 We now have our resilient homeland presentation and discussion, and we have adopted the British theme of keep calm and carry on from World War II. This will be a presentation and conversation on the homeland security aspect of resilience, and I want to quickly introduce the people who will be participating in this session starting with our Emerson Fellett, the New America Foundation, Amanda Ripley, who will be moderating the discussion. She is the author of The Unthinkable, Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why, and she got into the subject having covered 9-11 in its aftermath while she was on staff at Time Magazine. I'll go ahead and also introduce Thad Allen, who is a retired admiral in the United States Coast Guard and has really had to handle, cope, manage our resilient response to a number of different disasters, both in terms of on the terrorism national security side after 9-11 at the Coast Guard, as well as as the Coast Guard's chief of staff in 2005, taking command of the Federal Government's response to Hurricane Katrina and Rita. In 2010, he served as the national incident commander for the Federal Government's response to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, and so lots of frontline experience with these issues. He, Admiral Thad Allen is now the Senior Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton here in Washington, and maybe we can introduce the other folks later so you guys can get on with your conversation. Okay. Thanks, Andres. Well, thank you all for being here and thank you to Admiral Allen for being here as well. I figured if there was anyone who knew from resilience, it was you. I first met Admiral Allen shortly after Hurricane Katrina, before Hurricane, just days before Hurricane Rita, when I spent the day following him around for Time Magazine. And one of the first things we did was we went up, you probably don't remember this. It wasn't probably as big of a deal for you as it was for me, but we went up in a Coast Guard helicopter and looked at the Gulf Coast from above. And it was just the kind of thing that you really can't describe in words and the kind of thing you really needed to see, right? Would you agree to understand the scale of the devastation? So before we talk about that, though, I want to give you a quick synopsis of Admiral Allen's strange tendency to be in places where trouble happens. It's bizarre. In 1999, he led the Coast Guard unit that brought a hypothermic Cuban boy named Eileen Gonzalez to U.S. soil. On 9-11, he was the commander of the Atlantic area for the Coast Guard, which meant that within hours of the terrorist attacks, he had blocked off every major port in the United States, East Coast of the United States, and oversaw the, for months and years afterward, oversaw the metamorphosis of the Coast Guard into a homeland security force in addition to everything else it had been doing. And actually, you probably don't know, most of you, how much the Coast Guard does. It's kind of an amazing catch-all in some ways, from narcotics to search and rescue to antipiracy, by which I mean actual pirates, and environmental protection. So it's a long list and a lot of change that has happened over the years. And then in 2005, obviously, President Bush put Admiral Allen in charge of the federal response to Katrina, and then just seconds away from retiring in 2010 after 39 years of service, President Obama asked him to lead the federal unified response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. So you see what I mean? There's sort of a forest-gump thing happening here. Much smarter than forest-gump, but the same kind of thing. So one of the things that strikes me about that is that the Coast Guard is a place where men and women spend much of their lives on water. And many of those jobs are not really water jobs, some are, but certainly the response to Katrina, much of it, was not. Was there something that you think was resilient about the Coast Guard as an organization? I mean, what made it particularly agile, even though it was a part of Department of Homeland Security when Katrina happened, even though it's a big organization and as part of the government, it seemed to be, relatively speaking, more agile and more capable of taking measured risk? I think I'll give you two points here. The first is that we give a lot of autonomy and freedom of action to our operating units. And we don't have to go to higher authority to move them from different parts of the country, so we're able to assemble aircraft and get them down to the New Orleans area and put them in the right place so when the weather passes, we could come in behind, since we had flying conditions and take care of business and we ended up saving over 30,000 people. The other thing that was really important in the Katrina response is that when we have a storm approaching, we evacuate our families. There was a tremendous amount of concern in New Orleans with local police and fire departments that were trying to be recalled. And because of the residency requirements, a lot of them are putting into positions, do I assist my family or do I go to work? We really are people of that burden so they can focus on helping the public. And in fact, I think, am I right in remembering that you started that evacuation before the official evacuation? Yeah, a day before, right? Before the official evacuation in New Orleans, which came later than it should have. So you would agree that there are certain characteristics that made the Coast Guard resilient in some ways and flexible in some ways. Is that something that the Coast Guard had to fight for to retain over the years? I mean, why? Why? Well, I think it was a natural evolution because we have a lot of operating units that are on barrier islands and subject to extreme weather and even when it's not hurricane season. So you're sort of every day dealing with disaster. You have to deal with the fact that you may have to relocate your forces and then you have to come back in and reestablish your ability to operate because the American public expects you to execute your mission as part of the response and recovery. So you need to optimize your capacity to do that and you have to think about it ahead of time and that includes making units more resilient and how you're going to cope with the event when it occurs and that includes preparing for it. Now, my sense from a different point of view in interviewing survivors over the years is that you will often find in cases of mass devastation, you will also find pockets of resilience, sometimes entire communities that are surprisingly resilient. And it doesn't always correlate often, but not always with income, although often it does, but not always. Would you agree with that? I would agree. I think the glue that binds communities and makes them more resilient after an event has to do with networks, collaboration, partnerships. But the glue that underpins all of that when you have a group of people that are able to perform extraordinary things after one of those types of events in my view is some kind of a communal understanding of values and trust. So to give an example of that, could you tell me a little bit about what you learned about the community of Joplin, which what happened