Chertoff: Planning for disaster requires everyone
Of course, the fact that hurricanes are coming doesn't mean it's the only we challenge we face, because we also have to continue to prepare ourselves for the possibility of a terrorist incident or for pandemic flu or for a catastrophic problem with the levees up in California. There's no guarantee that these things will come; there's no guarantee that they won't come; and, of course, they could happen in sequence or they could happen all together.
The fact of the matter is that when you look at these issues and others, you see that emergency planning and preparedness cut across all sectors of our society. These are national issues; they require a national strategies and a national response that effectively integrates all of the levels of government as well as our first responder community, our private sector partners and our citizens.
Everybody here plays a critical role in this mission, and I want to thank you for being here. And I want to take a few minutes to lay out what we're doing at the Department of Homeland Security in both the near and the long term to boost emergency preparedness.
But I want to begin by emphasizing this: Traditionally, constitutionally, and by virtue of expertise and proximity, local and state governments are always at the first point of the spear when it comes to dealing with emergencies. The federal government of course has to play a role supporting them and getting people out of harm's way, but we do so in a way that does not upend the traditional approach of putting the management of emergency down at the most immediate and most directly impacted level. Now part of what we're doing, of course, on the federal level is making sure that we can bring together all of our capabilities, all of our planning, all of our training, all of our exercising and all of our grant making in a single integrated and comprehensive approach to preparedness, one that allows us to interact with all sectors of government and with the private sector. So we've unified the U.S. Fire Administration, our grants and training components, our state and local outreach components, our infrastructure protection, our cybersecurity and telecommunications, our national capital region, all in a single preparedness directory. I'm pleased to say that the leader of that director of preparedness, George Foresman, is a very experienced, hands-on emergency manager with over 30 years as a first responder and emergency manager here in the state of Virginia, culminating with his serving as homeland security adviser to Governor Warner, until the governor left this past year – someone who had also served Governor Gilmore and was part of the Gilmore Commission on Terrorism.
By unifying and integrating all these elements of preparedness, we have created an ability to leverage all of these capabilities – the money, the expertise, and the various perspectives – to bring them together in order to have the maximum benefit of preparedness that we can afford to the citizens and to the various state and local governments of this country. The fact of the matter is we are working every day to fund, plan, train, and exercise the kind of robust response and recovery planning that we all need to face all hazards, whether they be natural hazards or man-made hazards.
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