| Home | Information Sharing & Analysis | Prevention & Protection | Preparedness & Response | Research | Commerce & Trade | Travel Security | Immigration |
The threat level in the airline sector is High or Orange. Read more.
This information is not current, is not being updated, and may contain broken links.
Release Date: May 20, 2008
Washington, D.C.
Secretary Chertoff: All right. Should I make a few remarks? This is Administrator Paulison, the head of FEMA. And we're here to talk a little bit about hurricane preparedness.
June 1 is, of course, as you know, the kick-off for hurricane season. Although we confronted natural disasters over the past year, whether it be fires or tornados and things of that sort, I don't think the official prediction for the season is out yet. I think it's coming out later in the week. The individual from Colorado, Dr. Grey, has given his prediction. Last year we had a couple of category fives, but they didn't hit the United States, so for Americans, I think hurricanes do not seem to be a particular concern. In 2006, it was also a pretty mild season, but I hope that doesn't lull us into believing we don't have to prepare for 2008.
And as usual, the cornerstone of preparation is individual preparation. Have a plan, know how to get the information about what you need to do in the event that a hurricane looms on the horizon. Have some water and food and medicine and a radio, so if you wind up getting caught in a situation where there aren't supplies for 48 or 72 hours, you have the capability to sustain yourself. None of this is rocket science. It's the same steps you would take to make sure your house is prepared against a fire or some other kind of more predictable problem. And if people will make individual preparations, they make it easier for the responders, who then can first focus on people who can't help themselves, either because they're sick or old or poor. And those people need to get help first.
So people who have the wherewithal and the capability to help themselves, I think have a civic responsibility to do it.
In terms of where we're at, we've issued our new National Response Framework. We've got teams, mobile teams, that will be able to coordinate our response on the scene as quickly as possible. We've worked with 31 other government agencies including DOD, to have prescribed mission assignments so that the types of capabilities we might need to deploy are identified and we have an easy and convenient way to trigger their release. We've got 60 mobile disaster recovery centers. We've worked with our state and local partners to examine and test their evacuation plans, most notably in Louisiana, to make sure they have good plans in place. A number of them have made some substantial steps forward even as compared to last year. We're collaborating with the Red Cross to have visibility into their national shelter system. We've got a national emergency family registry and locator system up. We have transitioned a lot of our part-time disaster assistance employees into a full time cadre of specialists who can be deployed and around whom we can build a more robust capability. And this is - we've increased the FEMA budget to the largest budget ever, which is $9.7 billion.
We're also launching some new Ready Business ads, where the Ad Council is part of our Ready campaign. And one thing which I'd like to call everybody's attention to is our IPAWS, Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. This goes beyond the typical radio and TV-based alert system to one that allows Internet-based warning and cell phone-based, text message based, warning with an opt-in feature. We piloted this system last year in the Gulf. It worked very well. It is not terribly expensive. We are going to be encouraging the governors of the states in the hurricane areas to sign up for this system. I think it's only a few million dollars, and there's even some of our grant money. If they want to use some of that, they can do it. But we're providing them with a tool that will enhance their ability to reach out to the members of their community - particularly people who may be hearing-impaired - and give them notice if there's any kind of an event. And they need to step up to the plate and accept this invitation; and we're going to be encouraging them to do that.
Mr. Paulison: He covered a lot of it. We don't want to plan for the last disaster, but Hurricane Katrina raised, obviously, a lot of weaknesses in our whole emergency response system. Not just at FEMA, but across the federal government and out in the state and locals. So we've been working very hard to - and some of you already know this - to rebuild FEMA, obviously. Better leadership, more people on board, more dollars. Working with our logistics system to make sure it's going to work out much better than it did in the past. Making sure that we have the right type of training out there. A change in the culture of the organization from a reactive organization, as it was set up originally, to a more proactive. And that's involved doing some stuff with the states, too.
Last year we did a gap analysis of all the hurricane-prone states, from Texas all the way to Maine, to get a new assessment of exactly what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are. We know that one size does not fit all, that different states have different needs and different states have to work on different issues. We had to work very closely with Louisiana the last several years just on their evacuation process - making sure that there was an evacuation plan in place, making sure there's transportation available. In fact, year before last we propositioned 200 buses down there with drivers all hurricane season just to make sure we had some place to transport people.
So we took those gap analyses of all those states. We've tailored a lot of the grants towards addressing a lot of those gaps, whether it be sheltering, whether it be transportation, whether it's fuel along evacuation routes, any of those types of things. Whether it's dealing with children, dealing with pets. There's a whole series of things that we used as gap analysis. And that gave us a real assessment for the states, also, so they know what to focus on.
