 Well welcome everyone, we're absolutely thrilled to have Administrator Fugate with us today. This is the first time I think we've had, in recent memory, the FEMA administrator here, so it's a unique event for us, Andrew is saying first time probably ever, it's good. It's one of those events that gets a crowd like this, it's something we normally, it's an area we normally don't address at CSIS, but under the portfolio which I operate, by the way my name is Rick Ozzie Nelson and I'm the Director of the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Program here at CSIS, the issue of disaster management and recovery is an issue that we're focusing on moving forward here, so we're again we're honored to have Administrator Fugate here. Before we move forward I'd like to thank a few people and introduce one person in particular, but I want to thank our sponsors for this event, Louisiana State University, Mr. Joey Booth here in the front and the Pennington Foundation, Ms. Lori Burtman, who's the CEO of that foundation for their continued support for this. This is a third event in a series we're having on disaster management. We had Admiral Thad Allen in November. We had an extremely successful event with an international cooperation disaster management last month and then next month we'll be looking at public-private partnerships. We're hoping to have some CEOs or senior leaders from industry to talk about that. The series is designed as many things as CSIS to provide a forum for government officials and academic experts and leaders in the private industry to examine the critical issues such as preparedness and relief. I also want to note that we have a special guest from Louisiana, Mark Cooper, who's the Director of the Governor's Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness effort down there. I had a chance in December to go out and see Mark and the operation they have there and it's, as a former DOD person, I get impressed by command centers. They have quite an operation down there and Mark, it's an honor to have you here. Thanks for coming all the way up. Now on to our guest of honor here is Mr. Craig Fugate. I just spent the first time I met him was today and we spent a couple minutes in the back room and what an absolutely just a personal individual. I'm so glad we're gonna have him here. You know, based on that, this is gonna be a little less on remarks and a lot on questions and answers per Mr. Fugate's request. So we'll be doing that after I introduce, do some, well he'll come up and give a couple brief remarks and then we'll go right into questions and answers. I'll moderate those and those of you know me, I run a tight ship, no statements and answers, questions and answers, but he really wants to have a dialogue and a discussion. So if you don't, you know, let's have a useful one. Be proactive in your questions and let's try to have a get to peel back the onion here to see exactly some of the changes that have been made under Administrative Fugate's time at FEMA. One of the great things about him, I say he's kind of a strange fish here in Washington D.C. because he's got a remarkable state and local experience and he comes to federal government, which is something it's you know much needed. In fact, we were joking about Civics 101. He says I kind of touch on some of the nuances of Civics 101 in disaster management. I said this whole town needs more Civics 101. So please, we'll start with disaster management. But before coming to FEMA, he has a career in emergency management, volunteer firefighter, emergency paramedic and a lieutenant. Is it D'Alochua? Alachua. That's a Yankee, sorry. Alachua County Fire and Rescue in Gainesville, Florida. Now we were trying to bet on whether he was going to have an orange tie in response to our Louisiana State support here, but he wore an Auburn tie instead. So over the course, he also was appointed Bureau Chief for Preparedness and Response in 1997 and during his 12 years there with the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which he served director from 2001-2008, he managed some of the largest disaster responses in Florida history. In fact, 2004-2005, if you recall, there were a series of hurricanes that proved very, very significant events, obviously, in Florida and were very challenged to respond to. And then with Katrina, well, you know, obviously that didn't hit Florida directly. It was also one of the largest, if not one of the largest state-to-state supports as far as aid to that region in helping recover Mississippi and Louisiana. After his time there, he also served as Chief of State Emergency Response Team, managing numerous floods and tornadoes and all the other things that fall under that rubric. And then in 2009, he was appointed by President Obama to come take over FEMA and provide a new strategic direction and move FEMA into the next decade. So I will stop talking now. Again, Mr. Fugate, thank you so much for being here. We'll do your comments and then we'll go right into questions and answers. Hi. We want to really leave time for some questions. I wanted to tee something up. Generally, when you talk to FEMA, you're either of two minds. Either you think we are part of a national government and that FEMA runs disasters, in which case you don't really have any idea what we do. Or you take the approach that it's always about the reimbursement mechanisms under the Stafford Act and grants and dollars and how you rebuild. And I want to take a different path. I want to talk about something that my team actually named total communities and people think this is like a brand new policy. It isn't. It's Emergency Management 101. It's getting outside and not looking at a regulatory framework of how do you respond to disasters and reimburse and stepping back and going, how do disasters impact communities? And what are the things that have to be built to be successful in meeting both the immediate needs but also starting that recovery? We talk a lot about this in Emergency Management. And again, this is not FEMA-centric. This is me as a local, my practitioners and my peers at the state and local level. Also, our peers in the private sector. We oftentimes forget that in the private sector we have a large emergency management community as well as within the Department of Defense. So, this is not something unique to just FEMA. It's the community of emergency managers. And so, talking about this whole community, I want to kind of break it down because it's not this big mysterious thing. It's not a new policy. It's just basic stuff, folks. We talk a lot about the public is a resource and not a liability. Now, this may seem like, well, what do you mean by that? Is the tendency that when a disaster strikes, we look at the public in a way that we got to do everything for them instead of looking at them as part of the team and a resource? We oftentimes talk at them. We don't carry on conversations with them. And we tend to make decisions for them as if they are not going to be doing anything until somebody shows up. Yet, we know in large catastrophic disasters, the initial response is not even a local government response. It