Sen. Cory Gardner was settling into a light snow in Colorado Monday morning after touring Puerto Rico over the weekend as part of a bipartisan congressional committee.

Gardner took an aerial tour of the island devastated as Hurricane Maria made landfall on Sept. 20 and lashed the island for 30 hours. Much of Puerto Rico is still without power, and utilities and other services might not be restored to some areas until after the new year. Thirty-four deaths have been linked to the storm and its aftermath.

“It looks like a giant weed-whacker was taken to the whole island,” he said in an interview with Colorado Politics early Monday morning. “The vegetation has just been stripped, so from an ecological view it’s a disaster just in the number of trees that have been snapped and splintered into toothpicks, plus the number of homes that have had their roofs stripped off or the whole house just destroyed.”

Gardner and nine other members of the House and Senate met with Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello, as well as local and federal disaster recovery management officials, about the cleanup and rebuilding efforts. He toured the Port of San Juan with the San Juan Port Authority and Coast Guard leaders.

Recovery has been slow because of the immense devastation left by category 4 storm that packed 155-mph sustained winds, which the National Weather Service likened to a “a 50- to 60-mile-wide tornado.”

“The damage that was done was just not in little areas, but it’s the whole island,” Gardner said of Puerto Rico, which has roughly the land mass of Connecticut and a population of about 3.8 million people. “It’s not like a portion of a city that was hit by a tornado or a downtown that’s flooded and then you can reach it from those areas that weren’t affected. Every part of the island is impacted.”

Getting a mass number of people onto the island to make repairs to the power grid and deal with debris is a monumental task, he said.

“We have to get more boots on the ground, and by that I mean more utility workers,” Gardner said.

The White House asked Gardner to go because of his seat as chairman of the Senate Energy Subcommittee. He said the island’s grid needs to be restored to a level that it can weather the next hurricane.

“This isn’t going to be a recovery, but a long-term resiliency has to be taken into consideration,” Gardner said.

The cost of the damage has been estimated to be as high as $95 billion for a state already in deep financial decline.

Gardner said the assessment on needs in Puerto Rico isn’t yet completed. Maria is one of four storms to make landfall on the U.S. this hurricane season, the most in a decade.

“We don’t quite have a handle on what all is needed,” Gardner said of Puerto Rico. “I think it’s appropriate that we take the time to do the proper assessment and make sure we get the money that is appropriate but not send money that is either not needed or spent in duplication, so we have to be careful about what we’re doing.”

On the island last week, President Trump told Fox News last week that the island’s debts might have to be wiped out for it to rebuild, but his administration has since walked back that offer.

“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street,” Trump said to Fox News’ Gerald Riviera. “And we’re going to have to wipe that out. You can say goodbye to that.”

Trump’s budget adviser said later not to take Trump literally. Gardner seemed to agree with that assessment of Trump’s statement on Puerto Rico’s debt.

“I think the president was just trying to say something about his visit,” Gardner said Monday morning. “I think what has to happen is that Congress and bipartisan committees with the president have to figure out a long-term plan. What that is, I don’t know what the right response is yet, other than we have to make this right, because this is part of America.”

The senator cancelled a town hall meeting he had scheduled in Pueblo for Friday morning. The event will be rescheduled “sooner rather than later,” he told Colorado politics.

While at home in Colorado during a Senate break this week, Gardner has meetings in Wray, Sterling, Fort Morgan and Denver.

When he returns, Republicans will be working on their tax reform package to simplify the code and create tax breaks for the right people.

Gardner said studies saying the proposal so far disproportionately benefits the wealthy but those studies are using “completely making things up. This hasn’t been written. Income brackets haven’t been determined yet. The wage thresholds haven’t even been assigned.”

He said tax reform would go through a bipartisan process.

“Let’s get through that and make sure we’re benefiting hard-working middle-class Americans.” he said.