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Release Date: January 22, 2008
Washington, D.C.
Secretary Chertoff: Thank you, Dennis. And David, thank you for coming to join me here for this announcement of the National Response Framework. I’d also particularly like to thank everybody who is here; a broad representation of all the groups – not all the groups, a large number of the groups – that have contributed to the production of this framework that really spans the entire spectrum of those who have to deal with emergency response: firefighters, emergency managers, law enforcement, governors, mayors – all of whom have a role to play when we have an emergency.
Before I begin to talk about this, I’d like to just get off-topic for a moment and publicly acknowledge my condolences to the family of the deceased Border Patrol Agent Luis Aguilar, who was slain on Saturday, as a result of a deliberate action taken by smugglers who were being pursued, and who decided to take the life of a Border Patrol Agent as they escaped from this country back into Mexico.
I have been in close touch with my counterparts in Mexico. The Mexican authorities are working very closely with us to find, apprehend, and bring to justice the perpetrators of this brutal, heinous act, which was an affront not only to the family, but to the entire country.
Anyway, get back to the National Response Framework, this is the result of a number of years of very hard study, very hard work, and some tough lessons learned, and most important, the result of teamwork at all levels – federal, state, local and the private sector – to produce what I call National Response 3.0. You’ll all recall what the original National Response Plan was promulgated right at the end of 2004. After Katrina, we took those lessons and immediately put them into a revision, which we could call 2.0. But we also took the opportunity to take a step back and look more comprehensively and exhaustively at what our doctrine is with respect to response, and then to put together a framework that would work for everybody who’s involved in the process at all levels of government.
So I would like, first and foremost, to thank everybody who helped create the framework, emphasizing that this is not a federal response framework; it is a national response framework designed to operate at all levels of emergency management, and to deal with the smallest localized disaster, scalable all the way up to a major national catastrophe.
The key to the Framework is that it is a simple, straightforward guide for senior officials and emergency responders so they can plan, prepare for, and respond to all-hazard disasters and emergencies. The Framework lays out a clear understanding of the roles, responsibilities and relationships that are indispensable for effective emergency response. The Framework sets forth a doctrine, the core principles, and the structure through which this nation prepares for and responds to disasters.
Among other things, the NRF outlines those special circumstances where the federal government exercises a larger role in emergency management, including incidents where federal interests are directly involved and catastrophic events, where a state may require significant federal support.
In a nutshell, the National Response Framework boils down the key elements of what it means to have a unified and coordinated response. And the way the framework is written, together with the supporting annexes that are much more detailed planning guides, the National Response Framework is a less bureaucratic and more user-friendly plan that emergency managers and leaders all across the country at every level have themselves worked to create and now can benefit from. It’s also, by the way, written in plain English.
Now, the NRF is built around five core principles. First, engaged partnerships. The framework stresses the need for partnerships at all levels of government and across our society, public and private sector. First and foremost, what this is about is working together, which means planning, training, and exercising before a disaster, and then coming together to execute that plan and that training during and after a disaster – all of which is a way to make sure we’re properly coordinated in a dynamic and dangerous event.
A second fundamental principle of the NRF is tiered response. The National Response framework recognizes that local communities, tribes and states have the primary responsibility for the safety and security of their citizens. This document was not designed to be a top-down document, and response is not designed to be a top-down effort. Rather, the framework emphasizes a bottom-up approach that focuses upon the fact that most incidents are managed locally, that incidents in general should be handled at the most local jurisdictional level possible with a response that is measured to the appropriate need, and that we should be able to scale the planning when the dimensions of a particular disaster exceed the capabilities of a locality.
And that brings us to our third principle. No two disasters are alike, and so all of our capabilities have to be flexible and adaptable to meet the needs of every unique type of event. The NRF was designed to be scalable so that it, or at least elements of the Framework, can be expanded or contracted based on the scope and nature of the incident and the type of the disaster.
Fourth critical principle of the NRF is what we call unity of effort. Successful emergency preparedness and response depends upon a unity of effort, and a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities among all those involved. As such, the National Response Framework leverages on the core principles of the National Incident Management System, which has been around now for a while and is well understood and recognized. That incident management system allows first responders from different jurisdictions and across different disciplines to work together within a common framework.