I'm very comfortable that FEMA is much, much better prepared to respond to hurricanes this year than we were - definitely were two years ago, even better than last year. But probably more importantly, I'm much more comfortable that the states are ready, also. And I want to reemphasize what the Secretary did. The cornerstone of preparedness is all back down to the individual. The federal government, the state government, the local government, the tribal governments, all of us working perfectly in sync cannot make up for a community or a group of citizens who are not prepared themselves. You simply can't feed the entire country. You have to take some personal responsibility for yourselves and your family. And like I said, it's not that difficult for most of us.
Some of us can't. Some of us don't have the fiscal, the physical, or even the mental capacity to take care of ourselves. Those are the ones governments should be focusing on the first few hours after the storm. Most of us should be able to take care of ourselves for three or four days, until supplies can start moving in.
So for those notice events, we have a lot of propositioned supplies. We're going to be moving very quickly. We're going to be - we put people at the state emergency management centers to make sure we have good visibility of what their needs are. The Secretary mentioned our management support teams we have out there. That's something very new. These are trained professionals and responders to disasters. The IMAT teams. We've not had that before. In the past, FEMA stripped out its offices, and you may be working at a desk one day and the next day you're out there working on a disaster. One, we didn't have the people out there with the right type of knowledge or training, and two, there was nobody back at the inner regions or the headquarters to actually manage what has to happen back here, so there was no backup.
Right now we have two regional teams of 15 people each and a national team of 25 people that are trained professionals. That's all they do, is respond to respond to disasters. And they're full time employees. They'll be - when they're not responding to disasters, they'll be training. And they really served us well these last few disasters we've had.
So we've been putting professionals on the ground that know how to manage disasters, can give us better visibility of what's happening.
So that's kind of where we are. It's a whole new system. It's entirely different, being managed differently than in the past. The people we're hiring to lead the organization have 25 and 30 years of experience dealing with disasters. We have all ten of our regional director's offices filled, and all of our career senior management offices are filled, also. That will help us through the transition into the next administration.
We have put our heart and souls into rebuilding FEMA, and I'm going to make sure that nothing gets dropped from one administration to the next, regardless of who gets elected. So this is going to be the smoothest transition I think anybody's ever seen. We worked too hard to let the ball drop for lack of cooperation from one administration to another.
Anyway, that's kind of where we are. Got a lot of good stuff going on.
Question: Questions - and I want to jump on in. You had mentioned, Mr. Secretary, right at the beginning of this, the importance of - and you reiterated it - the importance of focusing on this personal responsibility for a number of reasons. One of them in particular was the critical nature in which these limited resources the federal government has ought to be focused on those who need them the most. And you mentioned those people who are either infirm or poor. And you mentioned the IPAWS program as one that can be used to help those who are deaf, and even blind, as I understand it. Could you elaborate a little bit more on how the response efforts now differ - response capabilities - differ now than they did before, specifically on those needy communities?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, let me just say a lot of the specific focus of our planning now is we asked the states to do a census and determine who are the people who are medically compromised. Who, for example, can't be evacuated and need to be sheltered in place. They need to know that and have a plan to make sure they can be sheltered in place. Who are the people who can be moved, but have medical circumstances that make it more challenging? Because they may have oxygen or they may have to have attendants. And then we need to make sure there are in place sufficient contracts for ambulances and other kinds of capabilities to bring those people out. Then we need to consider people who don't have automobiles. Can't drive, either because they don't own an automobile or they're somehow impaired. And we need to make sure, with the states, that the states have adequately provided for some kind of public transportation for those people to leave.
That's where a lot of the focus of planning is. Now, when somebody has an automobile, and they're perfectly healthy, and they don't listen to an evacuation order and they have to come and get rescued, you're taking a first responder who might have to deal with someone who can't help themselves, and you're having that person spend their time on someone who could have helped themselves but they didn't feel like it. I think that's wrong. And that's why we have a lot of emphasis on people who can take care of their own needs attending to those needs. What we want to do for the people who are not fully capable of meeting their needs is make sure we, for example, build into the plans alternative language capabilities for warning, and we did that with the IPAWS system last year. Warning capability for the hearing-impaired. People can sign up if they want a text message.
And so we built this system. It's out there. It can be contracted for. What we want to do is urge the states. Ultimately we'd like every state to do this. But we certainly want to urge the states to do that. Some have, some have contracted for part of it. We're trying to encourage them in every way possible, because the better and the more complete the warning system is, the more readily people will help themselves. And the more people help themselves, the less there will be for the first responders to have to do in that initial period after a storm hits.
