Remarks by Secretary of Homeland Security at the National Convention of the American Red Cross

Release Date: 05/12/06 00:00:00

Washington, D.C.
National Convention of the American Red Cross
May 12, 2006

Secretary Chertoff:  Chris, thank you for that kind introduction. I want to thank Chairman Bonnie McElveen- Hunter for greeting me, and also for doing a marvelous job at the gala celebration last night, I think.

We all had a little bit of a rough year last year. There were unprecedented disasters, and of course, we've all gone through a painstaking process of looking back and trying to learn some lessons about what we can do better. But what I think Bonnie said, which was very important for all of us to hear, is that there were many, many fine things done by the Red Cross and its volunteers last year, and we ought to be grateful and we ought to applaud them for that really excellent job.  

It's an honor for me to be here today in front of this intimate little group in what may be the largest room I've ever been in in my entire life. And it was interesting for me yesterday to reflect back on the fact that this is a 125-year-old organization, one that has helped our nation through some of the most difficult challenges -- whether they be world wars, or the attacks on 9/11, or health crises -- and an organization which is very much on the front lines with the challenges we face today.

During Katrina, which was an unprecedented storm, impacting an area roughly the size of Great Britain, causing the largest mass migration in American history, besides the Dust Bowl -- except the Dust Bowl took place over a period of ten years, and this took place over a period of less than ten days -- during Katrina, the Red Cross overcame almost unbelievable obstacles to ensure that the millions of people who had to evacuate or who remained but were suffering received the food, shelter and care they so badly needed. And what's even more remarkable is that the relief effort would not have been possible without the support and dedication of thousands of individual volunteers and staff across the country, including volunteers who themselves were displaced or suffering because of the storms.

So on behalf of the Department, I want to thank each of you for the work you do responding to all kinds of disasters, large and small, and for the ongoing partnership you have with the Department of Homeland Security, a partnership which we value a great deal.

The fact of the matter is, the key to all effective emergency management is partnership, it's working together. And the Red Cross has long been engaged with us in building the network of partnerships we need to deal with all kinds of disasters. You were instrumental working with us in developing and implementing the National Incident Management System and the National Response Plan.

During many disasters across the country, you worked with FEMA and other federal agencies inside DHS and outside DHS to provide mass care, housing and human services. You've helped us encourage individuals and families to become prepared through Ready and Ready kits, including our websites and promotional materials. You co-chaired National Preparedness Month with our Ready campaign. Together, we engaged over 190 national organizations and all 56 states and territories to sound a national call to action, for the public to take steps to prepare themselves, their families, businesses, and their communities for an emergency.

You're part of our Citizen Corps program, which is helping individuals and communities train and prepare at the grassroots level. In fact, during Katrina, Citizens Corps councils and other programs worked with the Red Cross to recruit more than 40,000 volunteers to staff local shelters. And of course, you've always been an important element of our terrorism drills and exercises in the TOPOFF series.

Now we have a hurricane season coming up upon us in less than a month, and of course, we don't know what other hazards, natural or manmade, we have in store for us during this year. So we haven't lost any time at all during the past year, having both of our organizations work together to take significant steps to improve our ability to respond to disasters and to be coordinated when we do so.

As part of the lessons learned from Katrina, the Red Cross has increased stockpiles of supplies, upgraded its information technology, and expanded its community outreach. And at the Department of Homeland Security, we've also made changes -- changes to boost our capabilities, including integrating non-governmental organizations into our planning, our training and our exercises.

There are three particular things we're focusing on as we approach June 1. First, we're making a careful and honest assessment with our state and local partners about what the level of state and local preparedness is. Second, we're working to make our own federal coordination and federal resources better than they were last year, and that includes retooling FEMA to get it into the 21st century. And third, and equally important, we are encouraging individuals to get prepared and do what they have to do. And let me talk a little bit about what we're doing in each of these respects.

The President directed us last fall to go out and review catastrophic planning in all 50 states and the 75 largest urban areas. We completed stage one of the evaluation in February, and we will complete stage two on time by June 1 of this year. And we've been working closely, particularly with communities in the Gulf, to explore what their capabilities are, to identify where they lack capability, and to build a coordinated plan to fill that gap.

On the federal level, we've looked at all of FEMA's operations and identified things that did not work as well as they should last year, and we have the process in place to repair and improve those things. What that means, in part, is better logistics tracking capability; better ability to manage and assess individual claims so we can give people the help that they need and the help that they're entitled to; more streamlined ways for dealing with removing debris, which is the way to open the door to allowing community recovery; and perhaps as important as anything, better communication so we know what's going on as quickly as is happens.

Let me give you some idea of what we're doing in terms of just increasing the amount of supplies we have on hand. This year, we're going to have four times as many meals-ready-to-eat in stock as we had before Katrina last year, two-and-a-half times as many trucks of water, four times as many trucks of ice. We're going to be able to sustain a million people for at least seven days, just with the supplies we have in stock, before we have to tap into stores that the Defense Department has or that we order from other manufacturers.

We've created what we call situational awareness teams, teams of trained law enforcement agents drawn from DHS, with modern technology, streaming video and modern communications that we can put into the field to give us eyes on the ground so we get real-time awareness of what the challenges are, and that gives us the ability, of course, to respond.

We've worked more closely with the Department of Defense this year than ever before. We've identified 31 categories of mission, everything from air support in case we need rescues, to medical support, to transportation -- the kinds of missions that might require the Department of Defense to lend a hand. We've scripted out what we're going to need. We've reached an agreement with the Department of Defense, and that's going to make their cooperation with us quicker than it was last year. And we're also doubling our telephone registration capacity to 200,000 a day, and our housing inspections to 20,000 a day.