is oftentimes neighbors helping neighbors. As much as people talk about the search and rescue from the Coast Guard and Fish and Wildlife and others in Katrina, you know who was doing the first rescues? Boudreau and their boat. Neighbors helping neighbors. Yet, we tend to dismiss that because they don't have the incident command system training. They're not credentialed. They're liability issues and we tend to take away from what they bring. So, the first thing is we look at is the public is not a liability. They're a resource. But the public has to understand they have responsibilities. They must prepare. This then gets turned into the critics of us saying, well, the reason they need to be prepared is because you're not going to help them. You can't get there and you're abandoning your responsibilities to take care of everybody five seconds after the disaster happens. And I'm like going, well, if you thought that was going to happen, you got, I can't help you. The reality is in these very large-scale disasters, the reality is if you optimize everything we do at all levels of government, you optimize all the volunteers and NGOs and you bring together everything that DOD does, we cannot get there fast enough. And here's what happens. People who don't prepare because they're assumption that somebody's going to take care of them but have the resources and means to cut in line. Guess who they cut in line in front of? The most vulnerable members of the community. The children and infants, the frail elderly, the poor. The people that should not have to get in line behind you because you didn't get ready. This isn't about we're not going to respond or help. It's about this is a shared responsibility. So if the public's a resource, they also have to understand there are responsibilities. They need to prepare to the best of their ability so we can focus our resources on the most vulnerable parts of the community. But we also need to recognize that if we look at the public as a resource, we also have to look at the private sector as part of the team. We have for too long done what I call government-centric problem solving. And it has the illusion of being very effective to the breaking point that we try to build our capabilities around what government can do and bring into a disaster. And guess what? In tornadoes and floods and other small compact disasters, it is very efficient. It falls into the illusion that government likes to have, which is control, bring in order to chaos and a disaster. And it's easy to manage. And if somebody wants to know what's being done because it's all government, it's easier for us to say. But the reality is on any given day, who provides the bulk of the food in your community? Private sector. They got the stores, they got the warehouses, they know the customers and they were delivering it yesterday. But we always make the assumption when a disaster happens, they're not going to try to get their stores open. They're not going to have those resources there. And so you get some of the idiocy I got in Florida, which was we were so focused on what government was going to do, we started putting distribution points in the parking lots of open grocery stores. It wasn't intentional in 04 when the power went out, the grocery stores were closed. By 05, they realized that they couldn't afford their competitors getting open, so they were dragging generators in. They were bringing in circus tents, they were bringing in satellite phones, anything to get retailing. But we weren't part of the team. We operated what government was going to do with a blinder to the private sector, so we ended up going to the places that served the greatest number of people with the best highway access in the most parking. Gee, that's where they put those big stores at. And they were open. Where should we have gone? Rural areas of my state that did not have those, inner city areas that do not have a present, the so-called food deserts, and door-to-door and high-rise retirement communities where there was no power and the elevators weren't working. But because we had all of our manpower and people focused on distribution to the bulk of the population without looking at the private sector as part of the team, we did not have the resources to do all that at once. So the business sector, private sector is part of this team. Then finally, FEMA's role in this is not one many people like to say, we're not in charge. In fact, if FEMA's in charge of anything something's terribly wrong, you read our authorizing language, which we now have. Not only do we have the Stafford Act, which talks about how we administer financial reimbursement in correct federal assistance and coordinate federal programs. We now finally for the first time have authorizing language that says what FEMA's job is under the Homeland Security Act as amended by the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Format. And you know what it tells us what FEMA's job is? FEMA's job is on behalf of the President and Secretary for Homeland Security to coordinate on behalf of them the federal resources in support of a governor or another lead federal agency. So what was FEMA's role during the Gulf oil spill? What does the law say we do? We support, who was the lead federal agency? Coast Guard. And we were supporting Admiral Allen with some of the things that he requests us to do. Why did FEMA go to Haiti? We have no authority there, of course not. It wasn't a FEMA response. Who had the authority to respond to Haiti? USAID. The President told us we were all in. Guess what? We supported USAID. So if I leave you with nothing else for our stop, the public's a resource not a liability and we all have a responsibility to make sure that you're not getting in line in front of the most vulnerable citizens because you didn't get ready. Two, the private sector is part of the team. You can no longer approach the types of disasters we face on the large scale with a government-centric approach. And third, FEMA's not in charge but we are authorized by Congress on behalf of the President, Secretary of Homeland Security to mobilize the federal family and the resources that we bring with Department of Defense and other parts of the federal government in support of a governor and a declared disaster or in support of another lead federal agency based upon their plans. So that will take questions. Thanks, Rick. I think you broke two records there. One was probably the shortest remarks in CSIS and probably the most substantive remarks in CSIS history. So thank you for that. We really appreciate it. So we'll go right into questions. One of the things that I'll start with, the first question if that's okay, one of the things, you talk about operational outcomes not in this speech but in other comments that you've made and that's one of the priorities at FEMA under your leadership. And based on the comments you just said about achieving those three minors for the people in the audience here and that are watching on the internet, what are the two to three things that you're doing at FEMA that are going to get you there? What are your priorities? Well, part of this