Remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to the Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce

Release Date: April 23, 2007

Washington, D.C.
Sacramento Chamber of Commerce

Well, I want to thank Dan Lungren for that rousing introduction. Whenever anybody talks about the sacrifice made in giving up a job with life tenure, I always say that, in this job, even a single year is a lifetime.  So I feel like I gained.

I do want to say that I've had the privilege of observing and working with Dan Lungren for quite a long time, because I was a prosecutor and I remembered him back first as a congressman before he became attorney general, and then as attorney general. And he was really a leader in the nation, in terms of issues of public security, public safety and law enforcement for as long as I can remember, someone who has brought energy, good judgment, commitment to the rule of law, and to the public to everything that he's done.

We were chatting a little bit before we broke in order to begin speaking, and Dan reminded me of his important role in defending the California Three Strikes law in the courts. And I actually said to him, I defended that law in the Supreme Court. The one and only U.S. Supreme Court argument I've ever had was in a case, was challenged, the constitutional validity of the Three Strikes law. And I'm pleased to say that we won. I participated on behalf of the United States supporting California, and we upheld the law. So I feel like I had a small contribution to Dan's work, in terms of making California a safer place.  

By the way, it's not that early for me, at 8:00 in the morning. I understand for you it's about 5:00 in the morning now.

I also want to recognize Al Martinez-Fonts, our Assistant Secretary for the Private Sector. And I'd like to personally welcome you all to Washington. I know Sacramento is a great growth area from a state that is a real engine of economic development and innovation for the country. And I think we benefit when groups from places like Sacramento come and essentially help to seed the fields of Washington with new ideas and new approaches, and give us a sense of what's going on in the real world.

Now, I've had the opportunity to visit Sacramento. I was there in March, 2006. And Governor Schwarzenegger and I took a helicopter flight over Sacramento, because the governor and the other leadership there was very interested in making sure that I looked at the situation with respect to the levees. And we then had a very, very interesting and, I'd say, important discussion about the issue of emergency preparedness, as it applies in particular to the area of Sacramento, and the challenges that are faced, with respect to the possibility of flooding.

I know Sacramento is taking a very important lead role in making sure that emergency preparedness is front and center, and also a public/private partnership. And the reason it has to be a public/private partnership is because most of the assets and employees which are threatened in any situation, whether it's a potential terrorism attack or a natural disaster, most of those assets and employees are in private hands.

This is an area where government can show leadership and can give guidance, but it's not an area where the government is going to direct or personally execute most of the activities. Most of that is going to be done by the private sector, using private resources and private people working. And therefore, this is really an area where partnership is very important.

Another area where partnership is important is in the whole general domain of homeland security, because homeland security is not just about security, it's about balancing security and prosperity and our way of life.

An approach that says security above all else is one that will actually ruin much of what makes this country great. And that's why taking a view of the problem of homeland security that puts it in the larger context of what we are as Americans, what our values are, what is necessary to produce the kind of economic activity that makes life prosperous and pleasant here, that kind of balanced approach is critical to having a homeland security strategy that takes us forward into the next decade, and, in fact, into this new century.

So, I thought what I would do is talk a little bit here about some of the ways we're trying to achieve that balance in homeland security, and the importance of the role that you, as members of the private sector, play in helping us achieve a balanced approach to homeland security.

Let me begin by talking a little bit about our core principles, because if we don't have a set of core principles, nothing we do is going to be sensible.

We understand, as I think almost everybody in business does, that in this world, you cannot eliminate risk. And even if you could totally eliminate risk, the cost of doing so would be unbelievably high, and the damage done to our way of life would be very substantial.

What we have to do is manage risk. And just as you manage risk in your businesses, what we have to do at the Department of Homeland Security is have a strategy that manages risk across the entire country.

What do we mean by risk? Well, we look at three things. We look at threats, we look at vulnerabilities, and we look at consequences. We try to weigh where the threats are, where we are most vulnerable, and, perhaps most important, what would the consequences be if a particular threat came to pass.

Once we've analyzed what the risks are and we've prioritized them, we try to take an analytic approach, basically look at cost effectiveness, to determine what are the priorities, in terms of risk, and how do we allocate our resources in the most cost effective and sensible way.

Once again, one of our bedrock principles is not to break the things we're trying to protect, not to burn down the village we are trying to save, or lay the heavy hand of government on well established and robust systems of trade and commerce.

So with these basic principles, with the concept of a partnership between those who own and operate most of our critical infrastructure, and government, which has its responsibility for national and homeland security, I think we're well equipped to develop and execute strategies to make this country safer.