Finally, unlike past plans, the National Response Framework is always active, and encourages a forward-leaning posture by emphasizing readiness to act. That means preparedness planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, and applying lessons learned every single day. Planning ahead of the disaster is critical to a successful response, and the NRF encourages such coordination. Also, because we’ve abandoned the old Incident of National Significance principle, which was a kind of an on-off switch for federal response, we recognize that the framework is really an ingredient of all of the disaster response we do, and that we need not wait until some formal legalistic threshold is crossed before we put into effect the lessons that we’ve learned and that we are training to and exercising for every single day of the year.
The framework that we’re releasing today, and this is maybe the matter of greatest significance, is the product of extensive engagement and outreach to members of federal, tribal, state and local government, the private sector, NGOs, and individual citizens. We received and reviewed nearly 5,700 comments on our first draft National Response Framework. We worked with stakeholders from all of our major constituencies to put together a final document that reflects their input and their contribution and their concerns – and ultimately has been embraced by everybody.
Over the next several months, we’re going to conduct outreach training, education and exercises across the country because the NRF does not come to be born in one fell swoop. It’s a birthing process that requires real integration across our emergency response, from sea to shining sea, and in Alaska and Hawaii as well.
We have to educate our stakeholders on the framework’s key features. We have to make sure the document is actually used and becomes part of the ordinary routine activities of emergency response preparation. What we are not interested in having is a framework that just sits on a shelf.
We’ve created an online NRF Resource Center, an example – the portal of which is behind me – which is designed so that emergency management practitioners can learn about the plan and also can provide us with additional feedback and suggestions. This is a living document. This is not the final word on national response; it is meant simply to take us to the next level. But we fully anticipate and frankly expect that we will be getting comments of real-life lessons learned which will be embedded in future versions of this as we move forward in the years to come.
We’re pleased to release this important document today, which will make our nation more prepared to answer – handle any kind of disaster. I want to thank everybody here and those you represent for very hard work, and a great deal of concern, to produce what I think is an outstanding document.
And now I’d like to ask Administrator Paulison to step forward and talk a little bit about FEMA’s role in putting the document together.
Administrator Paulison: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I want to publicly thank you for your support, your guidance and direction as we put this document together. And primarily I want to thank the people standing behind us here and alongside of us, and the groups they represent. We had some bumpy starts to begin with, but they stuck with us. And we have put together what I consider an outstanding document that has been a cumulative work for the NRF. We’ve learned a lot of lessons, and like the Secretary said, thousands of comments were received to put it together.
This truly is a national endeavor. It involves all of us. We have people up here from public works. We have people from fire, from police, emergency management, private sector, and our tribes. And we’re going to continue to work with them. We’re going to continue to use them to incorporate the improvements in the future, because with a single plan – with the single plan that we have, we can have systematic improvement of this thing, and not something piecemeal like we’ve done in the past.
Working together – we continue to work together – we’re going to make sure, like the Secretary said, that the National Response Framework is being used by our elected officials, by emergency managers, by police and firefighters, and the private sector – and not sitting on a shelf somewhere, like we’ve seen in the past.
So now we’re going to turn our focus to the implementation. Starting on February 5th, we’re going to begin providing National Response Framework training courses. And by April 11th, I’ve directed staff to have all 24 individual courses out on the website to focus on those key elements to the framework. By starting June 1st, I want all the federal family trained, all the federal responders, and as many first responders and emergency managers out there, ready to go to understand how we’re going to operate in this country before hurricane season.
On top of that, once we get the training done, we’ll start exercises to make sure that people are comfortable with how we’re going to operate, because this truly is a long-term project. This isn’t one shot in the dark. We want to make sure that this is a sound system, and it’s the system that we’re all going to use.
This system that we’re using now, the National Framework, is much broader in scope, has a much wider audience than we’ve had in the past, and a greater focus on partnerships – and I need to emphasize that because it has to be a partnership; it truly does if we’re going to respond together.
The five elements that the Secretary talked about – the engaged partnerships; the tiered response; scalable and flexible operational capabilities; and our unity of effort, the unified command – is strictly important for this thing to be functional.