Mr. Paulison: A couple other things, also, is dealing with people who simply, absolutely cannot take care of themselves. What we saw during Katrina. Nursing homes that did not evacuate, and we had people that lost their lives because of that. So we sat down with Louisiana to make sure that there were very clear plans. Every nursing home had to have a plan in place on how you were going to evacuate people, who was going to do the evacuation, how they were going to get transported, and where they were going to go. I mean, right down to the very details of that, to make sure that there was a plan in place to do that. And that was part of our gap analysis, also, for all the states to look at those types of things. Dealing with people that need to be - cannot move. Like you said, didn't have vehicles. Last year, when Hurricane Dean was moving into Texas, a Category 5 hurricane. All along the Rio Grande River, from Brownsville on up, there's about 400,000 people called Colonias. And these are people that are living in substandard housing they pretty much built themselves out of scrap material. Stuff you and I would call - would be throwing away, they'd call building materials. And no transportation. And about 150,000 of those were directly in harm's way of a Category 5 storm. It would have made Katrina pale compared to the loss of life we would have had.
We worked with the state of Texas, moving in literally thousands of buses with bus drivers, hundreds of ambulances, urban search and rescue teams, all before the storm hit. Now, the storm went the other way, but we were not going to let another Katrina happen.
So there were some people that could not take care of themselves, did not have modes of transportation. And we moved very quickly to make sure we had things in place to take care of those.
Also, the Secretary talked about prescriptive mission assignments. We now have over 200 prescriptive mission assignments with over 30 different federal agencies, where before we had a couple dozen with one or two agencies. And what that allowed us to do was to mission assign the Department of Defense to use large aircraft that are equipped to transport people who are invalid, and have those in place ready to go if we had to evacuate people our of nursing homes or people out of homes that were bedridden at home.
So those are the things that we're talking about, we've put in place. Again, working with the state. The federal government can't do it by itself. It all falls down to the state and local governments, but we're making sure they've got the resources, they've got the planning capability where they can have these in place to move people out of harm's way.
So that's kind of where we're focusing on that. Again, making sure that we work with the states. Making sure they have planning capabilities; and in fact, what we just did this last grant cycle, we made the states set aside 25 percent of their EMPG grants for planning and forced them to do that. So - because that was one of the gaps we saw as we did our gap analysis, that there was a lack of rock-solid planning out there. So now we're forcing them to do and giving them the money to do it.
Question: Is there also some sort of training or standards that are given in terms of planning? For example, you could give them the money and say plan and they may have a totally different idea of what a quality plan looks like.
Mr. Paulison: Part of that is also helping them through that process and working, having the regional directors working with them to make sure that they know how to put those plans together. We review the plans, and we're developing what we call an engaged partnership, where we want to be right there by their side. And some of you heard me say this before, that we have set up in the past a system of what I call a sequential failure. We've done it for 30 years. We wait for the local government to become overwhelmed before the state steps in. We wait for the state to become overwhelmed before the federal government steps in. That doesn't work. We saw that in Katrina. It's too late. You're chasing the storm down the street, and you never get in front of it.
So we're moving in early. That created some issues for the states that quite frankly, several state emergency managers thought that because of a knee-jerk reaction from Katrina, the federal government was now going to come in and take over the disaster. And it took a while to get over that. And now that we've gotten over that they recognize we truly do want to be a partner, and we want to be there by their side. So if there's a gap in the system, wherever it is, somebody can fill it. Either the local, state, or the federal government can fill the gap. And it's been working well in the smaller disasters, and I have no reason not to believe it's not going to work on a larger event, like a hurricane.
Question: Thank you for giving us a sense of lessons that you have learned and I know implemented since Katrina. And as part of that engaged partnership, I imagine the public is there, as well. And I wanted to get a sense of whether - where you think the citizenry is, post-Katrina. Have the lessons been learned? Have they been learned in some ways? Are there - as we go on - as far as general preparedness?
Mr. Paulison: You're talking for the public itself?
Question: For the public itself, and where you are. And if I could just extend it - I know you have eight months left, so I don't want to look too much in the future, but what are your suggestions and what will you do in the next eight months and what are your suggestions for the - whatever administration comes in to get to that culture of preparedness that you both speak about and to instill preparedness as a responsibility? Are there lessons that you - there's a new administration coming in with an opportunity to kind of re-introduce it, but you do it?
Mr. Paulison: That's a tough question to answer because I don't know what the public is going to do. I know what I saw in Hurricane Wilma, which went over the top of my house. I saw tens of thousands of able bodied people lined up for MRE's, a bag of ice and a couple bottles of water. And that's really stressed the system to the point that it cause a lot of problems at the state level and the local level. That should not have happened.
Secretary Chertoff: This was when the grocery stores were open.
Mr. Paulison: Yeah. Exactly. And there was tap water in Dade County. So that really sent a message to me that we're not - I say we, including you guys, are not getting the message out. After Hurricane Andrew, we saw a tremendous amount of preparedness on the local public side. If a hurricane even came off the coast of Africa people run to Home Depot, they run to Wal-Mart, run to the grocery store. But then as we got further and further away from that storm, we saw less and less of that. So I'm hoping that what we saw in Katrina and the fact that we are really pushing very hard. Your article that you wrote is one of those things that people read that hopefully and will get - eventually just work our way back to that.