Now, the fact of the matter is that all the commodities and all the tools are only part of the answer. The other part of the answer is leadership and people. And of course, we're blessed with the fact that FEMA does have some very dedicated and outstanding people. And here I want to say for a moment, FEMA got battered a lot in the public mind last year. And we understand that people in stress have a right to be impatient. They have a right to want to have things happen quickly. And we also have to acknowledge where we fell short. But I do have to say that the people who did the work, even when they didn't have the tools they should have had, really performed above and beyond the call of duty in much the same way that the volunteers did.  

But those people deserve leadership. And so I'm delighted to say that this year going into hurricane season, we are giving the people of FEMA the leadership they deserve to lead them into the hurricane zone and emergency management.

Chief Paulison, who is the President's nominee to head FEMA, has 35 years of experience starting as a ground-level firefighter in Miami-Dade, working himself up to the rank of Chief, senior experience in emergency management at the department.

Vice Admiral Harvey Johnson, who I've designated as the Deputy Director, has over three decades of experience in emergency operations at the United States Coast Guard.

And George Foresman, our Under Secretary of Preparedness, is also a 30-year plus experienced emergency management technician, firefighter and leader in the state of Virginia.

Between these three men we have over one hundred years of hands-on emergency management experience going into this hurricane season. And I think that's going to make a real difference this year.

We're also bringing in Department of Defense planners to work with us regionally in doing the planning together with our state and local partners. We've designated experienced officers to serve as principal federal officers and federal coordinating officers for regions all over the country, and the District of Columbia, in particular, giving us a pre-positioned, experienced team of on-the-ground operations managers who will train with, exercise with, and execute with the state and local leaders in dealing with any crisis.

And of course, very important to you is the fact that we are working with the Red Cross and other NGOs to improve how we register and track victims at our shelters. This means, among other things, creating a national shelter database that will increase information sharing and overall coordination.

The third thing we have to do -- and it's very important -- is we've got to keep sending the message that individuals have to be prepared. We all know and people need to hear that under the best of circumstances you have to expect that it may be 48 to 72 hours before help comes. You've got to have the necessary supplies to make sure you can maintain yourself. You've got to listen to instructions about when to evacuate. Doing this is part of personal responsibility, it's part of the responsibility we owe to our families, and it's also part of a responsibility we owe to our communities.

Look, we understand there are people who can't help themselves. There are people who while they don't have the economic means, or they don't even have the physical means, maybe they're sick or in nursing homes, they're not going to be able to help themselves. And that means we're going to have to step in as first responders and rescue them.

But when we do that, to make the job as easy as possible for the people in the field, those who can help themselves have to take the necessary steps to do so. If we have to take a responder away from rescuing someone who can't help himself because he has to rescue someone who could have helped himself, then I think what we're doing is we're really hurting those in the community most in need.

So I want to say to you that I think it is a civic responsibility and a moral responsibility for able-bodied Americans to get themselves ready to do what they can for themselves so we can help those who can't help themselves.  

Allow me before I close just to speak very briefly about an issue that's bubbled up a little bit recently on Capitol Hill, and this is the proposal that some have made to remove FEMA from DHS and dismantle what we have built as an integrated emergency response team.

All of us agree on the need to strengthen FEMA. The fact of the matter is we are well underway in implementing many of the very practical proposals that everybody is making in Congress about things we need to do -- regional preparedness, experienced leadership, better equipment, and training exercise. But we are now less than a month away from hurricane season. The last thing we need to do is pull apart the team we have built, which includes FEMA, the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration and our law enforcement officers. The last thing we need to do is to distract the people at FEMA from preparing and executing on their very important mission so that they can go back and once again rearrange the furniture and rearrange the boxes and create new organizational structures. The last thing we need to do is to reintroduce the kind of stove piping and barriers between people that we used to have and that we've been trying to correct over the last couple of years.

We have a lot more work to do, but I suggest to you the work we need to do is in the direction of integration and partnership. If there's any lesson we've learned, whether it's looking back on 9/11, or looking back on Katrina, is the answer is never go it alone and do it your own way, the answer is always do it together and do it as a team.  

At the end of the day we know we cannot prepare the nation alone as the federal government, or even as the federal, state and local government combined. We need to work with you, and we need to work with individual communities. So we look forward to continuing the progress we have made so far with the Red Cross in the days and weeks and months ahead, creating a culture of preparedness and putting together a good set of plans for this hurricane season and whatever else nature or evil-doers have in store for us.

I want to thank everybody once again who worked so diligently and under such extraordinary conditions this past year to help those along the Gulf Coast recover from a hurricane season that I hope we'll never see again, but which I think we have to be prepared for in case we do see a repeat.

This conference and the accolades that I've put out there, that everybody else has put out there about the sacrifice and the heroism of last year, this really belongs to you. You are the ones who deserve the praise.

And I can tell you I know that last year for a lot of people meant long days and nights far from home, privation, fear, anxiety and frustration. And I can't promise you that hurricane season this year won't be more of the same type of sacrifice. But I can promise you that your efforts will be appreciated, that what you do is of critical importance, that we rely upon you, and we encourage you to rely upon us, and together we will continue to forge the kind of emergency response and management team which the nation expects, which the nation deserves, and which we will deliver.

Thank you very much.  

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