I also, though, want to say there is a very important business case to be made with respect to investments in homeland and national security. After all, a good part of what you need to do when you invest your resources in producing economic activity is to protect your investment. You've got to protect your assets, you've got to protect your employees, you've got to protect your business processes and your good will.

And therefore, investment in protection of infrastructure or people against all kinds of threats is very much at the core of your business mission, and that's why I think there is a real confluence of objectives here between government and its responsibility to protect the country, and you as business leaders in your obligation to protect your own investments.

Now, with that in mind, let me talk a little bit about what our major strategic goals are at the Department of Homeland Security. I like to divide them into five categories: first, protecting our nation against dangerous people; second, protecting our nation against dangerous things or dangerous cargo; third, protecting our critical infrastructure against dangerous people or dangerous cargo, if they should, in fact, come into the United States; fourth, boosting our emergency preparedness so that we can respond effectively and quickly, if in fact an attack occurs or even a natural disaster; and finally, strengthening the department's own internal business processes and management.

I'm not going to talk about all of these five goals today, but there are a couple of things we are trying to do in pursuing these five strategic goals that I think will be of particular interest to this group. One of those is transportation security, and one is emergency preparedness.

Now, there's no question after 9/11, but even before 9/11, one of the biggest priorities that we have to focus on, in terms of risk, is securing our transportation system. And by this I mean not just aviation security, although that's clearly very important, but all modes of transportation. I know that Sacramento sits at the crossroads of several railroads and highway systems. Like cities and communities all across the country, you depend on safe, reliable and secure transportation for the movement of people and commerce.

So let me talk a little bit about some of the steps we're taking, and we've taken actually quite recently, to protect transportation, and in particular our rail system.

Consistent with our approach, which, again, is to manage risk but not eliminate risk, we have focused on the most significant risks to our rail transportation system. One of those is the risk of transportation of hazardous chemicals, including chemicals that could create a toxic inhalation hazard if they were accidentally or even deliberately released into the air. Of course, this is part of a larger and more comprehensive effort we are taking to make sure that the entire spectrum of the way we deal with chemicals is secure and protected against the possibility of a terrorist attack or a major natural disaster.

At the end of last year, we issued a proposed regulation that will require major railroads to improve the monitoring of rail cars that carry toxic inhalation chemicals. Rail companies have to make sure these cars are not left unattended in rail yards, especially where they are near major cities or population centers. They have to be able to track the whereabouts of these cars at all times, and then they have to put these rail cars on the safest, economically practicable routes.

Now, when I talk about this regulation – and let me pause for a second and stand back and tell you what the theory was behind doing this, because I think it might give you an insight into the way we manage risk. Unlike some people, we didn't say, well, let's eliminate the risk entirely, by simply preventing anybody from transporting toxic chemicals by rail. In fact, most toxic chemicals and necessary chemicals in this country are, in fact, transported by rail. And although some of them can be dangerous if released in the environment, many of them are critical to our health and economy all across the country.

The fact of the matter is, if we banned chlorine, you would not be able to drink the water, and people – literally thousands of people would die because of water-borne illnesses. So risk management means recognizing the value of being able to move these chemicals, but trying to find a way to reduce the risk when we do so.

So we analyzed what the vulnerabilities were, we knew the threat. The threat was the possibility of someone dispersing the chemical; and we recognized that the vulnerability came through several possible vectors of attack. The more a particular car remains in one place, the more readily it can be attacked. The more time it spends in a highly populated area, the greater the consequence will be. And the more uncertainty we have about the location of cars when an event happens, the more difficult it would be to respond and mitigate the harm.

And that's why our regulatory approach here was to look at precisely those issues, reducing what they call the dwell time, or the time that a car sits in a particular place, reducing the amount of time to the extent economically practical that those cars spend time in populated areas, and making sure we could track those cars and have responsibility for those cars at every stage of the process, so there's an element of accountability and so that we can move promptly if, in fact, there is some kind of a problem that occurs with a toxic release.

This practical, disciplined and analytically sound approach has, I think, yielded us a regulation that will significantly reduce the danger caused by this kind of transportation of chemicals, but do it in a way that does not cripple our ability to provide very essential ingredients of safety and the economy to cities all across the country.

Moreover, this effort to regulate and protect with respect to chemicals that are carried by rail complements a whole series of strategic efforts we have made to strengthen the security at our chemical plants, so that this is really a soup to nuts example of risk management that doesn't break what we're trying to protect, but materially reduces the vulnerabilities to make Americans safer.

