Two years ago George Hamilton, Dow's commercial director of engineering plastics, approached Elkhart, Ind.
Elkhart is a place that has lost jobs faster than anywhere else in America.
In 2009, I wrote a story for MSNBC.com about how youth sports were being affected in Elkhart, Ind.
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In the Elkhart, Indiana metro area, for instance, per capita income fell 6.5%, the eighth biggest drop in the nation.
On February 9th he visited Elkhart, a town racked by job losses since the local recreational-vehicle factories started cutting back.
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So what I'm trying to underscore is what the people in Elkhart already understand: that this is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill recession.
Part of the problem in Elkhart, that I heard about today, was the fact that -- this is the RV capital of America.
In July, for example, while the Elkhart yard was rebuilding 26 miles of track, the system diverted 500 cars a day to other yards.
But understand the bottom line that I've got right now, which is what's happening to the people of Elkhart and what's happening across the country.
He found that a furniture maker near Elkhart would let cars full of wood sit on tracks every year at the same time, clogging the rail sidings.
When Hurricane Katrina hit, the system rerouted trains scheduled to be switched in New Orleans, and later shuffled new trains into the schedule to haul thousands of mobile homes from Elkhart to Louisiana.
Now, what I said in Elkhart today is what I repeat this evening, which is, I'm absolutely confident that we can solve this problem, but it's going to require us to take some significant, important steps.
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