is, we actually haven't, I think one of the representatives back here from Big Locks joined us. We work with the Retail Federation and some of the other and we said, look we cannot coordinate unless you're actually part of the team and so we asked them and they are providing on a rotating basis senior executives that joined the FEMA's team to help us coordinate with the private sector. So one example was during the recent ice storm there was a representative at that time it was from Target but they were giving us and talking back and getting us updates on all of the major Big Locks grocery stores and hardware stores and what their status was in the ice storm. So if we had to start providing assistance we would have a better idea of what the private sector shortfalls were going to be. Previously FEMA had no way to do that and so again it's this commitment to if you're going to talk about it you got to bring them in as a whole team member. This term public-private partnership it's like I don't want a partnership I want your skin in the game I want you there and a lot of people say why is the private sector even interested in this and it's like it's a bottom line issue folks they also deal with the same challenges that we're dealing with we oftentimes compete for the same resources and so one of the things we're trying to do is ask a different question instead of asking the private sector what they're going to do for government is go what can we do to get you open and so that approach the other thing is FEMA is schizophrenic in how we operate for years and there's a few folks here have been here for a while Leo and some other folks where we were regional based and then we were headquarters centric well I always figured when you go shopping I shouldn't have to travel to Washington to go shopping and get my questions answered and FEMA had 10 regional structures but we had migrated so much of decision making to headquarters that for most dates the region was merely a speed bump day to day they would just they could nobody can make a decision regency ended up going out there so we took the positions that Congress gave us and you know I've never been an organization that ever says they have enough people but we took positions we took vacant positions that had not been filled and we gave them to the regions one of the things we never had before and Ernie Abbott will appreciate this we've never had attorneys in the regions we now have a attorney assigned full time in each region so that things don't have to come all the way up to the headquarters we've placed disability integration a lot of people talk about disabilities from standpoint is something well you got to comply with ADA well no folks it's a civil right it's not an architectural issue and part of this is being inclusive if you don't have people there and you're planning and you're exercising it tends to be after the fact so we have disability integration specialists now that have been hired that are in the regions we in this country mismatched the Stafford Act is very much state-centric but we also have the issue of the sovereignty of the federally recognized tribes all right so we never had dedicated positions in the regions and so I couldn't get enough positions so I split one private sector in tribal so that we at least have a point person in each region for the regional administrator to be a subject matter expert both working with our private sector partners but also on tribal issues so this is moving from washington-centric to get out to the regions and really kind of the idea is headquarters is where we develop the rules and the tools but the regions are where we implement because mark should be able to go to tony russell and would rare a section tony russell is the regional administrator region six get the answers and have run have a team there to authorize to support mark in that response without it defaulting to it's got to go up and get a mother may I from headquarters so just two kind of examples of we're not talking about it we're not writing another policy guidance we're not well they are updating the strategic plan but I mean we're like if you don't put people in places and you don't start doing it you just keep talking about it absolutely thank you okay what we have is we have microphones so when you come around microphone comes to y'all calling you we'll start right over here please state your name and affiliation if you have one and then go into the question and richard international rescue committee i'm curious to hear what you think the lessons learned were in terms of the u.s. government response to the earthquake in Haiti and my own sense was that one reason fema was involved so quickly was that the appointees at the top of us a id weren't really there yet and rasha just arrived and so had there been people they might have been able to explain that they do this sort of thing all the time maybe not on the same scale the other piece of the question is what you think of the need for an international response framework yeah all right let's put the humanitarian's against the responders um boy did i did i learn a lot about this and a fema i'd like to say yeah um yeah this is kind of an interesting topic first thing is um whether roge had all his political appointees or not most of the u.s.c id's core capabilities was working with ngo's in grant programs part of the problem we had was the un compound was destroyed so a lot of the un leadership and where you'd originally start from got devastated we also had a situation as the president pointed out the united states has been able to project our force across the world here we had a country next door to us that we were going to constrain ourselves through the traditional roles of response and again the president of Haiti had made it very clear to our president that he wanted our help this was not a question about you know country clearance or sovereignty of Haiti the Haitian president said i need your help and so it really became the proximity of where the resources were coming from and where the united states we had urban search and rescue teams we had two of which are dual certified for international response in us id but we had additional teams we had teams in miami who actually could tap into their local fire departments and get Haitian uh americans that actually know the country know the language that could go down there we had satellite communication capabilities we had public information that we could staff them up with and provide them greater support and the president made it very clear to all of the agencies that us id was the lead but we were all in in supporting this and so i think it set you know again this role that people said well this is really outside of FEMA's normal parameters i'm not going well what were we doing coordinating search and rescue putting in communications to support those search and rescue teams adding repeaters doing public information gee sounds like what we do anywhere the fact that you know FEMA doesn't have a charter to go out of the country of course not we didn't do it by ourselves we did it under the taskings from us id so for me i