This regulation also illustrates another key element of the way we approach these problems, because it was developed working in partnership with the rail industry and the chemical industry at every step of the process, so that we did have a fair, intelligent and not hysterical risk-based strategy. We didn't simply propose these regulations unilaterally. We worked with industry to understand their best practices, and then formalized a lot of the work that had already been put in place by making it a regulation that could apply across the board.

This ensured that the good work that the industry has done would be memorialized and institutionalized, and also ensured that those few companies that are perhaps less responsible would be induced to bring their standards up to the general standard, so that they didn't get a competitive advantage at the expense of the safety of the American public.

And this same approach that we've taken here is one that we've taken across the board in protecting our critical infrastructure, whether it's background checks on truck drivers who carry hazardous material, new credentialing requirements for workers with access to sensitive transportation facilities, and new investments in technology designed to better protect our passenger and commuter rail and bus systems.

Now let me turn to our second area, which I know will be of real interest to the people from the Sacramento area, and that's emergency preparedness. At the end of the day, although DHS was born out of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, it is an all-hazards department. We recognize that we have to protect against natural, as well as man-made disasters, and, in fact, almost all of the efforts we take with respect to emergency preparedness do double duty. They would be as important in a natural disaster as they would be in response to a terrorist attack. So it's critically important that we have effective and intelligent response capabilities in place.

Now, California happens to be a state which has given birth to many of the best practices in emergency response. The incident management system and some of the techniques that have been pioneered in firefighting and disaster response really grew out of efforts in California. And this state is one of the leaders in the country in terms of effective emergency response, capability development and training and execution.

So we recognize that we have a lot to learn from California, but we also know that we have a real responsibility to work with the authorities at the state and local level to make sure California is capable of meeting natural disasters.

Of course your state, while blessed in many respects, also experiences just about every kind of natural disaster known to man. You don't often get hurricanes – in fact, I don't think anyone has ever – although I guess in theory a hurricane could come up and hit you from the west coast of Mexico. I'm not aware of a significant one that has hit in memory. But you do have earthquakes, you have mud slides, you have fires, and you have all kinds of other disasters. And, of course, you have the possibility in the areas like Sacramento of flooding based on rivers and the possible damage to the dykes, which of course protect a lot of your agricultural land and your residential land.

So it's been important that we work with you, as well as with other states, to take significant steps to boost our capabilities for emergency response.

At the national level, we have replaced a lot of the leadership of FEMA with very professional and experienced managers. We have reviewed state emergency plans all across the country, including in California. We have formalized and really, dramatically enhanced our partnership with the Department of Defense for logistics and planning so that we have, for the first time, a level of joint planning with the military in case of a real catastrophe that never existed in FEMA prior to last year.

At the same time, because we recognized that a cornerstone of effective response is communications, we have completed a major assessment of communications operability and interoperability. This coming year we'll make available $1 billion in grants, specifically to make sure that first responders in our major cities and states can communicate during disasters. In fact, by the end of fiscal year 2008, we will have allocated more than $20 billion in homeland security grants to states. This includes more than $28 million to Sacramento as part of our Urban Area Security Initiative. And Sacramento will be eligible to compete for fiscal year 2008 Urban Area Security Initiative program grants.

Last November, FEMA participated in California's major exercise to test emergency response procedures for a catastrophic earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. This exercise involved more than 32 state agencies, 40 local and regional government entities, and 30 private organizations. Of particular interest I know to this group is our focus on levee repair and flood control.

FEMA Region Nine, which has California within its jurisdiction, continues to participate with other federal and state agencies on the Executive Oversight Committee, working on the issue of levee repair. This is, of course, a very important investment to be made now to avoid problems in the future.

When I reviewed the situation with the levees with Governor Schwarzenegger last year, what was brought home to me was the fact that Sacramento flood control authorities have made tremendous strides improving the community's level of flood protection, and the Corps of Engineers have made some significant repairs. But we have a lot more work to do and we need to get it done.

Our first priority at the end of the day, at DHS, is public safety. And to play our role, which of course, would come into effect if the levees failed, not withstanding all the work being done to shore them up, I wanted to make sure that we were properly connected with state and local authorities in terms of emergency response.

For this reason, I directed our leadership in California to work with state officials to develop the Sacramento Valley Levee Response Plan, which is now in place. This plan addresses mass evacuation, special needs populations, critical infrastructure, potential shelter sites, and all the other elements tied to emergency management that would have to come into play if we had a major flood in the Sacramento Valley area.

I also want to observe that under our National Infrastructure Protection Plan, which is how we work with the private sector to decrease the vulnerabilities in private sector infrastructure, we're developing specific plans to heighten protection for infrastructure in areas like agriculture, drinking water facilities, and dams. This is part of a comprehensive approach to protecting our assets, and then being able to mitigate the damage to our assets if, in fact, they come under attack or they become the subject of a disaster.