Secretary Chertoff: Another test is whether the people obey evacuation orders. I mean, I remember even after Katrina. I think it was Wilma. Only a certain percentage of people on the Keys evacuated. You know, some people are just convinced they're going to ride it out. And we didn't have any real false alarms in the past seasons, but if we have a significant hurricane headed for the coast this season it's going to test whether people are willing to obey those orders.
Question: And just to push up, and I don't know if you feel comfortable addressing it, but with a new administration, Republican, Democrat, Independent, whatever, it comes in and has a new chance, in a sense, to reintroduce themselves, but to - is there thoughts that you might suggest if you had been able to look at this tabula rasa when you came in directly after or new --
Secretary Chertoff: Well, you know, I think we tried to expand the Ready program, the Ready campaign, the business campaign, the private campaign. Something I would like that we didn't do is we introduced this concept in the schools, and I'd like to see - I don't know that there's a new initiative that's out there to be launched, but I do think a consistency of message, and particularly driving this into the schools, you know. I tell you what's fascinating. If you look at like this whole global warming thing. At some point, it captured the imagination of somebody and it became a big media thing. And then all of a sudden, every kid was coming home with information about global warming. And I wish we could get that media attentiveness in the area of preparedness, so that kids come - because this - actually, this is an area where it could make a difference if everybody had the plans and the kit and everything. You could actually see every individual could make a difference. So I would like to see that - someone pick up and cajole the media on this issue, because I think that would be a very big step forward.
Mr. Paulison: And there's a couple groups out there that are - I remember we did the "Learn not to Burn" program, and every kid came home with a homework assignment to draw a fire plan, how do you get out of the house, and where you're going to meet once you get out of your house, and is mommy or daddy going to check the smoke detector, make sure it's working. And that's been a tremendously successful program. We've had case after case where the fire department has showed up and the family is outside and it was just last school term that their six year old brought that homework assignment. And I know Home Safety Council, some others - maybe we should do something like that. Because once you get to the schoolchildren, and they have to take a homework assignment home, and ok, what do I have? Do I have three day supply of food and water in my house, you know. Do we have a plan? What's going to happen if I'm in school and there's an evacuation notice, whether the adults believe it or not.
Secretary Chertoff: I will say after 9/11 there was some of this. Like in this area, because of the experience that we had with 9/11 where kids - the parents, in some cases didn't come home. In other cases people were stranded. Then we had the sniper. There was a real bump up in school preparedness, and everybody had a plan about notifying parents and keeping kids sheltered in place. So that did cause a spike up in preparedness. And I suspect there's been some increase in preparedness in general sense all these events, but we haven't had anything really recently. Now you could look at what's going on in China and Myanmar and say, by the grace of God, it could happen here, and the answer has got to be to prepare yourself. But you really have to - it's almost a marketing issue.
Question: First of all, compliments to the Ready team. Downtown D.C. has Ready ads I think at every bus stop, including - I've seen at least 10 of the regular Ready ads, so they are out. Compliments to them. And to the preparedness folks in FEMA. I came from the Stakeholder Forum. You had a really quite full house, and it was interesting to see the diversity of companies and the broad spectrum and everything from Anheuser-Busch to BENS (Business Executives for National Security). So that was quite good. And there obviously - there's been a lot of forward leaning by that particular portion within FEMA. And you brought up the logistics folks in your comments. Obviously Katrina uncovered a lot of logistical gaps --
Mr. Paulison: That's an understatement.
Question: Well, let's be diplomatic. Again, there's gaps, and you guys have obviously streamlined the organization chart to make it a direct report to you. You've hired an SES. You've done the executive program with the UPS Exec. You've done those particular things, but it seems the logistics office is the one portion of FEMA that isn't seeming to be leaning forward as far as its engagement of public/private sector on regs. And it's almost a tale of two FEMAs here, that you guys are being very aggressive on this but when it comes to requirements, collection or engaging of private sector folks, the logistics branch - I know from companies that either I work with or that talk to me either can't get meetings, or they won't sit down. I guess I'm concerned about should we have the confidence in the logistics folks that I think people are certainly having within what is being done with the preparedness and NRF and all of that. But it just seems that the logistics folks aren't being as proactive as I think your other portions of your agency are.