think it's a lesson that probably within this western hemisphere um when these types of events occur that the traditional response of grants and those programs the fact that you actually have significant number of local and state response capabilities that could go i think you may see more of that in this hemisphere it doesn't really work well once you get out of this hemisphere just because the cost of sending teams versus approximately other resources within the international community in fact there's a pretty healthy debate going over in the e you right now about this within those folks who believe there should be an international response outside of the humanitarian channels i will leave that debate to the state department in the un if i am tasked we are prepared to support but that is a it's a very lively debate upon the uh response community particularly the international uh urban search and rescue and other teams and the more traditional humanitarian but i am focused on what we do here inside of this country and if i'm asked and tasked by ross to support him in the future we are prepared to go i mean we essentially do what we do all right thank you it's uh somebody over the gentleman right here raises him and then we'll work our back way across there like a leo bosner retired fema thanks for great presentation by the way i almost wish i hadn't retired almost almost um i want to ask uh mr figure to comment on three issues that i saw as a fema employee during hurricane Katrina that causes real problems and ask what he's what he's been doing i'm sure he's been doing a lot to address generically issues like this one was that we had really lost by 2005 a lot of our state and local connectivity and credibility and it was hard for people to work quickly by then i think with our partners uh second was the issue of how do we work with homeland security the homeland security people really in my view causes a lot of problems during Katrina i'd like to see how that's been worked out and then um thirdly the question just how we address problems that get identified but never get fixed or problems identified in hurricane and exercise a whole year before Katrina but a year later they hadn't been fixed so what you're doing try to get on top of that and thanks again um well since i was one of them they've reminded me time and time again just because i'm up here in washington they know where i live so the state directors and i have a very healthy dialogue the one thing i can say that i appreciate they don't blow smoke up my and i don't blow smoke up theirs we have pretty frank conversations and we'll disagree but i think mark can attest to this normally at the uh the state directors would have a conference and the uh FEMA ministry would routinely fly in and fly out and speak 30 minutes and be gone i try to be there the conference i try to make myself available we have a closed door executive session which is basically everything's on the table we don't hold anything back and we don't script it so i think that that relationship i think the real challenge leo isn't the existing state directors is how many new state directors we've had and you know mark's gone from being one of our rookies to being one of our more senior state emergency management directors in a relatively short period of time so it's really how do we pass on to the new state directors the lessons learned and the network that can support them and so that's one challenge uh the other challenge was how do we work with dhs i just ignore all that stuff that was going on before i got here secretary napolitano uh the depth sec and i we get along great congress basically said the fema administrator one is is a is an elevated position the position was upgraded to a level two executive there's only uh two other level two executives and dhs the deputy secretary and the under secretary for uh management uh the law says that i only report to the secretary that is illegal for me to report through anybody else uh so that was a framework that we walked into but then again secretary napolitano was also a governor she dealt with this from a governor's perspective and you know there's a lot of people say should fema be in or out of dhs i said you know really that debate should be over because congress already has ruled on that you got to focus on doing your job and then there's this other term realizing my press guys freak out when i say this called opm other people's money fema doesn't have an air force but the coast guard and cbp do and one of the great things about being inside of dhs is we're able to leverage a lot of our capabilities so again when admiral alan i mean we don't fight oil spells i don't really have that much stuff but when he needed more people to help uh get out with community messaging helping support public information things like that well those are things we have and so our ability within dhs to share those and work as a team i think really starts to show uh some of the benefits of yeah there was a lot of stuff that happened before but i didn't start with that i started with a new secretary a new organization um focus on doing our job and trying to be a good team member and that seems to have put a lot of that in the past and you always got your little bureaucracies but we even got that in fema so that i think is normal but i think some of the stuff that was going on before we just started off going got a new secretary we got clear direction in our authorities uh we're going to function as a team and then the last one is a lot of times the exercises were so phony that if you learned the lessons you basically learned the lessons to a bad shakespearian play uh so i mean it's sort of like state needs generator freedom says okay we got generators well there's not indefinite generators you know some of the lessons from pam you learned was that the federal government's going to do all this stuff and it's like you can't so the easy answer a lot of time was just to say yes when the more practical answer was going how do you prioritize that where's it coming from is this going to be something that the state would be faster sourcing privately and reimburse i mean this is the thing here's here's this is how bad it got when i got to florida i actually thought fema had an icemaker because every time we had a hurricane we ordered ice from fema so my assumption was fema had an icemaker because every time there's a disaster we'd ask for food water and ice so we get mre's which weren't anything suitable for anybody under the age of 16 and you know over 16 or under 80 it was about the only people that could challenge those things bottled water and ice they turned out they were buying the ice from an icemaker in jacksonville they were buying it through a mission assignment through the core of engineers which was a 20 market for their overhead to have their ace folks and everything they had to have in place so essentially we were buying ice from a florida vendor to be shipped through fema systems but overhead to the us army core of engineers to come to me and then i still had to pay the 25 match so i asked a question why don't we just order the