I understand that a delegation from this chamber will be meeting with FEMA's Mitigation Division to talk about some of what I've just reviewed during this visit. We look forward to continuing our partnership with you and making sure that the Sacramento area is safe, is as protected as it can reasonably be against the possibility of some kind of a disaster, and then has an effective response if we should need to call it into play.

We recognize at the end of the day, again, all risk can't be eliminated, and living with levees means living with risk. It's important that property owners in communities take those risks seriously and make those investments in advance that need to be undertaken. It's also important that we recognize that emergency response plans are only as good as the amount of training and exercising that we put into effect to make sure that they actually work when the time has come.

In fact, I venture to say that this is part of a larger issue, which I want to spend one moment talking to you about, which is the whole question of business preparedness. I can tell you that whether it's a flood or the possibility of an avian flu pandemic, a cornerstone of our preparedness has got to be the engagement of the private sector and the business community in preparing each and every private institution. In fact, every family has to be invested in preparedness. That means acquiring the right tools, planning what you would do to deal with an exigency, and then training and exercising against it. This is not only a responsibility of the government or the military. It's a responsibility which has to be embedded in every single organization, including private business.

I'm going to predict to you that in this next decade, the issue of risk management and risk mitigation, including emergency preparedness and planning, is going to increasingly be seen as an obligation for every business in the private sector in much the same way as you treat the sanctity and the reliability of your financial reporting as a critical business function, because if there is, in fact, a major avian flu epidemic, and you have to deal with the question of who your essential workers are, and how you keep operating, or if there is a flood, you're going to find that there's not a lot of time to do the planning when the emergency is under way. And the quality of your response is going to be a direct product of the planning and exercising you've done in advance.

We obviously speak in the shadow today of the terrible events of last week at Virginia Tech. And even there, there is a terrible, but nevertheless important, lesson for everybody, which is preparation in advance for the unthinkable, gives you a leg-up in being able to respond when the unthinkable actually comes to pass.

So out of all of these tragedies, whether they be the tragedies of natural disasters or the havoc that is wreaked by individuals, there is always a lesson to be learned about how to prepare ourselves better that pays dividends in the future in a way that is very important to all of us and our families.

Finally, let me, before I conclude, talk about an issue that effects everyone in this room today, and every American across the nation, and that is the issue of immigration. And here, again, I know that you know that Congressman Dan Lungren has been a leader over the years in talking about the need to have an intelligent approach to immigration across the board.

We have a unique opportunity at this moment, as Congress weighs immigration reform, to confront an issue that has challenged our country literally for decades. I can't remember a domestic public policy issue that has been more challenging or more important in my adult life than the question of immigration. It touches everybody. And what's been interesting about the debate in this is that it touches people in unexpected ways. And sometimes, people find themselves conflicted. On the one hand, there's an understandable deep concern about the importance of controlling our border and making sure that the rule of law is honored in deed as well as in word.

And yet, many of the same people who are deeply committed to that recognize how much the economy depends upon the work that is being performed by currently undocumented workers. And so they're wrestling with a way to reconcile these problems.

That creates an opportunity, as well as a challenge, to fix this problem once and for all. The President has been very clear and has committed a lot of his capital to the desire for immigration reform that protects our borders in a way that's not been done, in my memory, that strengthens enforcement of our immigration laws, but that also creates a temporary worker program and a fair resolution to the current issue of undocumented workers that solves the problem once and for all.

We have already made a very important down payment on the things that we are capable of doing right now: strengthening the border, beefing up interior enforcement. We have been tough, and we will continue to be tough, because, A, being tough is part of the commitment to the rule of law; and, B, being tough is part of a commitment to the American people to prove to them that this time we are really serious.

But toughness alone will not do it. We also have to be smart. And that's where I think that the work that we're doing now to try to produce immigration reform is very important. And if we can get it done, it's going to not only solve a problem that has been with us for decades, and solve it in a way that, again, manages the risk and doesn't break the systems we're trying to protect, but it will illustrate to the American people that here in Washington, we are still capable of producing intelligent solutions to problems, which, at the end of the day, is I think what we're all here to do: solve problems and not merely talk about them.

So I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here today and talk to you at what you probably still regard as an early hour. I appreciate your partnership. I look forward to working with you and coming back to visit the Sacramento area again. And I know we will want to put our shoulders to the wheel, pushing forward progress in this country to our mutual goals of enhanced security and continued economic prosperity.

Thank you very much.

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This page was last modified on April 23, 2007