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Release Date: 05/23/06 00:00:00
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact 202-282-8010
Washington, D.C.
May 23, 2006
Secretary Chertoff: Well, I want to thank you all for coming today. We thought it might be helpful as we approach hurricane season, which is a little bit more than a week off, to provide an overview of some of the steps we've taken over the last six months to strengthen our ability to respond to another major hurricane and to help our state and local counterparts do the same thing.
I'm delighted to introduce Chief Paulison, the Acting Director of FEMA; Under Secretary George Foresman of the Preparedness Directorate at DHS; Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, Paul McHale from the Defense Department, Admiral Tim Keating, the head of NORTHCOM, and General Steven Blum from the National Guard Bureau.
I'm going to ask each of them to talk briefly in a few moments. But before I do, I'd like to make a few general observations, and then we'll be happy to take your questions.
Let me begin by emphasizing one of the foundational principles of emergency management. State and local government has the primary authority and the primary lead in managing a disaster. The reason for that is because state and local government knows the people, knows the situation, knows the geography. And that's the way our system of government works. We want to push the authority down most closely to where the action is.
But the federal government also has an important role to play. We operate in a supporting capacity, unless a state's capabilities are so overwhelmed that additional federal support is needed. That's why over the last few months, a lot of what we've done has been to focus on helping states and major cities prepare for hurricane season. We've worked with them looking at their emergency plans and making very specific recommendations, conducting joint training, regional hurricane preparedness exercises, and working with emergency managers to make sure everybody has a clear idea of their mutual roles and responsibilities.
As part of that process, FEMA conducted a pre-hurricane planning and readiness conference which brought together federal and state disaster community members. The purpose was to discuss new policies and give new guidance and to figure out ways to improve hurricane readiness and response, so that all of us have a better understanding of our expectations and our responsibilities for the 2006 hurricane season.
I've personally been down to the Gulf on several occasions, meeting with governors and emergency managers in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Under Secretary Foresman and Chief Paulison have spent many days down in the Gulf and in other parts of the country working on hurricane preparedness.
For the first time ever, we've predesignated principal federal officers and federal coordinating officers to serve a federal representatives in the regions and to work with their state and local counterparts preparing for whatever comes.
We've also spent a lot of time reviewing the lessons of Katrina and what we can do as a federal government to improve our own ability to respond quickly and effectively. We've integrated many of the recommendations by Congress, the White House and others, including our own Inspector General, and we've made some pretty significant investments in terms of new capabilities, new resources and additional personnel.
We've shared some of that progress with you over the past weeks, including the enhanced capabilities we've given to FEMA in terms of ability to track commodities and supplies, enhanced and speedy victims assistance, better emergency communications, and of course, new, tested and experienced leadership under Chief Paulison and his deputy, Admiral Harvey Johnson, recently retired from the Coast Guard.
Let me give you some interesting statistics. In terms of commodities, basic supplies, food, water, ice, we're going to have four times as many meals ready to eat in stock going into this hurricane season than we had last year facing Katrina. We're going to have four times as many trucks of ice and two-and-a-half times as many trucks of water. We have built a network of supplies that will enable us to sustain one million people for at least seven days.
We have also taken a hard look at the national response plan to see how we can refine and clarify this document before the start of hurricane season, so we can better manage hurricanes and similar events over multiple jurisdictions.
The result of all these efforts is that we're on a much more solid footing this year, and much more prepared as a nation than we've ever been to confront a major hurricane.
Now I want to make something clear. A hurricane is a disaster, and disasters are by their very nature messy and unpredictable. Experience shows that even with the best of planning, we're going to face some unprecedented challenges and some unforeseen events. But if we begin with a good plan, and we have a good plan, we will be in a far better position to coordinate our assistance this year with state and local governments and to get help to those people who need that help the most.
Finally, let me say this. Planning and supplies and government activity are very important. But what's as important, if not more important, is an informed and prepared public.
Each of us as individuals, as family members, as members of communities, have the ability and have the responsibility to get informed, to listen to warnings from officials about what to do when a storm is pending, and to take action to protect ourselves and our families. And for those again who want to get more information about what they can do to prepare themselves, I would like to direct you to www.ready.gov.
And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Chief Paulison to talk about FEMA's preparations. Chief?
Mr. Paulison: Good afternoon. We've gone through with the Secretary a very methodical assessment of what we need to inside of FEMA and inside of Homeland Security to make this year's response much better than it was last year.
My first move was to, quite frankly, look at the staffing and where we need to put the top people. We've brought in several key people around the country already, and I'll mention a few of those.
One, Deputy Harvey Johnson, my new Deputy Director sitting out in the audience. A 25-year veteran, vice admiral in the Coast Guard. A tremendous amount of experience in response and operations, widely regarded as probably one of the brightest that the Coast Guard has produced, and I gladly welcome him aboard as my deputy.
We just replaced the Region 1 director, the Region 1 director up in Maine. We actually took the emergency manager of the state of Maine and asked him to serve with us, taking over Region 1. HE's agreed to do that.
Region 2, a guy named Stephen Kemp. Stephen is a past regional director and years and years of emergency management experience we brought in.
Region 6, Bill Peterson, former chief, fire chief of Plano, Texas. Comes in with a lot of response experience. And also here at staff level, we brought Deidre Lee in, who is widely regarded as one of the best acquisition specialists that the federal government has to offer.
