Remarks by the Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff at the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference

Release Date: 03/06/06 00:00:00

Washington, D.C.
National Association of Counties
March 6, 2006

SECRETARY CHERTOFF:   Well, listen, I'm delighted to be here with the Association of County Officials.  This is really -- I think you have the most difficult job in American public life, because you are constantly relating to and interacting with citizens on matters that really touch the most in their personal lives.  Maybe the only job that's more difficult is being a member of the school board.  (Laughter.)  I can tell all the school board members from the knowing laughter.

But I think even though I'm sitting here in Washington and you're coming from all over the country, we have a lot in common, a lot of challenges in common.  And I want to thank Bill Hansell, and I want to thank Colleen for introducing me, and I want to thank Larry Naake, all of whom arranged for me to come here, because I do think it's important that we get to talk about some of the very significant challenges we have going forward.

The fact of the matter is, whether we are dealing with a catastrophe that is manmade or one that is an act of nature, the point of contact in the first instance is always going to be at the local level, in the cities and the counties.  And that means those who are responsible for governing and leading our counties are going to have to be the ones who react first.  And I think our job is to make sure that we are supporting you and helping you to prepare and train and equip yourselves, and, if necessary, to maintain yourselves while helps comes on the way from state and federal government.

The fact is, we face a set of common challenges, and the only way to face those challenges is to do it as partners.

Well, I think the first element of facing a challenge is to prepare for it, and preparing involves a lot of different elements.  It involves planning, it involves building capabilities, it involves training, and it involves exercising.  And only if those elements are in place are you really in a position to deal with both the expected and the unexpected emergencies.

I think we recognized this was a serious component of preparedness early on last year when we really took a look at the Department to try to evaluate where we were.  This is a young department, it's an immature department, its third anniversary only just passed.  And by way of comparison, people sometimes say the Department of Defense took 40 years even to get to the point at which it started to build a unified department.  I've also heard people talk about the Department of Transportation as a department that did not really become a single functioning entity until five years into its lifetime.

And, of course, we're three years into this.  I don't intend to wait 40 years and I don't even intend to wait five years, but I also recognize, and I recognized last summer, that we had a lot left to do.

First thing I wanted to do was make sure we had somebody that was accountable to make sure we got prepared.  And so in July I announced my intention, come October 1, to create a Preparedness Directorate, which would unify all of our preparedness efforts -- our planning, our training, our exercising and our grants -- under a single leader, to make sure that we were conducting preparedness across all hazards and the entire spectrum of dealing with hazards, which include preventing where possible, protecting when necessary, and responding if it comes to that.

And I'm delighted that the President nominated and the Senate confirmed George Foresman -- (applause) -- whom many of you may know.  He was the state homeland security advisor and emergency manager for Virginia, and has 30 years in the business working his way from the ground up.  And with George as leader, we are now really moving forward to the next stage of building the kinds of capabilities and the training and exercising we need to get prepared.

And we have a lot of different things we have to get prepared for.  We have to worry about hurricanes and natural disasters.  And those of you from Gulf Coast counties, let me tell you right now, you know as I do, on June 1, hurricane season begins again.  And the challenges are going to be extraordinary, because not only could we face another storm season like last year's unprecedented season, but we're going to be facing that in the context of cities that are still in the process of rebuilding.  

So we're going to be weakened, in some respects.  We're going to have debris and construction material that people are using to build their houses that may, in fact, become swept up in a hurricane.  We're going to have people still in the process of trying to get themselves situated in their homes when a hurricane may hit.  And that means we have to place special emphasis on preparing for evacuation and emergency activity if a hurricane hits.

Of course, we have the possibility of other natural disasters.  We heard talk about the possibility of earthquakes and levee breaks in California.  We're concerned about the possibility of avian flu, which may never come, may never come as human-to-human transmissible illness, but we -- again, which we have to be mindful of and thinking about.

And then, of course, there's terrorism.  You can't help but look around and see the attacks we had in Jordan, the attack we had in London, Madrid, Israel, other parts of the world, and the repeated efforts by bin Laden and Zawahiri to talk about their desire to continue their war against us without recognizing that terrorism is a very, very real challenge.

So, stage one of how we're going to deal with these things is to have our Preparedness Directorate go out to all the 50 states, all the 75 urban areas, and help you work to make your emergency and evacuation plans better.

Stage one of this process we've completed.  We got self-assessments from all the states.  Stage two is now underway, and I personally will be going down to the Gulf to meet with local leaders as we get closer to this summer to make sure we fully understand what your capabilities are and what we need to be able to step in to plug if we have a hurricane that hits the Gulf this year.

But we've also got a lot of work to do inside the federal government, as well.  We've gone through a reflective and sometimes painful process of looking at things that worked and things that didn't work, with respect to Katrina and Rita last year.  

