Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Issue link: http://dysoncollege.uberflip.com/i/128987
be introducing yourself at the time of the disaster or the calamity. You've got to have all of these roles and responsibilities worked out long before a disaster strikes. That's not the time to be exchanging business cards. I used to tell my friends in the business community that if you look at DHS from a private-sector perspective, you'd see that we began operating with a board of directors of 535 people. My private sector friends used to say that you've got to run government more like a business. And I said, "Call me when your board of directors is 535 people— it's called Congress. And call when you have to turn to that kind of board to get funding in order to secure what you do and hire the people that do it. And by the way, we have three million shareholders—called the American public." We had to be operational from day one, from March 1, 2003. We had to keep the country secure and at the same time try to pull together 20-plus agencies and 180,000 people. That is a real challenge. And as a department, as a country, I think we've made great progress. I think we're far better prepared than we were before 9/11. I think in a decade's time the federal, state, and local private-sector leaders have trained together; they've worked together; they've run the tabletop exercises, major exercises, like Top Off. We've improved preparedness and response capabilities through new technologies. We have instituted our Ready Campaign and the Computer Emergency Readiness Team. We've got the fusion centers and the work continues to today. I believe that, in terms of emergencies, we are far better prepared in terms of training and outreach with one another. And I remember the work we did with the National Response Plan and the National Incident Management System, so that at least there was a model [for our successors to go forward]. There are two things you need to know about the model you build: It gives you a foundation to respond and react, but also you know through that model that you cannot be prepared for everything. What you need to be prepared for is being unprepared. So you need some flexibility within your system but you also need people and leadership who make judgments at a time based on circumstances they come into. With the National Response Plan—I think they've renamed it after Katrina, but it's basically the same thing—and the National Incident Management System at the state and local levels, we are far better prepared. I tip my hat to the first responders in this community. One of the things that the public sector has let the private sector down on, and frankly they let all 300 million Americans down on, is not making good on the 9/11 Commission Report to build an interoperable broadband public safety network—one that would enable all of our first responders to perform more effectively in the event of a natural disaster. I think it is, frankly, a conspicuous, outrageous, and major gap in our ability to respond and recover as quickly as possible to an all-hazard event. Frankly, I think it's a failure of Congress to match its own rhetoric. Those late nights, when I cannot get to sleep, I turn on C-SPAN and I listen to what they call special orders—that means you can go down to the floor and just talk. And they talk and they talk and they talk about the fact that we need the public safety network, but we've been talking about it for 10 years. Don't get me started. [Legislation has since passed since these remarks.] In keeping with our discussion today, a little more than 10 years post-9/11, six years post-Katrina, two years post-Fort Hood, two years post-BP oil spill, I believe we have also yet to fully and aggressively integrate another key component into our national mission to prepare, respond, and recover from a catastrophic event. 12