This NRF uses much clearer terminology. It’s easier to use, and it more clearly defines the roles and responsibility of each of us, including the difference between the principal federal official and the FCO, the Federal Coordinating Officer. And those types of definitions are important if we’re going to operate in a catastrophic event.
No plan will be successful without hard work, and no plan will be successful without teamwork. The people behind me, alongside of me, have committed to that teamwork, and I’m committed to it also because I firmly believe if we work together, we truly will serve the American people much better than we have in the past. Thank you very much.
And I think now the Secretary and I will be glad to take any questions.
Secretary Chertoff: Yes.
Question: I’m just wondering if you could provide some concrete examples of how – like a hurricane – the response to a hurricane under the framework, and then maybe under the previous plan.
Secretary Chertoff: I think the framework makes it very clear, the responses. First of all, it’s going to be initially local and state, but we are going to be able to lean forward much more readily in terms of assistance – pre-positioning assets. We have – now had the opportunity over the last couple of years to work with a lot of the jurisdictions on their individual plans, so we have a better sense of what their game plan is when there is a hurricane or a similar disaster. And I think we’ll – because we’ve had people deployed in the regions, there are pre-existing relationships which we’ll be able to capitalize upon.
The best example of how it’s going to work in practice is if you look at what happened with the wildfires in California last year, where we were able to position ourselves forward much more readily. Our planning and work with the Department of Defense enabled us to bring all of the federal assets to bear, including Interior Department and Agriculture Department, DOD, and DHS. And our relationships with the state of California allowed us to fit in basically seamlessly with their admittedly very highly skilled emergency response system so that we could leverage their capabilities as much as possible.
Yes.
Question: There was tremendous frustration on the part of the private sector during the Katrina response because they felt there was no way to integrate into the federal and state response to that disaster. You’ve mentioned private sector here, but can you be a little bit more specific about how you’re integrating them into the response structure?
Administrator Paulison: Well, one of the groups that are here is the National Public Works Association, that we work with very closely. Any time we respond to a disaster, we have to involve not only the traditional responders like the emergency managers – we’ve got the national emergency managers here, the local emergency managers, but also the non-profits like Red Cross and others. And the private sector, like you said earlier, is one we have not traditionally involved in our response – and now we’re doing it. They were part of the review process for the National Response Plan. They’re part of the system of how we’re going to respond. All of the supplies that we have do come from the private sector, so we need to involve them early.
Al Martinez-Fonts, sitting out here in the audience over here, is our representative to that private sector piece, and was heavily involved in reviewing and writing this National Response Framework. So they are going to be involved. They’re going to be involved very heavily. We saw that recently with the fires in California and in Oklahoma with the ice storms, where the private sector moved in very quickly to assist us.
Question: Does this mean that the National Response Plan failed, or did not work?
Secretary Chertoff: No. What it means is that, as with any other document or plan, it goes through a constant process of retooling and improvement as a consequence of the lessons you learn in real life. I mean, nothing – the first go-round of any plan always winds up, once it faces reality, being the occasion to go back, take a second look, decide what needs to be improved, what needs to be corrected, what’s good and what’s not so good – and I think this is a natural, organic process. And I guarantee you there will be probably another version of the National Response Framework in a few years.
I would expect this to be a constant process of renewal because that’s how you not only keep a document up to date, but that’s how you get the maximum benefit of some of the lessons that you learn from real experiences and real life.
Yes.
Question: How would you sum up how communication and coordination between federal, state and local officials has been improved with this document?
Secretary Chertoff: I’ll let Dave come in too, but let me just say a couple things from my perspective. The first thing about the framework, which I do think is an improvement, is it’s much clearer and it’s much shorter.
And so for people who are, particularly like governors and mayors, political leaders, not full-time professionals, there’s a clear statement and understanding of the appropriate roles and the way people relate to one another. It does build on incident management, the incident management system, which is a system for bringing people together at the table to making sure that you can coordinate across a host of disciplines while recognizing that, of course, each particular discipline has its own chain of command and therefore has its own authorities and responsibilities.
So I think the simplification, the clarity, the firm foundation in the incident management system are all elements which will improve communication. And the key is really to bring people together in a particular location, ideally in person; if not, at least virtually, so that real-time communication can be undertaken.
