Chertoff: Planning for disaster requires everyone
Of course, the critical element is the health care center, hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care facilities, which have in many cases a legal and certainly a moral obligation to prepare, to develop evacuation plans, and other emergency plans to insure that people with special needs whose care has been entrusted to these caregivers will in fact be taken care of and will get the appropriate care in an emergency. Now as we talk about hurricane season, we've set a couple of deadlines for ourselves. June 1st is the start of hurricane season. By hurricane season, we will have completed and have in place a much more well-prepared and well-exercised unified incident command structure, a way for us to make sure that all the players can come to the table and coordinate; a 21st century logistic system that gives us the ability to track where our trucks of water and food are in real time so we can tell emergency responders where things are and when they're going to get to their destination; a much better hardened communications ability so we can talk among ourselves and we can talk to the public without being hampered when a catastrophe takes down all of the wireless towers and the other typical communications equipment; and then a series of hurricane exercises. We're actually going to build capabilities and then make sure that we have tried them out. Some of them will be tabletops, meaning we'll sit around and exercise with the decision makers. But at least in some instances, we want to take it out into the field and at least on a pilot basis kick the tires and make sure that the equipment and the plans work the way they're supposed to work.
A big piece of this is going to be sending a message to the public about citizen preparedness. The fact of the matter is – and this is not new with me; this has been the received wisdom for decades – rescue operations take time. Responders may not be able to reach people who are trapped in the first 24, 48 or even 72 hours. People need to take the steps to take in their own families to be prepared with food and water, medicine, a radio with batteries, and other necessaries. And you can go on the website for our ready.gov website or for state, local emergency websites and get information about the kind of materials you need to have on hand in order to prepare for an emergency.
Second element of this is planning. You need to understand what to do if there is an emergency. Some of that is families deciding how to meet up if they get separated in the course of a big catastrophe.
Other types of emergencies, like medical emergencies, require an understanding of kind of basic hygiene, how you minimize the possibility of infection, how you make sure that you can take yourself out of situations where you're putting yourself at physical risk.
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