So that's going to help us start, just to start, to make sure we fill some of these slots.
The next thing we want to do is logistics. Obviously, during Hurricane Katrina, a lot of issues with the logistics and getting supplies where they needed to go. The Secretary briefly covered some of it. Let me give you some specifics.
Before Hurricane Katrina, we had 180 truckloads of MREs. This year currently we have 770 truckloads in stock. Water pre-Hurricane Katrina, we had 600 truckloads of water. This year we already have 1,540 truckloads of water in stock. Ice pre-Katrina, we had 430 truckloads of water -- excuse me, of ice -- and now we have over 2,000 truckloads of ice currently in stock.
Along with that, we signed an MOU with the Defense Logistics Agency to provide backup and supplies should those grow short. We have a tremendous amount of supplies.
On top of that, during Katrina, we did not have the ability, simply did not have the ability to track our tractor trailers once they left our warehouses. We've put a very sophisticated global positioning system in place. That will be on every tractor trailer that comes out of our warehouses.
We'll be able to track them real time, live on a map, so we'll no where every vehicle is, and we can pull up each individual commodity by itself. We can say, show us where all the ice trucks are. Show us where all the water trucks are, where all the MRE trucks are, right down the line. So that's going to help us considerably moving down through there.
The next, victim management. We simply were not able to register people. We simply were not able to track them like we should have. And so we're putting plans in place to fix that. We have five portable registration shelters in place that we can take out two people where they are in case they don't have transportation and we can register them right there with cell phones and computers based out of a van.
We're also going to double our registration capacity to over 200,000 a day to make sure that we can track people as they come into the system, and probably, and more importantly, we are working with the Red Cross to pre-identify the shelters that are going to be used so we can pre-position FEMA people in the shelters and register them as they come into the shelters, and so we don't have to track them all over the country like we did following Katrina. This is going to help us significantly.
Situation awareness. We did not have good situation awareness during Hurricane Katrina, and that was the big issue for all of us. So we have systems in place now to pre-position people out there that have not only voice, satellite, but also video capability to beam those videos right back into the Department of Homeland Security headquarters so we can see exactly what's happening.
We should have had a better handle on what was happening on what was happening in the Superdome. We should have had a better handle on what was happening at the Convention Center. We should have had a better handle on what was happening with the levies. But with this new situation awareness team that we're putting out in the field, that is going to help us keep track of exactly what's going on and where the support is needed.
Lastly, I want to talk about mission assignments. One of the big issues and why these people are sitting behind me, is we are pre-prescribing mission assignments for our different agencies around the country. And we have no 31 different mission assignments that will be in place by June 1, and last year we only had 13. That's going to allow us to simply have things in place and people know what they're going to be required to do ahead of time, and we don't have to work those out.
We are working together as a team. That's probably one of the most important things I can say. We are going to have a command system. We are going to use a joint field office as a base of operations. And we are going to be working together to make sure that our upcoming hurricane response, or any disaster response, is the most coordinated and the most structured it's ever been in the history of this federal government.
I thank you very much, and I do want to introduce right now my good friend, who I work with very closely, the Under Secretary for Preparedness, George Foresman.
Mr Foresman: Thank you, Dave. Good afternoon. And I would like to just spend a few moments maybe putting a little perspective on how we're approaching our national preparedness for the upcoming hurricane season.
If I could have my first slide, please.
One of the things that we've had to put in perspective as we've looked at retooling within FEMA, as we've looked at our readiness across the Department of Homeland Security, and frankly, as we looked across the nation in terms of local, state and federal readiness for the upcoming hurricane season, is how do we get the right level of preparation so we can get the right resources to the right place at the right time?
The graphic that we are providing here to you in the lower right-hand corner is a graphic showing the impact of Hurricane Katrina with the impact from the levy break in New Orleans. To its immediate left on the lower side is the impact of Hurricane Katrina without the levy break.
Now the other three slides at the top, Hurricane Camille to your far left, Hurricane Andrew in the blue in the center, and then finally Hurricane Ivan, some of the more notable hurricanes in the history of this country, brings to you the scale and the complexity of the issue that we've been dealing with in the Katrina aftermath.
And it's important for us to understand that as we look at our preparation for the upcoming hurricane season, that area in red represents our capacity that we need to have at the national level: The combined capabilities of local government, state government, and the federal government, to be interoperable, to be integrated, to be synchronized in terms of being able to deal with a hurricane on the scale of the catastrophic size that we saw with Hurricane Katrina.
Next slide, please.
We've also taken the after action reports from Hurricane Katrina, both the after action report that was done by the White House through the Homeland Security Council, the after action report from the House, and the after action report from the Senate. And as we've looked across those after-action reports, they very much underscore the fact that the area that needed the greatest level was emphasis was in our ability to do the front forward thinking planning that is needed to ensure our ability to deal with emergencies and disasters.
The second highest area, the 8 percent area on this pie chart, represents that area where we put operational procedures in place. And the point that I offer to you today, it underscores what Secretary Chertoff said when he announced the second stage review in July of last year, that we have got to do a better job of uniting our entire national effort, local, state and federal, towards a more comprehensive approach to preparedness that allows us to meld together what we do to prevent, deter and to protect and to respond and to recover and mitigate against the full range of hazards and emergencies.
Next slide, please.