I don’t know if you have anything more to add, Dave.
Administrator Paulison: No, I think you’re right on target. Two pieces. One is using a unified command system, where you’re working out of one place, sharing information with each other, making sure we know exactly what’s going on, taking those very clear lessons learned from Katrina where information was not shared.
The other is what we call the engaged partnership. What we’re doing right off the bat when we have a disaster is putting people at the state EOC, putting people at the local emergency management center, where we know exactly what’s going on, we know what the needs are.
Even with the tornadoes we just recently had in the South, which did not end up with a federal declaration, we had people at the state emergency management center in several states around the southeast United States to make sure we understood what the needs were and understood what the communications piece were; we could share that information. And we’re back here at headquarters where we could have our supplies ready if we had to roll them.
So it’s a whole new era, a whole new culture, in how FEMA, how Department of Homeland Security is going to respond to disasters. It is going to be a partnership.
Question: Is there any overlap with the infrastructure of the fusion centers?
Secretary Chertoff: No, this is a different issue. Fusion centers are designed to be permanent, in-place locations where intelligence can be shared. In the case of an emergency, you typically set up your joint field office and your unified command where the area of operation is, and you stand it up for the duration of the episode. So those are really two distinct and separate things.
Question: If I could ask another (inaudible). Next week, different documentation required at the border coming in; you’re taking a lot of heat from members of Congress on this and the travel industry and some others. Why make those changes? Why do that now?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, first of all, I made the – the changes were made six months ago, and they were announced six months ago.
Question: But they go into effect.
Secretary Chertoff: Right. Well, they – and the answer is, they have to go into effect at some point. Just to sum up for everybody, we currently have a system as we speak today – and this would, I think, frankly shock a lot of people; certainly surprised me when I learned about it – where people sometimes can enter, cross a border, simply by saying, "I’m an American citizen," and they get waved through. Of course, this is at the same time that the public is demanding that we secure the border, we build fencing between the ports of entry, and it strikes me as a little anomalous to say we’re going to build a fence between the ports of entry, but you could just walk right through the port of entry by saying, "Hi, I’m an American citizen" without being checked.
Another current challenge that we face at the border is, we’ve allowed people to go across our ports of entry using 8,000 kinds of identification, whether it’s baptismal certificates, library cards, students IDs. And that really puts our Border Patrol – border inspectors in an untenable position. Just a couple months ago, the congressional GAO had some scathing words to say about the system, about the need to tighten up on the documentation.
So I don’t think there’s any doubt that we need to go to a system where we at least begin to narrow the kinds of documents we’ll accept and allow people to use documents that at least have a reasonable amount of security, even as I hope we are moving in the direction of ultimately having real document security.
Now, is this going to be a change? Yes. That’s why we announced it six months ago. That’s why we’re working very hard to get the message across. I want to make it clear that we’ve – as we’ve said in the documents we’ve put out, if you don’t have the right documents, it doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be allowed in, but it does mean you’ll be given a warning in the first instance; you may experience some delay while we verify your identity. So we’re prepared to implement this as smoothly as possible.
But you know, at the end of the day, there comes a point that if you’re going to make a change, you have to make it. And when you delay things indefinitely and keep putting them off, the real message the public gets is that you’re not serious about ever making a change, and that only makes it harder down the line.
So I still have ringing in my ears the words of the 9/11 Commission, which talked about the importance of dealing with this. And I hate to say, but this has got – how many years ago is this? I frankly thought the heat I get is why it took so long, and why we’re still not at the end state.
So I think that what we’re doing – we’re going to be mindful of the challenges at the border. I’ve asked the Border Patrol – border inspectors to carefully track delays and to make sure we can put additional people in place if we need them. I recognize that a lot of the problem with delay at the border has to do with infrastructure: not enough bridges, not enough roads. And that’s a different problem, which I certainly think we ought to deal with.
But in the end, if we believe that the 9/11 Commission recommendations were worth paying attention to, if the whole exercise had a point, then it must be that we begin the process of implementing those, even if it means that we’re going to have to adjust ourselves.
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This page was last reviewed/modified on January 22, 2008.