ice from the icemaker ourselves and get fema to reimburse us it is an eligible cost and so a lot of this was again as you go through these exercises really going back and going look folks bring up these issues and we kind of backed off some of the stuff and said there's a part there's a hierarchy to what you got to get done first thing is you got to be able to physically get back into the area of impact so it doesn't matter what our plan says if you cannot get into an area don't care how many generators you have on trucks they're still not there so you know again can you get in there second thing is got to be safe and this is really generally going to be where the governor's going to use their resources their mutual aid for law enforcement their national guard but again if you lose that even the perception that it's safe what happens to all the other parts of the team that don't carry guns they're they're they're stopped the third thing is to search and rescue and if we don't get to the injured they don't get a time out they don't get to do over I mean it's like that's fine and so you start moving through this hierarchy and what you found with PM was you're getting so far down into the event that you weren't focused in on you may not be able to do generators you may not be able to do food distribution if you still haven't got the resources to re-establish enough capability to make sure that it's a safe environment to operate in that you are not diverting away from search and rescue so we're moving back to a hierarchy of what we're calling a mom a maximum to plan against versus we're going to try to build a response out of pieces and hope we get there we're defining an outcome with a time frame and then we're not defining it as only what government can do or only what the federal government can do we're really looking at who's got the best resources who's got the core capabilities and in some cases some of those missions may be better served by actually tasking a contractor or turning to the private sector and asking a different question if you can get your stores open then I don't need trucks hauling food I need to put those trucks now hauling generators to get to the wastewater treatment plant so that you know part of what we're trying to do in our exercise is make them more realistic make them less make them not so much free free form is less scripted and actually get to the issues and then recognize there are no easy answers and so part of this is having the state with the visibility and they're saying we got to make choices and they're not going to be popular choices but they're pragmatic based upon this is what you can get done in the time frame this is how much stuff's available and this is who on the team's got the best solution so we need to work to make sure that is what we're focused on let's go to this gentleman right here and then we'll go back over to the gentleman over here hey Craig Mike Herman how are you good um a lot of this is Mike's fault actually I'm not going to admit to that or deny it um as you know it's not a big surprise for you for me to say that I agree with you that emergency management is primarily state local focus and there's a lot that's tried to be done to focus on that and we've also had a situation in the last particularly since Katrina and some could argue since 9-11 where in the last administration in particular it was presumed that emergency management was really a federal function now we have this dilemma where we're in the tightest fiscal times we have in probably since the Great Depression we have a constitutional and fractally statutory and operational recognition and emergency management is primarily state local responsibility but there are lots of folks in washington who still thinks of federal responsibility and lots of dollars in washington how can you create incentives or do things to really create the opportunities to put the capability back in state local governments where responsibility is and frankly as you point out you can't get there as quickly as you need to well again I think it's some of the things that um longer term is looking at some of the incentives that were built as pilot programs in the Stafford Act one of which was I was very fond of was just a just one of your most costly pieces of a disastrous debris management debris removal what we call category A there was a pilot program that was passed that for a certain period of time would provide that if states and locals developed enhanced mitigation enhanced debris management plans the cost share would not be uh 75-25 it would go to 80-20 the thing about cost shares you need to understand is what congress says in Stafford Act the cost share shall not be less than 75 federal 25 state and local the states determine how they do their match with local some do no match and the locals pay everything some split it some pay it all some do a variation but what the Stafford Act says is the assistance shall not be less than 75 percent we have a rule that says once you get to a high level of impact of uh over 120-130 dollars per capita total state population times 130 once you get to that cost we will move the cost share to 90-10 but we've never really looked at using the Stafford Act as an incentive to provide a higher cost share based upon steps the state takes is to reduce the overall cost and contain cost an example is if the governor will call out their guard and again most states don't have a reserve for disasters they don't have a disaster uh you know response fund like we do with the drf so for them it comes out of budget comes out of operating costs but the reality is the difference between them calling out their guard are we getting a tasking that we end up tasking the dod under a title 10 is actually the cost is far greater than whatever the 25 percent match was so trying to incentivize that where we can provide with our disasters if the states are doing more to contain cost and doing more of what they can do through their contracting and save us money could you look at things like cost share so these are some of the strategies if you look at the deficit uh uh presidential deficit commission reduction commission this some things are pointing out is the Stafford Act and the way declarations have occurred are really not driving that what they're doing is they're serving as almost to a safety net at a very low level so it's not really driving this incentive to increase capability at the state and local levels and it's it's actually getting into an area where is this going to be sustainable uh so again i think if you look at the presidential budget recommendations for 11 and 12 one of the things that we're still funding and it's an interesting program because of its history is the emergency management performance grant programs those programs got all the way back to civil defense and it's one of the very few programs that ever funded positions and it is constantly under attack and everything like that but the the the cost savings you know because i'm kind of you know when i look at this is like okay why is this a good idea to pay for staff in state and local governments and what