Mr. Paulison: Part of it is - and they are, in some ways. One of the examples was we had a flood in Nevada. And our water supply is in Moffett Field, California. And instead of shipping water all the way across - halfway across the country, we contacted Wal-Mart and had them ship water from the next town over with their drivers and their trucks and delivered it and distributed and everything else. So we are doing that. We have to be careful with some of it. Part of the issue is everything we do has to be competitive. And I'm a firm believer in not using sole-source bids, or - you don't want to give somebody a leg up. I mean, I've already got FedEx complaining why didn't we use them instead of UPS? That's all on the Executive. So we're going into this kind of carefully. We are doing the business things like we did today, and we had a workshop not too recently with the private sector also. How do we get them more involved? And we're trying to use the Business Council and other groups, instead of using individual companies and giving them a seat inside the joint field offices set-up. So they can have their fingers out into the private sector, more tap and dip.
Secretary Chertoff: There's also this aid matrix.
Mr. Paulison: The aid matrix is a donation system where when donations do come in, there's a central - it's computer system. A central place where everything is located and we know where it needs to go. We know where the gaps are. And so that'll help for private companies wanting to donate supplies and things. The other thing we're doing is instead of FEMA just handling FEMA logistics, it's going to be the logistics coordinator for the entire federal government, including the Red Cross. Where we know where all of those supplies are, and where they are out there. Somehow we have to tap the private sector into that. Greensboro, Kansas, we ended up - we sent a lot of stuff there. So did the Red Cross. So did Veterans' Administration. And we duplicated. We had so much stuff they didn't know what to do with it.
And we got together - I got together with the Red Cross president, who at that time was Mark Everson, and said we can't do this anymore. We've got to do a better job of whoever has the closest stuff, that's where it'll go. When we had the wildfires in California, I got a call from the Red Cross. They got a request for 10,000 cots, and they needed them that night. And theirs were way on the other side of the country. And so they called me and said, "Can you provide the cots?" I said, "Sure. Ours is in Moffett Field." But then I thought, why would we do that? We'll get a hold of the military. There's two military bases right there, and within four hours we had 10,000 cots at Qualcomm Stadium. And that has never happened before. So it's a matter of knowing where all the resources are at least at the federal and non-profit side of it, and be able to tap into those right away. What we need to do is, like I said, is we're working to - how do we get the private sector in there without stepping across that line of giving one company a leg up over another when it comes to doing business with the government.
Question: When it comes to the requirements or what are needed for an area, obviously, you know - Southern California with its fires and earthquakes and just about everything else, is it better to work on that on a literally region by region basis? Deal with the folks in Region 10? I mean, their needs are certainly going to be different than what Region 2 in New York might be. Is it better for the public and private sector companies, the organizations that are in that area? Should they work that directly with the FEMA Region rather than trying to come up from a Headquarters?
Mr. Paulison: Probably at least for the sake that we know whether - where the resources are. Because nobody knows a town better than the people who live there, and nobody knows the state better than the people who live there, and nobody knows the regions better than the people who work in that region. So probably the answer would be yes as far as - at least knowing where the supplies are. What I can't have is a food fight over supplies from one region to another. So we have to control that centrally. I'm trying to decentralize almost everything I can in FEMA. That's why you see us putting all those people we're hiring - 80% of them are going out to the regions. We have literally doubled the size of this organization in two years. The Secretary's been in tremendous support of that, and the President and Congress to give us the money to do that. And - but most of those are going out into the regions. But logistics almost has to be controlled other than that. During Hurricane Andrew - it has to be controlled centrally. Otherwise the logistics don't necessarily go to where the priorities are if you let it - if it's done out on the regions there.
Question: You mentioned work with the state of Louisiana a couple times here as far as helping them, dealing with the nursing homes, etc. Obviously they bore a significant brunt of that, and you can sort of look at the difference between Mississippi and Louisiana. Do you ever see a time when these states will sort of graduate from these conditions of needing all this extra help? I mean, is there sort of a - not there's a solid time table that, you know, "we expect that you graduate in two or three years here."
Secretary Chertoff: I could say that they pretty much have graduated. I mean, I think in terms of Mississippi - we've done regional planning this year but I think that Mississippi, we don't - they plan. MEMA does its plans. We work with them but we don't baby-sit them. And I think this year Louisiana really has done a lot more on it's own. They had to build on the prior base of work that had been done but I think they've gone out. They've revalidated or they're in the process of revalidating their census of vulnerable communities. They've gone out and revalidated the shelter, in-state shelter capability. We've helped to some extent when it comes to finding regional backups, because we recognize that the physical configuration of New Orleans created a launch. Created a certain extra vulnerability to flooding, but I would say they're well on their way to graduating. There's much less hand-holding this year than there was in prior years.
Mr. Paulison: We're not putting busses down there anymore. They have their own bus contract. They have their own logistics supply. It's not enough, so we're going to supplement it, but they didn't have anything. So their shelter space, they don't have enough space inside the state, but they've gone out and have agreements with 11 or 12 other states who are willing to take evacuees out of New Orleans into their shelters. So they're doing a lot. We're seeing a lot of change. There's been a change of a lot of the - local Parish Presidents changed over and they've got some good, solid business people who are now running those Parishes. I see a huge difference between where Louisiana was two or three years ago and where they are today. Because they recognize - they're accepting the fact that they have weaknesses in their system instead of just - well, let me just say they accepted a fact that they had a weaknesses and they're working to fix them.