And what I'd briefly like to do is run through the 11 primary recommendations in the White House report and provide you all with a quick snapshot update in terms of where we're at.
As Chief Paulison said, one of the key factors that was identified during Hurricane Katrina is the necessity of making sure the key state decisionmakers, state coordinating officers, state emergency management officials, have the ability to co-locate with their federal counterparts: The principal federal official, the federal coordinating officer, as well as the defense coordinating officer in the case of a large federal response, the joint task force commander.
We're in the final stages of our changes to the national response plan, and we will ensure a co-location of federal decisionmakers with their state counterparts to ensure full unity of decisionmaking during the disaster event.
We've also prepared to be able to more quickly pre-position those assets into the disaster impact area to establish that joint field office so that we can better coordinate and rapidly improve the speed by which we provide federal assistance to state and local authorities.
We've, as Chief Paulison pointed out, dramatically improved our ability to provide for rapidly deployable communications. I've been in this business for nearly a quarter of a century, and one of the most dramatic shortcomings that we've had in our national preparedness efforts over the past 20 years is we didn't understand our basic communications architecture between local, state and federal authorities.
Our national communications system, working with the U.S. Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, and a host of other federal, state and local entities, have gone out and mapped the communications architecture.
What that means to us is, in advance of a storm, we will know better what communications assets we need to be able to put on the ground to support state and local systems that may be impacted by the storm event.
We also would note that we have co-located our Department of Defense officials with our key DHS component entities, including FEMA. All ten of our FEMA regional offices have defense coordinating officers permanently sitting in those offices working with our preparedness staff, the FEMA staff, the state and local partners, and the federal interagency, to make sure that we have synchronized, organized and integrated plans. And those Department of Defense officials will be co-located with the key decisionmakers in the disaster area.
Again, as Director Paulison mentioned, we have preestablished our disaster staging area and put in place the tracking capability. This is important. All of the resources that are going to be needed in the disaster event need to be close to the disaster event but not so close that they themselves become the victim of the disaster.
We've identified the pre-staging areas where we're going to be able to move critical resources in advance of hurricane season so that we can speed up the ability to move into the disaster impact zone those critical resources.
We've also updated our rosters at the federal level and in partnership with our state and local communities of key personnel. One of the big successes during Hurricane Katrina was our ability to marshal the resources of other states and local communities and provide them into Louisiana under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact.
We've provided dramatic assistance to the states to be able to further utilize that so that in the event of a major emergency or disaster, a hurricane type of event, one state can call on another state to put those critical resources that, for instance, know how to remove debris on public roads, or know how to restore critical signal systems, or know how to conduct shelter operations; to put trained staff from other states into the disaster impact state.
We've upgraded our efforts and our emergency alert system, particularly in the Gulf. We've made sure that the satellite technology is in place with the primary warning points. One of the key issues that both Secretary Chertoff underscored, as well as Director Paulison, is government must be able to get the word out to the public about the impending emergency and what they need to be able to do in response to that emergency.
But there's an incumbent responsibility for the citizens of America, and particularly those citizens in the hurricane vulnerable areas, to make sure that they have a plan, that they have a kit, and that they're informed and ready to react if government tells them that they need to evacuate.
We've worked with states to ensure that states, in addition to the federal government, have the ability to pre-contract for critical relief supplies. The federal response is not the first response. The federal response is the supplementary response. And we very much are dependent on making sure that our local partners and our state partners are organized and they're logistically resourced for success.
We've also made dramatic improvements in our ability to disburse federal funds. This is particularly important down in the Gulf region. We realize the fragile nature of the Gulf Coast. As Director Paulison mentioned, we've had a special planning effort ongoing in Louisiana to help them deal with the unique evacuation needs that are created by the damage that they had last year.
And we will ensure earlier pre-declaration of emergencies prior to landfall of a storm, particularly a storm that may threaten Louisiana, Mississippi, those areas down in the Gulf Coast, because we want to make sure that we've got the federal resources, both people and equipment, as well as dollars in place to be able to help the state and local governments be in the right posture.
Again, we've improved our customer service. Director Paulison mentioned the fact that we're now able to register more than 200,000 victims a day. We have increased our housing inspection capability to 20,000 per day. That's double what it was last year.
What's important to understand is that housing inspection is the first step in the individual assistance process for the disaster victim. And that means that we can get more aid to more disaster victims quicker than in previous years.
And finally, we've completed our review of the state evacuation plans as part of the national plan review. That report will be sent to Congress early next week. I think it is going to be interesting and introspective in terms of its findings, but one of the things that we would say about that plan review is it underscores the importance of a unified process, a process that allows the synchronization between local, state and federal, between the civilian and military, and between the public sector and the private sector.
Finally, in closing, let me just offer one perspective as an individual who's been in this business for nearly a quarter of a century. I've had the opportunity to watch the preparations, to watch the new leadership at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
We've got a terrific team in the context of Director Paulison as well as Deputy Director Harvey Johnson. Secretary Chertoff, Deputy Secretary Jackson, and the entire team in the Department of Homeland Security has been committed to making sure that FEMA is right organized and right supported for success with the upcoming hurricane season.
Today, or rather as a matter of fact, tomorrow, the entire cabinet will participate in a cabinet-level exercise to test the federal government's ability to be able to put critical federal resources on call, on standby, and then on target to be able to support state and local communities in the event of a hurricane strike. That is unprecedented in my relationship working with the federal government over nearly that quarter of a century.