is inherently a state and local responsibility well this is the one area that historically has been the least supported at the local level but where you do have a program can significantly reduce your state and federal response cost my experience in florida was where i had strong county programs my costs were pretty low i just had to bring them stuff but where they didn't have a strong program i had to bring in management teams a lot more capabilities and that cost meant that until those teams were there we were delayed in our response and our costs went higher so it's it's again where do we make our strategic investments you know this term how do you buy down risk it's kind of a hard thing to say when you're dealing with a variety of hazards but if you can increase capability that you can show reduces the overall cost and reduces the frequency of how many times we end up having to task federal agencies to do something then there are some savings but it is you know in this fiscal environment you know here's the bottom line you really want to get to the cost of disasters start getting some incentive in there to really push building codes that are based upon the hazards of the states they're in and use that as leverage to get states to adopt stronger codes everybody says well you're going to price out the homes it's a cost of living thing you know people can't afford houses i have people in florida that had homes built before the statewide unified building code that were bought affordable they lost everything because they were upside down their mortgages their insurance didn't do replacement cost and their roofs were not able to withstand a category one hurricane while their neighbors whose home was built after the unified building code in the same price range selling in the same markets didn't lose their homes because their roof didn't blow off so you know this is you know it isn't going to be easy but the staff would act as itself is not the tool that's going to drive this unless we figure out how we can build incentives in there so that the states in the locals on the front end are actually responding more aggressively reducing the overall cost particularly when it comes to things like holding down cost on big ticket items like debris gentlemen right over here it's hi my name is peter hide i'm just an interested bystander but um rarely does that occur in this town got good benefits anyway you mentioned in your remarks the importance of using the public as a resource yep i think that's a really important concept and resiliency of a society being able to recover after a disaster um people want to be soldiers not victims and to some extent it seems that with the ubiquitousness of social media that offers a tool to coordinate the public in a way that we've never enjoyed in the past and i was just curious to what extent fema is developing a strategy through which you could coordinate people's movements their participation etc etc thank you okay well i actually for saw this i was actually tweeting yesterday that the uh the biggest danger at fema now wasn't the creation of acronyms it was new hashtags and that at some point a hashtag would be used in the presentation so here it is the hashtag in twitter you want to follow is a pound sign sm em it's a rather lively debate going on among emergency managers of how social media can be used but here's the caveat you cannot use social media to control people or direct people uh this is again if the lessons of the unrest that's occurred overseas as well as our own experience in disasters the the trick is you have to figure out that you now have a tool you never had before and that is we can now engage in a two-way conversation but we cannot tell the public what where to go what to do we can give them information but you don't this isn't a tool where it's like another way of broadcasting to them like over to radio or tv this is actually where they often will determine they actually determine which hashtags are going to use or how they're going to talk about something so it's a it's a new era for us and as somebody wants some of the uh emergency managers said this is sort of like when radios got introduced this is a way of communicating we've never had before so it's starting to tear down some of the barriers between us but here's the trick there's no way for us to have a two-way conversation with millions and millions of people but we can see what the issues are what the concerns are what they're hearing what they're doing and then respond to that and try to do a better job of addressing those issues or concerns and so uh you know we've been using things like uh we did a joint project with uh tennessee and tennessee floods where we did a joint facebook so that we could post uh people were kind of surprised we let people post negative comments about the response they're feeling that we were going to censor that the only thing we were censoring was anything that was offensive to the general public but if it was critical fine um i'm trying to get my guys to blog and actually put information out there that don't read like press releases and then allow people to comment about that um and using twitter as a dynamic tool again not as another tool to issue a 140 character press release but to put information out there and then see what people respond back to and it's actually become something pretty fascinating within the emergency management world it's actually breaking down and speeding up communication upon emergency managers at all levels volunteer NGOs and their and government about how fast this is emerging and changing and ideas and techniques that traditionally was limited to conferences and courses so here's the joke fema would like to innovate at something faster than the speed of government and so we're looking at social media and other tools that we're not so dictating it as we're followers trying to learn how the public uses these tools and the reality we need to fit how they use it not make them fit how we operate rams go ahead to the uniform over here thanks sir um i have a question okay guess your where's the mic and get your name and affiliation please thanks major tom lesnick from the air force not representing the air force just in the air force a question about a question about managing expectations and uh speaking plainly obviously you're you're a plain spoken guy um it seems as though there's a murkiness to every event immediately following a disaster there's an expectation we're going to go from uh incident to recovery right away and then emerges a leader who speaks clearly and forthrightly what steps have you taken to talk to your regional officers about being forthright with the public so that they have an understanding of when recovery phase is going to take place i hope i've asked that question clearly um it seems as though a enabral alan always emerges after confusion a general honoree always emerges after confusion how do we get that person up front right away because i truly feel as though populations embrace those characters and it helps communities heal well the person that would normally deploy into a state in that situation