Question: Okay. I'm going to throw one more if I can. You mentioned about with the shelters, and providing the IPAWS capabilities and the things that are being done with pets, etcetera. One of the things I know during my deployment that became an issue was - this was one of the things that you were shocked at because it was something you forgot was dealing with persons when you have a mass shelter that may be sexual predators. People that have been convicted of those types of things. That was a real hot button issue. How is that issue been defused or been dealt with when we're dealing with shelters and you're creating emergency shelters literally almost at a moments notice as far as screening people and addressing those issues?
Mr. Paulison: Working with - doing agreements with DOJ of how we allow - we have privacy issues obviously we have to deal with. And those are federal laws that we have to deal with. But allowing DOJ to have access to certain parts of that where they can check for people who are sexual predators or felons or things like that without violating the privacy laws of everybody in the whole group. So it's - I don't want to get into a lot of the details of how we're doing that, but the fact is we're much more comfortable that we can give law enforcements the information they need than what happened in Katrina. It was a big issue. No question about it. A big issue. And we were trying to make sure we could give everything we could to law enforcement without violating the federal laws for privacy that we all hold near and dear to our hearts. And we've been able to do some of that, so I'm comfortable we're not going to have those types of people in the shelters.
It's also providing the right type of security in shelters. Planning ahead. Now we know where the shelters are. We know where you're going to go if you're evacuated, if we evacuate you - we as an emergency management system. We know how you're going to get there and what shelter you're going to go to and we know that that shelter is going to have security and it's going to have the food and water and all the things to take care of you.
So it's a much different system. We didn't even have a registry of all the shelters before. And now, working with the Red Cross, we have that. And so we have some 35,000 shelters that are identified. Now, we can't keep up with every little church and stuff like that who opens to doors up, but for the most part we have a much better handle on the sheltering system in the country than we did in the past. And make sure that they're going to be - the Red Cross has gone out and actually inspected them, making sure the structures are sound, they meet all the requirements for evacuation shelter so you're not putting people in harms way after taking them out of harms way. And again, having the right amount of security there is a big issue to stop - if you did have a bad person in there, having the right security to stop anything from happening.
Question: Quick follow up on that. Private sector engagement part. You had described this important relationship as almost like a supply chain, where you've got assets all over the place, just-in-time kind of necessity in the event of a crises. You, for example, contacted Wal-Mart or found the cots at the base where they happened to be in proximity to where you needed them. Could you say a little more about the how of that? How did you decide to call Wal-Mart on that night? Or how did you notice the cots in this place? Is the private sector part of these prescriptive assignments process?
Mr. Paulison: No, they are not. Prescriptive mission assignments are strictly what we by law can mission assign over federal agencies. But what we do have in place is a lot of contracts that we didn't have before. You saw some of the contracts that we wrote during the middle of Katrina. They didn't serve any of us well except the contractor. So now we have those in place ahead of time.
And so we're negotiating from a position of strength as opposed to the other way around. So we have a lot of those things already in place. So it's just a matter of - we have contracts who are - we're using what we call a 3PL - third party logistics. We are going to have our stockpiles of food, water, ice, tarp - not ice. Excuse me. Not ice. Food, water, tarps, cots, blankets, all the things that we think we need to - that they're going to need during a disaster. But at the same time we have contracts in place to continue that supply chain going. So it's a combination of what we have, what we have the defense logistics agency - they have 3 million MRE's that they hold for us that they rotate through their stocks. So we have access to that at any time. We have 9 million of our own that we have out around this country. We have the same type of thing for the water supplies. So we have the initial trench of food and water and supplies that go out there. At the same time, we have contracts in place to back that up with a supply chain, and ability to track it. So it's a combination of our own organic resources and of third party logistics. I'll follow in behind that.
Question: It's almost like the private sector is involved in their own version of a prescriptive mission assignment by way of these contracts?
Mr. Paulison: That is correct. We can't call them prescriptive missions.
Question: Two public education questions. I ask both those as a blogger and also as a CERT member in New York in which our main job is to educate the citizenry. And a couple things that I'm curious whether you think we can get to as far as educating the public, engaging the public. One is in some ways migrating or expanding preparedness, or the conversation at least, the free and easy conversation, beyond storm and natural disasters into man-made terrorism. To be able to talk about what was talked about at the Senate hearing about the good things that could actually be done in an explosion that we should know, but are difficult to have an open discussion about. I want to put - go ahead.