The combination of that, the combination of the wide ranging of great work that's being done at the local level and at the state level across America tells me as a professional who's been in this business for a long time, that we're certainly right postured, and we're ready for this upcoming hurricane season, assuming that the American public does their part and they get ready as well.
I'm exceptionally pleased to be able to introduce the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, the Honorable Paul McHale.
Mr. McHale: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. As George indicated, I'm Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul McHale.
Under the national response plan, it's important to note that the role of the Department of Defense is to assist the Department of Homeland Security in a civilian-led response to major disasters. In short, ours is a partnership with DHS, and that partnership has never been stronger.
Let me take just a couple of minutes to set the stage for the operational briefings that you'll receive in a moment from Admiral Tim Keating, our Combatant Commander at NORTHCOM, and General Steve Blum, the Chief of the National Guard Bureau.
By June 1st, the Department of Defense will have assigned defense coordinating officers on a full-time basis in each of the ten FEMA regional offices to ensure coordinated planning and operational integration between DOD and DHS, most especially FEMA.
In coordination with the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation, the Department of Defense has prepared 18 pre-scripted requests for assistance to expedite the provision of DOD support to civil authorities during a disaster response.
These pre-scripted requests for assistance cover a wide area of mission assignments, but specifically they include transportation, communications, public works assistance, emergency management, housing, resource support, public health and medical services, and most especially, patient evacuation.
DOD has improved our capability to provide interoperable civilian military communications to include satellite phones, land mobile radios, and high frequency radio integration. DOD will provide integrated wide area surveillance assets such as aircraft and overhead imagery to ensure rapid and accurate civilian damage assessment following a catastrophic event.
When we reviewed the after action reports from Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina last year, we discovered a consistent pattern in terms of the challenges of identifying the full scope of the devastation following such an event. In the turmoil following a catastrophic event, it is often quite difficult in the midst of that devastation to determine the full scope of the damage in order to prepare for remedial action.
We in the Department of Defense possess unique assets, mostly aviation assets, to gain that kind of wide area surveillance so that, in addition to open source media reporting, we can in fact provide near real time and in some cases real time imagery to the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA so that we know precisely the scope of the challenge.
In the Gulf Coast states, DOD has provided 12 planners to aid federal, state and local planning efforts for interoperable communications, mass evacuations, and evacuee sheltering. In short, never in the history of the Department of Homeland Security and before that, the history of FEMA and the partnership with DOD, have we had such a closely coordinated effort in advance of a hurricane season.
DOD has tremendous assets to bring to bear in order to assist that civilian-led response to any major disaster that might occur, including a hurricane during the next several months. Those assets have now been identified. Those assets are ready for deployment, and with pre-scripted requests for assistance, we are better prepared than at any point in our nation's history to move that assistance as rapidly as is humanly possible.
Let me turn at this point to Admiral Tim Keating, our Combatant Commander at NORTHCOM, for a more detailed operational overview.
Admiral Keating: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. As Secretary McHale has said, I'm Admiral Tim Keating. I'm the Commander of the United States Northern Command. As such, I work for the Secretary of Defense, and when he or the President so direct, we execute the second part of our mission. The first part of our mission is to deter, prevent and defeat attacks against the United States. The second part of our mission is to provide defense support to civil authorities.
I'll take a series of slides here, starting with the next one, which will show you some of the efforts we have made and some of the commitments we've made to provide Secretary Chertoff the assistance that he may require in responding to natural disasters, once again, if we're directed to do so by the President or the Secretary of Defense.
This first slide shows -- the first bullet some National Guard coordination indicators with our good friend, Lieutenant General Steve Blum, from whom you'll hear in just a moment. We have spent a significant amount of time since Katrina working on the coordination and communication capabilities that we enjoy between the Department of Defense and the United States Northern Command and the National Guard Bureau.
We had the ten hurricane TAGs, hurricane state Adjutants General, to our headquarters in January for a full day meeting. We've had various conferences. I have met with each of the 54 adjutants general, and we had a significant legal conference, all of which were to ensure that we understand completely how the National Guard will respond and the National Guard understands how we at the United States Northern Command will respond.
The second bullet addresses interagency coordination. I think it was one of my previous speakers mentioned that we have eight to ten planners who have been in Louisiana at Baton Rouge working with local, state and National Guard officials and DHS officials, to ensure Northern Command is as fully apprised as we need to be of the planning that is ongoing in preparation for this coming hurricane season.
It's also been mentioned that we have full time active duty colonels, defense coordinating officers, who are embedded with the FEMA regions and will go to the field offices as necessary in the event that there is significant enough damage that the Department of Defense assistance is going to be required.
We've had over 150 tabletops, tabletop exercises and conferences, and we participated in a bi-weekly video teleconference since Katrina with FEMA.
We've also addressed, on the next slide you'll see some of the communications capabilities that we in the Department of Defense will provide. It's a busy slide. Secretary Foresman mentioned this himself.
We have -- you might notice about halfway down, some of the organic, self-sufficient capabilities that we'll provide, we have one, we are purchasing two more of these organic communications units that will deploy when directed. FEMA has seven of them themselves.
There are dozens and dozens and dozens of cell phones that will work off this organic cell phone tower, and we have also distributed during Katrina and we'll do it again this summer, hundreds of satellite phones, which of course don't rely on a cell phone network. And these will be -- the cell phones will be distributed to folks who need them until such time that commercial carriers can restore their cell phone network.
