and we apologize to all those impacted by the devastating Camp Fire.”
— PG&E, acknowledging the role of its equipment in a California fire that killed more than 80 people in 2018 and apologized.
“These defendants scammed insurance companies to cut costs in one of the city’s most dangerous industries with utter disregard for their employees’ lives.”
— Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a press release regarding unlicensed labor broker Salvador Almonte Jr. and insurance broker Steven Asvazadourian, who were indicted in New York for allegedly underreporting the size of Almonte’s companies and lying to insurance carriers about the work being performed by employees in order to evade more than $1 million in insurance premiums. This scheme left more than a hundred construction workers underinsured.