there before the tornado that devastated Joplin on May 22nd, I believe it was, 2011? First of all, there's not a lot of water around Joplin. I had been retired from the Coast Guard and I was actually working as a senior fellow for the Rand Corporation. And we had established a partnership with the state of Missouri and we were going through the process of preparing a risk assessment guide and a planning guide for facilities and institutions that had children were not in the home when one of these things happens. And of course that's exactly what happened to some extent when the tornado hit Joplin. So children were at school, right? Yeah, daycare centers and those types of things. So we assembled in Missouri to have a daylong conference to talk about this, to roll out the guide and to work with public safety officials, home and security officials and education officials from the state of Missouri. And I had the extraordinary opportunity to meet an individual named CJ Huff, who is the superintendent of schools in Joplin. CJ Huff had been an elementary school teacher. He had been made the superintendent three years before the event and he immediately took on the goal to reduce the dropout rate in the high school. He went out and he engaged the community. He found corporate sponsors. He found mentors. He found tutors and he did an extraordinary job of reducing the dropout rate. But what happened on the 22nd of May, they were actually holding high school graduation at a local university across town. The tornado went right over the school and if you go on YouTube, you can see the security cameras, watching the cafeteria and the auditorium basically implode. And he was driving home and drove right through the path of the storm and found that about 30 or 40% of the facilities in the school district, they were actually unusable at that point. That was on a Thursday. The next day, the Joplin school district made payroll. Brought us folks in, got the servers up. The next day people were lined up to say, what can we do? And what he found out and what I found out in a discussion with him was, it doesn't matter what you do before the event. To the extent you create collaboration networks, partnerships and trust in the community, you create a more resilient community and they are adaptable and they will come together and support the community. And the extraordinary thing that happened in Joplin was they started school on time last fall and they put a football team on the field that actually was a subject of a special by ESPN. And this guy, in my view, I meet a lot of people that have done extraordinary things in my life. CJ Huff is a national hero. And there's actually, you can go on YouTube and see the speech that he gave, right? When he welcomed all of his teachers back for the school year and it's quite an emotional moving talk. And I think that's a great example because it shows you how this kind of thing has to be baked in before the event happens, right? I have my own, we have some people that are very well educated and research on resiliency here. I can give you a simple sailor's definition if you'd like. There are two ways to think of resiliency. One is the actual activity itself and the other one is the capacity to do something. And if you look at what we had to deal with in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina coming into New Orleans, I answered a lot of questions about whether or not there were social equity issues involved in that response. And one of my responses when I talked about it is that the event does not create the preconditions. But to the extent that the precondition, that sounds rather simple, but to the extent that preconditions exist, they can exacerbate the effects of the storm or the event. And when I look at resiliency, I kind of see a parallel to the human immune system. And if those precursors not in place to be compliant with the orders they're being given and participate in the recovery, it's like a person with a low immune system getting sick. That is very simple. It might be an elegant way to look at resiliency and what it really means. Yeah, I think that's a good way of looking at it. And it's sort of, well, I mean, in part of me thinks, well, what is the purpose of, I mean, if that is certainly true, what are the implications? And I guess one implication is that investing in relationships, networks, trust in New Orleans, for example, there was very little respect for the rule of law for a lot of reasons. There was a lot of incidents with corruption within the police department, within the prosecutor's office, the defense attorneys. And so everything was sort of corroded before the hurricane struck. I would actually look at some other factors. I would look at anywhere from childhood nutrition, level of education, high density, low income housing, lack of transportation, access. Those are all conditions that precede the event but exacerbate to the extent that they are present the effects of the event. And I can also compare and contrast. Hurricane Rita was one of the most devastating hurricanes that's ever hit this country. I think it's in the top 10. You heard very little about it for a couple of reasons. Number one, we already had forces on the ground and we moved right away and came in to Lake Charles right after the storm came ashore. But anybody that's ever been to Southwest Louisiana down around Cameron knows that those people are so self-reliant and there's such a culture down there. It was like, give us what we're doing, leave us alone, we're gonna build our town. Like get out of our way. And it was almost palpable when you walk into that town, the attitude that they had because of the relationships they had and the trust they had in the community. There's a tension though, right? And this is my last question for you and then we're gonna let you, we're gonna release you and we're gonna have a small panel of other folks up here. But there's a tension, right? Because you're there on behalf of the federal government, right? And the federal government has over the past 100 years or so done more and more and more to help respond to disasters. Not always effectively, but has certainly done more. I think that that has been the trend line. And there's a tension there with creating a certain expectation. Would you agree? In other words- I think there is, but I think everybody needs to understand that there's a responsibility for preparedness in this country. It doesn't only exist at the federal level, it goes clear down to the individual. And real resiliency and real response capability has to be for the least 24 of the first 72 hours, something that local communities have embedded to understand and can activate. Because the U.S. government can come in. I also think there's an evolving perception about what a whole government response with the government should do. And I think there's a changing social contract that probably needs to be renegotiated about what the expectations are of government by the limits of law, resources and what they can do. But I would tell you there's a responsibility at every level clear down to the individual to be prepared. Okay. All right, well thank you very much for being here. I appreciate it. My pleasure, thank you. Thank you.