We just conducted a significant exercise in our headquarters, Exercise Ardent* Century, in which we tried very hard to execute those -- to submit ourselves to a rigorous exercise, testing our ability to incorporate Katrina lessons learned, in addition to several other natural and man-made disasters. And to the degree that I can stand before you today, we have satisfied a large number of the communications issues resident from Katrina.
The next slide, please. We'll talk about some of the logistics. George Foresman addressed these himself, as did Chief Jameson. Our role here is largely to provide -- to assist in providing in-transit visibility and also to provide those Department of Defense bases for staging the comprehensive logistics system that's been put in place.
Damage assessment. Again, Chief Jameson talked about this. Our role will largely, almost entirely be in support here. We can provide a significant number of significant platforms -- sophisticated platforms is the term I should use -- as well as some land and water mobile capabilities, putting folks in boats, in airplanes and in trucks and cars to get to the scene of the disaster as quickly as possible, and provide that very, very important early situational awareness that Chief Jameson mentioned.
Our last slide, once again, in summary, our mission first and foremost is to deter, prevent and defeat attacks on the United States. If we're directed, we support the Department of Homeland Security, as they are the lead responders, and you see some of the capabilities listed on that slide, if the President of Secretary so directs, we will execute those missions as quickly as we can reasonably do so.
We work very closely, as I mentioned earlier, with Lieutenant General Steve Blum, and I'll turn the podium over to Steve.
Lieutenant General Blum: Bottom line up front, ladies and gentlemen, the National Guard is always ready, always there, and this year we're more ready than we have been in the past.
If you look at the chart to your right, it'll answer the question that I'll probably get asked as soon as the Q&A gets started. You're busy overseas. You're busy on the Southwest border. How are you going to be able to do the hurricanes better than last year?
The facts speak for themselves. Three hundred and sixty-seven thousand citizen soldiers and airmen are ready and prepared to respond to whatever comes our way during the hurricane season. The states shown in blue are the states where we have protected our resources, concentrated our equipment, improved our capabilities for communication, command and control, logistics, restocked our medical sets, restocked our search and rescue equipment so that we're ready this year for a season that will begin as early as two weeks from today.
Where the hurricanes come, we don't know. But we are prepared to receive hurricanes anywhere from the coast of Texas all the way up into New Hampshire this year. The hurricane season is going to be a busy one.
Next slide.
You can see that there's 17 name storms predicted. And if you go to the bottom line, five of them are to be pretty significant in nature. Any one that hits you is significant in nature if it's your neighborhood, but we're talking about significant at the regional or national level.
Next slide.
This is what the Guard does for those of you that are not familiar with it. We are not in charge. We are in support. We show up with military capabilities. We work for the local authorities, the state authorities and the federal authorities. Whoever happens to have the lead, that's who we work for.
And we work very closely with the active duty forces that are commanded by Admiral Keating and sent in under his direction with the approval of the Secretary of Defense from U.S. Northern Command.
There will be no command and control issues this year.
Next slide.
That has been worked out. Our job is to save lives, not waste time arguing who's in charge.
Next slide.
We'll have unity of effort. The governors will be in charge of their National Guard. IT's already been predetermined. We will have an increased shared awareness this year, better than we did last year, particularly in the early days of Hurricane Katrina.
We have a robust interoperable communications package that the Congress has funded for the National Guard. We have spent $800 million in the last nine months to get better in the area of interoperable communications. And we will have a transparency across all of the forces so there will be no confusion for any of you out there watching who's working for who and who is doing what. We're all working for the lead federal agency in support of the governor or the governors that are affected by this hurricane.
I anxiously await your questions.
Secretary Chertoff: Before you take questions, I just want to extend my appreciation to Secretary McHale, Admiral Keating and General Blum for joining us here at FEMA, and also to Secretary Rumsfeld and the entire department. They have been true partners. We really I think achieved a degree of integration in our planning that we've never seen before, and I think the beneficiaries of that will be the citizens of any community that finds themselves on the receiving end of a hurricane.
With that, if you will identify yourself and give us your news organization, we'll take some questions.
Yeah?
Question: (Inaudible.) Last week at the House Homeland Security Committee, (inaudible) said that FEMA has (inaudible) percent of that capacity. I was wondering if that's accurate and (inaudible).
Secretary Chertoff: Well, I'll let Chief Paulison talk about our staffing.
Mr. Paulison: We are in a very aggressive hiring mode. We want to go into hurricane season with at least 95 percent of our staff full. Right now we're right over at 85 percent and still working very hard to reach that goal. We're very comfortable with where we're going.
Question: Mr. Paulison, last year there were widespread reports that although there were enough supplies, the problem was the trucks were being turned back because they weren't able to get into the area because of the hurricane damage. How will satellites help?
Mr. Paulison: Well, that's always an issue in any storm we have, even for the first responders, is getting through some of the areas with trees down and wire -- power lines down and debris in the road, sometimes streets flooded. That's always going to be an issue. So we'll make sure we have, you know, working with the state and the local communities to clear those roads so we can get our trucks in there.
But by having GPS tracking systems, we'll at least know where they are. Last year, we didn't have a clue. Once they left the warehouse, where they were, we could not track them. We didn't know how soon they were going to get there. We didn't know that maybe they were being turned back.