Some things did work well.  The Coast Guard rescued 33,000 people in Katrina.  That is six times the total number of people that the Coast Guard rescued in the previous year.  Some things didn't work so well.  We were slow sometimes in getting supplies and evacuations, and part of what we have to do is retool FEMA to make it a 21st century organization.

So let me tell you what we have set out to do by June 1, to at least get ourselves to where I think we need to be for this coming hurricane season.  We're going to complete the process of integrating our incident command structure and common operating picture by making sure that both technologically, and, frankly, culturally, we are functioning as a single, united department.

We're going to streamline our efforts to get logistics to the places that need goods and products -- food, water, ice, other emergency supplies that are necessary when we have a disastrous event.  This really means getting the kinds of tools that a lot of private companies have.  Our aim is this next three months to contract out with our shippers to require total visibility to where our assets are using modern GPS and communications, so we can pinpoint in real time exactly where commodities are and how quickly they will get to the place that they need to get to.

We're looking at streamlining the debris removal process to give localities that are afflicted a better range of options in terms of the kinds of contracts they can let out in order to get debris removed.  We know debris removal is an important part of what indicates to a community that it is in the process of rebuilding and reconstructing.  And we know that a lot of what the process of debris removal can do is jump start economies.  So we want to offer the choice of using local contractors, which are in many cases much more efficient, and also prime the pump, in terms of local economies.

We want to streamline our communications processes, building better capabilities we can put in emergency operation centers, and with our own reconnaissance teams so we have better situational awareness.

And, finally, we need to find a way to engage with people who are displaced and who are suffering much more easily and much more quickly using some of the 21st century communications tools which we now have available.

I believe that using these -- taking these steps forward in FEMA will make DHS and FEMA much better partners in dealing with emergencies to come.  At the end of the day, the way to confront catastrophes -- whether they are natural or manmade -- is to work as a partnership.  That means that every stage of the process, we want to work with you, we want to work with your state counterparts, we want to work with the private sector to make sure that we clearly understand what our plans have to be, that we know who's got what capabilities, and that where necessary we can step in and supply capabilities to meet those that can't be met locally or in the state.

At the same time I want to tell you that we have no interest in supplanting local officials as the principals in dealing with crises and emergencies.  We're not here to elbow you aside; we're here to work with you and support you, to stand shoulder-and-shoulder with you as we deal with some of the challenges we confront.

Before I close, let me talk about one particular challenge, and that's the challenge of avian flu.  We don't know whether avian flu will ever become a sustained, human-to-human transmission.  If it doesn't, then we'll all be much luckier and happier than if it does.  But we do know that if it were to happen it would present unique challenges because the consequences wouldn't be limited to a particular geographic area.  They would be spread perhaps over parts of the entire country.   And that means that if we were to confront a public health emergency such as avian flu, an enormous amount of the actual day-to-day responsibility over a long period of time would rest with county health officials, county emergency managers and county officials of all kind.

We need to continue to work with you to elevate your level of preparedness for this challenge.  The President has signed off on a national strategy.  We are currently working on detailed implementation plans for the federal government.  But as I know Secretary Leavitt has made a point of saying in his many visits with local leaders around the country, this is going to be a matter in which local leaders are going to have the critical major role to play, because it's going to be in county hospitals that people turn in either because they are sick or because they're afraid they're sick.  It's going to be counties that are going to have to decide when to open schools and when to close schools.  It's going to be county officials who get questions from worried people.

The only solution to dealing with this kind of challenge is education.  We've got to educate ourselves; we've got to educate the public.  We've got to do it in advance; we've got to do it in a way that's realistic, but not alarming; we've got to assess what it is we're going to need to do; and we have to make sure that our response is appropriate and balanced, neither an under-reaction nor an over-reaction.

So I would encourage you as we move forward in the months to come, along with your many other challenges, to keep yourself tuned into what we are broadcasting with respect to the issue of this potential medical emergency; to consider what we are putting out there that you can disseminate within your own counties to educate your emergency staffs and your public health officials and your hospital staffs; to consider what kind of message you want to send to the public; and to prepare yourselves for the kind of contingencies you may face.

We'll be there to help you.  We'll be out among you, giving you assistance, talking about what kinds of supplies and equipment the federal government can bring to the table.  But it is something we all need to start thinking about now, well in advance.

I want to thank you for coming.  I want to thank you for listening to me.  I've been uniformly impressed as I've gotten out in the Gulf and in other parts of the country talking with county leaders about terrorism and about emergency management.  You do wonderful things and you are really the part of government that touches people most.

We look forward to working with you as we deal with the challenges I've outlined, and heaven knows what else is going to come hit us in the next couple of years.  We have a lot of faith in you, we want to support you, and we look forward to working with you as partners in struggling to protect America against threats that are both Mother Nature's and those of people who want to do us harm.

Thank you.  (Applause.)

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