Secretary Chertoff: I think that's - of course, the immediate issue we're focused on is hurricane season, and the basics. You always want to have food, water, radio, meds, etcetera. But you're right. There's a broader discussion. We talked about, for example, a pandemic flu or some kind of biological attack. Do people know where to go to get some basic information? We've discussed the possibility of encouraging and making available to people certain medicines and counter-measures that would be applicable in the event of an attack.
Now, to make that happen a couple of things would have to occur. First, we'd have to be confident that the public would properly use it, would safeguard it until it's required to be used, wouldn't lose it or cannibalize it. Second, we'd have to confront what is a cultural bias on the part of the medical establishment against people self-medicating. You know, they want you to always come and see a doctor. That makes perfect sense, but if you've got a city the size of New York and you were worried about anthrax and you need to get people antibiotics, you're not going to get 7 million people to be seen by doctors in 24 hours. It's not going to happen. And so we would have to have this discussion out there. No doubt there would have to be a lot of lawyers in there making sure no one's going to be held liable. I think these are all important discussions to have. I think later this year we're going to try to move the discussion beyond the basics into some of the area like medical countermeasures and things like that. But there is one thing we're going to have to tackle, which is the hardest part, which goes back to my predecessor, who was ridiculed because of this idea that somehow talking about duct-tape and things like this was a big joke. If the perception is that it's a joke to talk about preparedness, we're in big trouble. I guarantee it won't be a joke when something happens. That will not be funny.
So part of this is we've got to find a way to acculturate ourselves to the idea that talking about things that may be remote possibilities isn't fear-mongering. I got, like all of you probably - I got polio vaccine when I was little. I don't think it was likely I was going to get polio, but it was understood that public health - you tried to vaccinate as many people as possible. So this ability to have a serious discussion above and beyond the basics, I think that's the key to moving this forward.
Question: The second thing I was going to ask you, and you just touched this, the discussion on risk. And how do you educate the public about risk and what they - can you do it?
Secretary Chertoff: Right. And how do you say to people, let's say get a med kit. Get these kinds of things. It doesn't mean that we're afraid of an attack next week. What it does mean is that there are a series of things that could happen that would require you to use this. Acquire it, put it in a safe place, leave it alone. Now, it doesn't strike me that that's a bizarre thing to do. If you go to other places in the world - Switzerland, Israel, it's part of the culture of those countries that people are used to having certain things on hand for an emergency. Part of the reason they do that, to be honest with you, is because those tend to be countries with universal service. So everybody's trained and you're used to bringing your firearms home. You have to have them because you're on reserve duty. And so it's accepted in part of the culture.
We don't have that culture. And a question that's been debated to some degree is whether a culture of national service - not just military service, but national service - would have as a useful byproduct training people. I think the more familiar people became with the need to have some basic understanding of how to handle yourself in an emergency, the less forbidding it would seem and the less culturally antagonistic people would be to this discussion. So this, to come back to your earlier point, I think maybe is a good new initiative for a next administration to tackle. I think if you look at people in their 20's now, there's a lot of debate about what that generation is thinking. I think that they actually are pretty public spirited. They're interested in current affairs. They seem to be interested in all kinds of public things going on overseas - aid to china and whatever. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to harness that and find a way to get the schools to harness that as they do now with recycling programs and other things.
So how do you train people to deal with an emergency? How do you train people to help other people in an emergency? You know, 21st century networking is about the power of the network. How do you harness text messaging, cell phones, internet? We've done some things with Ready to try to do that, but maybe - I wish some of the guys in Hollywood who are focused on some of these other things would actually pay a little bit of attention to this. We could maybe get a real boost.
Question: One quick follow-up. You mentioned later in the year. Can you give us a sense of what that might take and how that might go --
Secretary Chertoff: I'd like to see us by the fall have some kind of a proposal to make. It may have to begin with something we do internally in the department. I know the first responders are interested in getting information about this. We're discussing now what ought our approach to be to this idea of people preparing medical supplies for themselves. They probably have to go to the doctor and get a prescription, but getting this set up in advance. Could we prescribe kind of a set of counter-measures that everybody ought to have as their basic counter measures? And I've got a list of things that I want to try to get done or at least out on the table before I leave and this is one of them.
Question: Does the department and FEMA have the mechanisms to allow you to build the partnerships to, say, do the medical that you were talking about? I mean, could this be DHS and the American Medical Association coming up with those types of things?