And now we can follow that down and we can know exactly where those trucks are, if a truck is stopped for a period of time, we can tell there must be a problem and we can check it out and find out what's going on.
Question: (Inaudible) GAO report said the (inaudible) at FEMA were inadequate (inaudible) ability to respond. Has that been fixed?
Secretary Chertoff: Chief?
Mr. Paulison: For the most part, yes. Our IT systems have been antiquated for a long time, and we have been in the process since last year bringing those up to speed to deal with some of the things like we just talked about of being able to register up to 200,000 people a day, putting our systems in place.
Part of the issue with FEMA is we were dealing with 20th Century technology, and not moving into the 21st Century like we should have, and that's what we're doing now.
Question: Jean Mazur, CNN. In recent days, some of the state emergency managers have made some critical comments about how prepared you all are. You've said they're the first line. They're the front line responders. What's your assessment of them? Are they ready? Are these states and localities ready to do the job?
Mr Foresman: Jean, thanks for the question. I think historically when we look across the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf Coast, states have been dealing with the hurricane threat for many, many years.
And I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but one of the reasons that we did this national plan review, and we took a comprehensive look at the capabilities, particularly in the hurricane vulnerable states, as well as the major metropolitan areas, was to put some level of peer assessment. It was not a federal assessment. It is a peer review assessment. Other state and local officials evaluating those plans.
And I think as we will see next week when that report is sent up to Congress, we know that we've got to find a better model for preparedness in this country that puts a heavier emphasis on planning pre-event, making sure that local, state and federal officials are sitting side-by-side well in advance of events and not during events trying to figure out how to do their jobs.
Question: So are they ready this year to do the job?
Mr Foresman: Jean, I've gotten no indication that any of the states are any less prepared than they have been in the past. I mean, one of the best --
Question: Are they more prepared?
Mr Foresman: Well, I would have to say that they are going to be more prepared. I don't think there's a governor in the hurricane vulnerable states that hasn't looked at the Katrina experience and the fact that we've had these planning teams in place providing remedial suggestions to them on how they could improve their response posture, they have grabbed hold of them.
Florida is a good example. After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, they put in place a state-directed preparedness process that has made measurable advances in Florida's ability to be able to manage hurricanes. The same is true in other states all along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.
Question: What about Louisiana specifically, they're still trying to recover?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, let me say first of all, I have -- one of the things I did is I personally went down to the Gulf and spoke to each of the governors. And I can tell you there is no more focused group of people than the governors of states that are in the target zone for a hurricane.
We're working very closely with Louisiana. They obviously have unusual challenges this year. They're still in the process of recovering from Katrina. There's construction going on. They obviously, particularly in the urban areas that were hit most seriously, they're still in the process of getting their resources back to where they should be.
So, I think we anticipate lending a more vigorous helping hand. But as we speak, I think they are underway with a process of exercising so they can evaluate and we can evaluate where they are.
And I'm going to be going down myself early next week to literally get on a bus and ride around and kind of walk through the paces of some of what they have in mind to do to prepare themselves and be prepared by June 1.
Question: Bobby Block, Wall Street Journal. Two questions. First question is, I understand that there may be some trouble with the reimbursement of EMAC for last year, which may mean that some states may not be financially in a position to come to the aid as readily as they were.
And the second question in terms of planning
-- I know you're going to love this one -- what is the threshold at which you decide the states and locals can't manage and that the federal government has to step in?
Secretary Chertoff: Yeah. I'm going to ask Dave to answer the first question, but let me address the second question. There is no mathematical formula that's going to tell you at this point a state or local government has been overwhelmed.
I think we clearly have the experience of last year, which was probably the upward bound of what could conceivably be an overwhelming situation for a state and local government. How much short of that we would have to be for us to say a state or local government was overwhelmed I think is a little bit hard to predict.
What I can tell you is that we will be much more involved with the planning early on. I think that will give us a better sense of when we might be hitting the point of having an overwhelmed government. And of course we have contingency plans in effect if a government does get overwhelmed, to step in energetically in order to pick up the slack.
And the first question, I'll let Dave answer.
Mr. Paulison: That was Buddy, right? First of all, let me say that what a great system EMAC is where people, equipment, supplies are shared from state to state to state as the need exists.
We did have some rough issues earlier on with some of the reimbursement issues, primarily an education piece of how to apply for the reimbursement, how to do the paperwork. We're trying to streamline that, streamline it right now. I'm not aware of any outstanding issues with the EMAC system, but since you brought it up, I'll make sure I go back and check.
I think we resolved all of those and the states know how to do that, how to get the refunds quickly. Because we want to keep it viable, and we want to keep it alive. We want to make sure that the states get reimbursed as timely as we possibly can.
Question: I'm Pam Sussman with NPR. These plans are very goal oriented, and I'm curious how flexible they are if in fact something hits the Northeast or the Mid-Atlantic. For example, your GPS system is only for the trucks that leave Atlanta and through logistics centers. Not all of the logistics centers. So how flexible is this to deal with those hurricane disasters?
Mr. Paulison: Well, first of all, those are our two largest warehouses, so regardless of where a disaster left, that would be -- a lot of those trucks would be going out of there. We're also working with the Defense Logistics Agency. They've got the capability of tracking their trucks also. So a lot of our supplies would come out of there.