as a federal coordinating officer and i've given clear instructions the first one i see in front of the governor briefing i shoot um my message to my federal coordinating officers is pretty straightforward as long as the mark cooper and his governor are getting things done and we have an embarrassed president we've had a good day and i think this is one of the things about making clear femas in a supporting role we're not in we're not running the disaster also as you say we need to be clear about what we can and can't do there's a lot of mythology about when people hear about individual assistance that we're going to make everybody hold and the first thing i do is going you can be made whole with thirty thousand dollars if we max out every piece of the programs and everything you can get which is rare you know the average amount of money people get from fema most disasters is it's about twenty two to twenty four hundred dollars in the tennessee floods is a little bit higher because of the flood damage but it was a little less than eight thousand dollars and so one of the things about it is with our regional administrators building the team with the states and with the governors particularly with new governors making sure that we all understand what our programs can and can't do and we find that the best advocates for this is the governor speaking to their citizens explaining what they are doing how fema is going to help and what we can do but it's also being clear not that we'll go in there and say we're going to fix everything make everybody hold everything's going back to normal it's a disaster all right there were losses people died people's homes were destroyed and again the fema programs are not designed nor was it the intention of congress that stafford act make communities whole and make people whole it is a tool to start the process there are other programs there are other capabilities but too many people have made the stafford act in fema central to that we have all the answers and all the funds quite honestly in tennessee the folks that were in shelters and leo knows this we would go into a disaster and put people in a fema housing program all right our programs statutorily and by rule we go about 18 months then we don't have any more capability go but if you're in a shelter after a flood two weeks after it you're not going to be a fema program for 18 months you're going to have a long-term issue because you're not in a shelter two weeks after a flood because you've got options so part of this is building a better team and coming in with a better program who's got the best program for those people displaced that have long-term housing needs they're going to need to be supported it's HUD so why wait 18 months so one of the things we've been doing as part of the administration is building the team around who's got the best capabilities and so we brought HUD with us into those shelters and began leasing people into the HUD housing program versus putting them into a fema program as an intermediate step because the reality was they needed a long-term housing solution not a temporary solution and so these are the types of things you come back and you know people like talking about managing expectations i'm like good luck what you got to focus in on is what the needs are there's a lot of ones out there but there are certain essential needs you got to focus on the first one is if the community isn't safe you're not going to step two if people don't have a place to live you can't get jobs back if the schools don't open people aren't going to stay so you know people would like to be held harmless they want everything to be great they want to look this my theory in florida was if you're complaining about how long the line is to get your free eyes it's a good day you're breathing you're alive so decide the room anyone from here jenny sir from north com could you tell us a little bit about the uh if there's any effort to revise hspd8 and to address some of the planning synchronization and coordination problems of federal plans yeah it's uh national security staff have been working on that that was one of the uh early hspds they've been reviewing it's in the interagency it's actually now out in concurrence project with the process with the deputies uh but again as i've been known to do is like that's i'm not waiting uh we're charging ahead focusing on using catastrophic is kind of a a benchmark to plan against to go if our systems don't work in that i've never seen anything scale up and work in a disaster so if you can work these issues and figure out how you deal with the big issues and those challenges then it's it's easier to scale down so we've been less focused a lot of people like to focus on scenarios i was a paramedic uh for a while and i kind of asked this question so what kind of different paramedic do you need if it's a weapons of mass destruction versus a building collapse versus a flood i mean how many different kind of paramedics are there essentially you break it down into what you do and what you're trained to do and you may have some enhanced skills but the bottom line is you don't suddenly become something you're not and so when people are so focused on scenarios as driving it's almost like you need a whole different team it's like there is not a whole different team the whole thing about all hazards we use a lot in emergency management wasn't there all the same but the mayor is the mayor it doesn't matter what happens what disaster whose authority is what federal entity is going to show up the mayor is the mayor the police chiefs the police chiefs the superintendent schools superintendent schools and hey guess what when you really boil it down you're going to do inherently what you're trained to do it may be more of one side or the other there may be different agencies that have lead responsibilities but guess what emergency management does who's got the best answer who's got the best team then our job is on behalf of our authority having jurisdiction make sure we're all working to support that one of the lessons i learned is when you got state veterinarians set up a command post ordering up phone lines and setting up and trying to build out these things that's that many more state veterinarians not focus on an animal disease outbreak and once they figured out that we weren't coming in there to run their job they realized that the emergency management team we can support a state veterinarian deal on the animal disease outbreak and help them with all of their logistical needs so that the state veterinarians could be state veterinarians and do the epi investigation instead of trying to figure out how to find billeting rent cars and schedule meetings. Let's go all the way in the back and left side over here. Thank you sir. Clyde Pirce, Embassy of Barbados. Sir, in your experience the question of security or security concerns or even in my view fear of victims how has that impacted on on your ability to to operate effectively and can you cite you know any examples to illustrate it. Thank you. Yeah the the hurricanes that we ran into in 04 really gave me an opportunity. I'd