Secretary Chertoff: It would certainly be with HHS, because any medical recommendation we make is going to be done - they're going to take the lead on. Once you - then you get into other issues. How do you make it available? And what is the role of the medical community? And I agree at the point at which this would be offered at publicly, you'd need to engage all of the medical stakeholders. I think we've first got to make a determination about just in terms of first responders and in terms of our own operators. Is this something we're prepared to offer? And it should be offered on a government basis. It should be encouraged on a government basis. And then, more broadly, what should the role of the federal government be. Should it be to encourage it, should it be to subsidize it? I don't want to suggest we have answers to these questions, and they may not all be fully answered this year. I do want to get this concept out before we leave, though, because I think it's important. It's part of this debate. Now I'm going to tell you right now here's what I'm going to hear: fear-mongering. Oh, you're fear-mongering.
And I feel - look, here's the bottom line: If people who accuse us of fear-mongering think - here's the - pretend that there's nothing bad out there. They'll never be a disaster. They'll never be an illness. It's just going to be wonderful. If they think that's a reasonable adult approach then make that case. Go to the American people and say nothing bad is ever going to happen. Don't trouble your pretty heads about it. Just dream wonderful dreams. I think the public actually understands that a rational discussion about threats is empowering them to take charge of their lives. You know, when someone says buckle up they don't go fear-mongering, fear-mongering they're going to be in an automobile accident. They take it as irrational when people get flu shots. All of these things are reasonable responses. To me, in the end what this is about is empowering people to take charge of their lives. Those who don't believe in that who believe, no, no, let the government take care of everything; don't trouble your heads with it. That's a different model. I disagree with that model. But I certainly don't think our model is fear-mongering. I think our model is empowering.
Moderator: We'll take two more questions.
Question: The House Homeland Security Committee has devoted its hearings to the subject of resilience and has had a number of hearings so far. Would you have a comment - I don't think you've testified or were intending to testify on this - the department has offered some comments on resilience being either one of two things: part and parcel the strategy as it already is or actually a distraction from what's more important, and that is focusing on prevention and emergency response.
Secretary Chertoff: Resilience is part of the strategy because resilience is part of response and what resilience means - let's go back to having the food and water. Having the food and water, having the capability to sustain yourself until things get better, that is resilience. Backing up your records on a back-up server is resilience. Having the capability to replace power lines that are down or having a back-up generator, that's resilience. That is something that is at the core of what we think is an appropriate response. I remember a couple of years ago in the latter of 2006 I wrote - the Secretary of Energy and I wrote the CEOs of the various oil companies and said to them you really have the responsibility to make sure that your distributors, your franchisees have generators at the gas stations so when the power goes down you can start up the gas pumps, fill up the trucks so the workers can go to the power plants so they can start the power up again. So we have always viewed resiliency as an important part of the strategy. That doesn't mean you don't try to prevent. It just means that you recognize that 100 percent prevention is not something that you can count on.
Question: Can I come back on the IPAWS issue where you talk about reaching out to the governors and providing them a system by which they could reach the entirety of the populations of their states. What would be your metrics for success, or what are the metrics that you're trying to use to convince governors to become part of what will become a nationwide network to take this in? Because you're dealing with some states that obviously some may have more elderly, they may have more deaf, whatever that condition might be. What are going to be the metrics that you use to convince those governors to buy into this type of system and obviously you're making the grant dollars available and flexibility so they can apply for those monies.
Secretary Chertoff: This is really - this is a core government responsibility. We're not asking states to go out and experiment and devising their own system. We're saying we got this. The system works. We've tested it. It's available. I think depending on the nature of the state and exactly how fully configured the system you buy is, it's 2 to $3 million per year. It's not a lot of money. And warning, anybody will tell you is the key. If you get - the more people who are warned and take steps in advance the better off you are in response. I can't see a reason why a governor wouldn't sign up for this to be honest with you. And not to sign up for this would be as if to say that's the federal government's responsibility. Let them do it. And I don't think anybody responsible is going to play a show game with the responsibility for making some people evacuate. The law lodges the responsibility for evacuation and warning at the state and local level. We have the ability to urge them to do it but at the federal, we're limited legally about our ability to mandate this. We've created the tool, or we've piloted or tested the tool. I think it's just a question of recognizing it and signing up for it. So I don't know that there's a metric. I think it speaks for itself to be honest. I don't know why you wouldn't do this.
Mr. Paulison: I don't know why a governor would not want to be able to warn everybody in the state if there was something bad happening. Just last week we had a tornado that went through Pitcher, Oklahoma and into Seneca, Missouri. I think it was almost half of the people killed were killed in their cars because they weren't at home. Even if they had been, it wouldn't have helped them but if there was a warning system out there that could access your Blackberry, your cell phone, or your car radio, or satellite radio which everybody listens to now. So somebody could have activated that and said there's a tornado; get out of your car.
Secretary Chertoff: Whereas in Jackson, Tennessee they actually did get a lot of warning out there. There's a school there, Union College, and they had a terrific response, people protecting themselves. That's a huge part of doing this response early warning.
Moderator: Thank you for your time.
###
This page was last reviewed/modified on May 20, 2008.