This is the first phase of this plan. By next year we'll be able to track all of our commodities. What we're doing is a phase at a time, and right now we're focusing on primarily the Atlantic seaboard and also the Gulf Coast where our most probable strikes of a hurricane are going to be, and so are predictable disasters.
So by this time next year, we'll be much more robust in this for the rest of the country.
Question: So you'll be able to deal if it (inaudible) from the Northeast?
Mr. Paulison: That's correct. Because our supplies in Atlanta, probably they're going to flow that way anyway. And our whole goal upcoming, especially for hurricanes, is we're going to really do a very aggressive pre-positioning plan; pre-position people, pre-position equipment and pre-position supplies. So those commodities, if we had a hurricane going into the Northeast section, we would already be pre-positioning stuff up that way, and those trucks will have GPS tracking systems on them.
Question: Dawn Ettinger, NBC. Secretary Chertoff, the flood maps in the hurricane zones, some of them haven't been updated in over a decade. I know that this is a state and local function. But I wonder if the federal government is doing anything to see that they are updated?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, you know, of course, part of this is FEMA's function. Maybe I ought to have Dave stand up here.
Mr. Paulison: Sorry. We are in the process of mapping the entire country, and by 2010, we should have over 90 percent of the population of this country with new updated flood maps. So we're in the process of doing that now. Congress has given us money for this program, and we're well into that program of getting those flood maps done.
Question: That's four years away. So what between now and then?
Mr. Paulison: Well, I mean, you know, we're doing the entire country. So we're moving very rapidly across the country to, you know, focus on mainly the most important areas where we know we're going to have flooding, and get those done first and then move and get the entire country done.
Question: If I understood you correctly, more than half of the mission statements, 18 of the 31, have been assigned to DOD and to the Pentagon. So I'm wondering how much more is this than what the Pentagon was handling last year during hurricane season? And also, if this is going to be sapping some of the Pentagon's traditional roles of military preparedness elsewhere?
Mr. McHale: Laura, we learned from last year's experience, there were 93 separate mission assignments during Katrina last year. Most of those requests for assistance were drafted during the immediate response.
You don't want to be writing those kinds of requests in the midst of a crisis itself. And so what we did was, we took those 93 discrete requests for assistance and grouped them into 18 areas where it is reasonable, indeed foreseeable, based on our past experience, to anticipate that were we to experience another major hurricane, let's say in the Gulf this year, that the kinds of requests would be quite similar to, different magnitude, but quite similar to the kinds of requests that we received last year.
The whole purpose of that was to speed up the process, so that rather than engaging in the writing or requests for assistance during a crisis, by anticipating the nature of those requests, literally we take the requests, we complete the forms, and in a fraction of the time that it took last year, we can gain approval of the request and begin to deploy the capability.
And with regard to the second half of your question, no. This will not impair our warfighting ability. We were able to provide an unprecedented level of support last year. The response to Hurricane Katrina was the largest, fastest civil support mission in the history of the United States military, and if we have to, we can replicate or exceed that capability this year without impairing our warfighting ability.
Question: You're going to be collecting a lot of person data from people who are displaced. Given the Veterans Administration's recent problems, what is FEMA doing to protect the personal data of the people that it helps?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, first of all, you've got to tell us what news organization you're from. Not --
Question: All right. Mark Cardoza, Federal Computer Week.
Secretary Chertoff: Well, first of all, we're not going to have anybody from FEMA taking home a disk with all that personal data.
Secretary Chertoff: I mean, seriously, we do take this very seriously, because it's critically important for us to have data in order to help people who need assistance, whether it's because of rental needs or because they've lost a house and they need to have assistance in order to begin rebuilding. We do assure that we have protocols in place to make sure the information is maintained with integrity. We have security built into the computer systems.
I'm not kidding when I say you can be no one's going to be taking home a disk with that data. At the same time, we do want to make sure we're able to collect the data in a way that serves the people. We want to be out where they are, with laptops and with the ability to interact with them where they are actually spending time as opposed to making them come to us, which experience shows can be very burdensome.
Yes?
Question: (Inaudible.) One of the recommendations was to consider the extraordinary circumstances (inaudible). Have you all (inaudible)?
Secretary Chertoff: I think that's an issue which we have discussed. As I say, the threshold for various kinds of determinations is not usually one that can be defined with mathematical certainty. I think there are a series of characteristics and factors which you have to take into account, and ultimately, it's a decision which is going to depend on the particular circumstances.
But certainly one of the issues we look at is, what is the appropriate allocation of roles among the departments, depending on the circumstances.
Yeah?
Question: Mr. Secretary, Spencer Hsu, Washington Post. In recent weeks there's been some concerns raised from the states I've heard about FEMA's concept of operations plan, something in draft form and not final. On trailers, there's still 100,000 people in trailers. There's public anxiety and also operational concerns with what happens if there is going to be a need for temporary housing.
Last couple of points. Any requests from Louisiana and Texas for aircraft support? And that (inaudible) supports recommendations that there be an interim national (inaudible) communications strategy completed and revised (inaudible).
Secretary Chertoff: Do you seriously expect me to remember every single question you just asked?
Secretary Chertoff: I mean, let me --
Question: (Inaudible) operations (inaudible).
Secretary Chertoff: All right. Let me deal with those. In terms of the concept of operations, one of the things we are doing this week and next week is exercising with all of the states in the various regions of the country which could experience a hurricane so that we fully have our concept of operations integrated with theirs.