kind of been bubbling around with this since I became the state director and we were dealing with the immediate aftermath of September 11th and the anthrax attacks which actually the first ones were at the AMI building down in Florida and dealing with some of those things and I began looking at what we had learned from Hurricane Andrew and applying it against the the recent attacks and one of the things I began to really try to get across the team was we don't have time to assess. Every time we send people out to assess how bad it is is the last time we have to respond and that's when I first said why don't we just respond like it's bad. The traditional way we would do security is you'd wait till there was a problem then you start calling out the guard and sending them there. I said well why don't we just send the guard there in the first place. I had a great general at that time agent general of the Florida Guard Major General Burnett and he coined the term presence is a mission. That if we wait for security to become an issue we lose control nor did it require us to have somebody on each street corner with a gun. In many cases if you had a Humvee or a sheriff's deputy or even a utility truck immediately in the area afterwards it reassured people you you really kind of come back to what people go through in the trauma of a disaster and how they are dealing with that and the first thing they deal with is they're cut off they have no communications they don't know what's going on and they oftentimes they only know what's around them as far as they can walk in as far as they can see. So this isolation tends to start driving a lot of the situations that people will allude to and say well it's looting and other things well it's actually pretty much survival mechanisms but if people see a presence of authority a it means they know they're not by themselves somebody got there all right two it reassures them that help is coming and so we would we would and with hurricanes coming in which is something we could see we would just deploy based upon it was going to be bad and we would try to get in right behind the winds and I had a lot of sheriffs in Florida were quite angry at me because how dare I suggest they didn't have full control and who was I to come into their county and I'm like look here's the way it's going to work they're going to show up you want to get mad talk to my boss he's the governor and he actually has this authority and oh by the way your guys have been working their rear ends off getting ready for the storm evacuating wouldn't it be nice to get some relief in here so they don't have to go straight into directing traffic so they can check on their families and hey if we only going to be here a day or so let us do some of the stuff to help you so your guys can take care of their families then come back and it's yours we're not taking charge sheriff you're in charge but here's some help and at first it was a it was a turf issue but afterwards people got it and it we did not have and again I had areas that were subject to the things that you would have seen in Katrina but on much smaller scales it just didn't happen you know you get reports of looting but it was very isolated but what we got time and time again and this is something any governor that's been in the business will learn one of the best things a governor can do to show people that they have seriously committed to respond to this disaster is to see the guard got called out and so you sometimes you focus so much on you know the idea of nobody's shooting and nothing's happening you wait it's it's also a very psychologically powerful tool and again you know Andre was right you don't walk around with your guns pointed all right just being there in uniform just being there in the vehicles and being seen is really for what we found was what settled things down and it actually started doing something a little bit more different in that once people saw them people started coming out and realizing I need to go do something so they weren't just at their house because a lot of people they wouldn't even leave their property but once they started seeing the guard and see the our Florida Highway Patrol and other sheriff's office and we had a really robust mutual aid and stuff going in people's then started getting back and leaving their homes going back to their place of work or going back and seeing how bad the school was damaged and they started moving back into what are the things we need to get going to get on our feet again they weren't holed up and so again this is this tendency that we only bring out security when we lose it it's basically you've lost because it's going to take you a better part of three to four days in our experience to get control again you're going to require vastly more forces than you had in the first place and you escalate the risk you're going to have to use deadly force which again nothing's happening to you do that so it's a different way of approaching it particularly in the islands down there is you guys get hit people again if they don't see authority and they don't see hope and everything's pretty bad they're going to start their own survival mechanisms and then that gets kind of scary after that when that starts to break down and they don't see that government's got some control so it's a way of looking at it it's not it's again it's not this thing where as emergency manager we're always taught you have to overwhelm the first level to go to the next level to go to the next level what I call the domino's theory of failure which is what it usually turned out to and if you wait until you know how bad it is it's like we were really big on sending assessment teams in afterwards to survey the damages to report back up and go to we need it I just took the approach you know if you got a category three hitting the coastline it's probably bad unless it's the king's wrench in Texas which apparently you can hit with category four and the cows just turn backwards to it but um you know if you get a major earthquake you know you get a big hurricane coming in I mean really how much assessment do you have to have to know you're going to need stuff and there's always this risk people want to be cost-conscious look there's people that accuse me of this that's like I basically tell you you can be fast you can be cheaper you can be accurate pick one I don't run a disaster that way for seven months but in the first 72 hours it is a lot better to have too much it's like I tell my guys and for those of you that are recording this in members of congress or your staffs that are seeing this um if I don't have enough stuff there fast enough I'm going to get fired if I have too much stuff you're going to call a hearing you pick well on that note um no that's great I was I'm still back on the cow reference so uh no that's uh unfortunately this is all all the time we have to be respectful of uh mr. to few gates time this has been absolutely fascinating um discussion really enlightening and appreciate you being so open and receptive to the question so thank you very much for taking some time out of your schedule thank you