We actually do have a concept of operations. We have a clear -- not only have we identified the particular roles to be performed by our federal coordinating officer and our principal federal officer, but we've actually pre-identified them and we've gotten them down actually to be working with their state and local counterparts. We've got the military. We've got our joint field offices identified. We've got tentative locations for them set up.
What the exercise will enable us to do is to make sure that everybody understands that concept of operations. Equally important, of course, for us is to understand the concept of operations by the state and by the local authorities, because they are the first responders, and we have to fit in with their plan as opposed to our writing their plan.
As far as housing is concerned, you know, this is a very important point. There are a lot of people in trailers. A house trailer is not built to sustain the kind of winds a house is built to sustain. And that's why one of the critical issues this year is evacuation for people in house trailers when they get the word from their local officials, and it is possible if they're going to get the word in the face of a storm that under normal circumstances would not be regarded as a very big deal.
But we're going to have to say to people, the responsible thing to do is when you are told it's time to leave, you've got to get in your car and you've got to leave. We are working with the states. Most of the states haven't finished the process of identifying shelters, congregate shelters. States use different models. We are working to fill in where there may be a gap with what the state has identified. And, of course, the Red Cross is a critical partner in this, and I've spoken to the leadership of the Red Cross, the CEO and the chairman, about a recent agreement that we've reached to make sure that we have visibility to where their shelters are that we can put our people in their shelters to register people as they come in, as opposed to coming in after the fact.
So all these pieces actually have been worked. The exercises over the next week that have already begun will let us determine where we still need to make some adjustments, and more important, they'll make sure everybody understands what the plan is so we go into the season with a clear sense of what the team has to do.
Question: David (inaudible) with Defense Daily. You mentioned, several of you, the need to track a storm before it hits, and also to better assess damage and response. Would it be useful to have such assets as a national orbiting earth (inaudible) satellite system, high altitude air ships, a network of them, global hawk and other unmanned aerial vehicles, would any of these be useful in tracking the storms and predicting where it will make landfall, and then in deciding after it's passed, where the damage is and how to respond, where to bring assets to bear?
Admiral Keating: The Secretary of Defense will, without hesitation, provide me whatever assessment platform is necessary. We had considered using Predator following Rita, her landfall last year. It turns out we didn't need Predator, but from the sophisticated classified systems overhead down to folks in Humvees and boats with satellite phones and incorporating all of the FEMA capabilities as well, anything that the Department of Defense has, if the situation is sufficiently grave, those will be authorized by the Secretary of Defense.
Moderator: Two more questions, please.
Question: You talked about pointing and FCO and PFO (inaudible) for the first time (inaudible). If Katrina, the exact storm hits Louisiana tomorrow, who's in charge? Which one of those two people? Because people in FEMA in that region tell me it's unclear to them who's in charge.
Secretary Chertoff: It's actually completely clear, and the exercise I think should demonstrate the clarity. The Federal Coordinating Officer has all the authority to authorize supplies, contracts, all the material that has to move into the area to support the governor and the local officials who have to respond.
The Principal Federal Officer has the ability to coordinate all the federal assets that may come into the area to make sure that that -- those assets are properly deployed and working together and synchronized. And the two of them are literally sitting side by side, so they talk to one another.
So, you know, at the end of the day, of course, it's usually the governor and the local officials who are the principal legal authority. They have, you know, the National Guard is under the governor's command as commander in chief. But in terms of federal assets, coordination of all federal assets will be the PFO. That's Gil Jameson. And then the actual authority to sign off on moving the product, moving the goods and services, is in the hands of the FCO.
Moderator: Last question.
Secretary Chertoff: You had one, Bobby, so who hasn't had one? I guess we're due for seconds. All right.
Question: If Bobby gets another one, I want another one.
Question: Last year during Rita, because of the pressure in the aftermath of Katrina, the 5th Army stood up without a request from the state. At the same time during Wilma, there was a similar situation whereby a JTF was attempted to be set up as well. In both cases, the governors of the states were very upset and it kind of caused problems and to reassess. How this year are we going to make sure that those kinds of things don't happen?
Mr. Paulison: Bobby, part of the process that we've gone through with enhancements to the national response plan and this work across the federal interagency, the simple fact is, we were in a reactive environment last year in the aftermath of Katrina. And I think over the ensuing months, we've had the benefit of a number of after action reviews. We've had the benefit of some very deliberate discussions, unconstrained by time and tension. We understand the parameters of the states and communities. We've clarified to them our expectations of what we need and will be prepared to do to support them. They've clarified to us what their expectations are of us as a federal family.
And so I think, you know, we should draw comparisons towards the future in the context that we've had a lot more deliberative discussion, a lot more authoritative planning, training and exercising. And many of the things that frankly we had to develop on the fly last year, we've developed a lot of really good processes that Dave and his team and FEMA and across the entire federal interagency have been institutionalized in terms of long-term better processes. So I don't think you'll see that level of tension this year. But at the end of the day, one of the inherent responsibilities that we have to the American public is to make sure that if, for whatever reason, states and communities are unable to perform their basic functions, that we provide the necessary level of federal support to ensure the needs of Americans are met.
But, frankly, I don't know of a state or a community out there that is not going to put a premium on being able to meet their most basic fundamental responsibilities.
Thank you.
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