**Under Secretary Foresman Discusses Building Relationships and
Collaboration For a Culture of Preparedness**

United States Chamber of Commerce

Washington, D.C.

June 1, 2006

10:00 A.M. EDT

ASSISTANT SECRETARY TRACY A. HENKE: I don't need to talk to you guys
about partnerships and collaboration, and co-ordination, and the
importance of citizen preparedness, because you live and breathe it
every single day. So does our next speaker.

Under Secretary, George Foresman leads by example. For those of you who
don't know him, he has spent 20 plus years, I don't have his bio in
front of me, I'm trying to make certain that I remember all of this, 20
plus years though, in public service, in working specifically on
Homeland Security related issues, on securing and protecting the state
of Virginia, and now helping prepare, secure, and protect the United
States of America.

Under Secretary, Foresman is the Under Secretary for the Directorate of
Preparedness, and as the Under Secretary, he leads the team. He ensures
our coordination, our collaboration, in that we are moving forward in
unison to once again accomplish our shared objectives, shared with all
of you. A safer, more secure, more prepared nation.

So, with that, ladies and gentleman, please welcome Under Secretary,
George Foresman. (Applause)

UNDER SECRETARY GEORGE W. FORESMAN: Well, good morning.

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

UNDER SECRETARY FORESMAN: Good morning!

AUDIENCE: Good morning!

UNDER SECRETARY FORESMAN: Thank you. I'm exceptionally pleased to be
here and I want to tell you a brief story on the front-end. I noticed
that a few people have left after the first speaker, (Laughter) but I'm
exceptionally pleased that you all stayed to spend a little bit of time
with me.

One of the things I will point out, Liz DiGregorio who is sitting
somewhere around here, Liz is sitting in the back, a dear old friend of
mine, came in and threw me up against the wall about three months ago
and said, "Look, we're going to have the Council together. I want you to
come and keynote it." I said, "Liz, I'm there. You know how I feel about
citizen preparedness, we're good to go." As we got closer, we all know
that today is the, in addition to my daughter's birthday, the first day
of hurricane season, I sometimes think she is a hurricane, (Laughter)
but nevertheless, Liz came to me and said, "You know, we absolutely want
you to keynote it. We want you to be there, get us off to a good start,
and please make sure you can do that." So, Liz cemented it, re-cemented
it, checked about every other day to make sure it was still on my
schedule, but three weeks ago, first day of hurricane season, the
necessity of making sure that we were ready, we were looking at maybe
having an exercise today, you know. We sent word to Liz that, looks
good, but is questionable. Well, you all know Liz. (Laughter) That
wasn't acceptable. So, she started pressing me and she said, "You know,
Mr. Under Secretary, you've promised. We have got everybody lined up.
They need to hear the message. We're going to bring them to town. If you
can't be there, you have absolutely got to make sure that you've have
got a crackerjack alternative kickoff speaker." (Laughter) I did my job
Liz.

But, I don't underestimate the fact that President Bush did come over
and used this as a backdrop to talk about what we need to do to do a
better job of preparing America and preparing our communities to deal
with the risks that we face in the 21st century.

And while he spent much of his time today talking about the challenges
that we face with securing the borders, ensuring that we have the
correct immigration policy in place, the one thing I intuitively
understand with about four-and-a-half months on this job, is that the
President clearly understands, the federal government understands, our
state local partners understand that what government does to prepare
for, to respond to, to recover from, to prevent the wide range of
threats and hazards that faces on a day-to-day basis that make up this
risk continuum in our country, that as important as that is and as
important as it is to do that in partnership with the thousands and
hundreds of thousands of businesses in the private sector, large and
small, all of those things together make for a more secure nation and
they make for a safer nation.

But ultimately, at the end of the day, government and the private sector
can do everything that it should be doing and needs to be doing, and we
will not be successful with ensuring the safety and security of America
against the full range of hazards and threats that create our risk
continuum because frankly put, if the American citizens are not part of
our preparedness, if they don't share in a culture of preparedness in
this country, we're not going to be as safe and secure as we need to be.

And I think that one of the great opportunities that we have here on the
front-end of the 21st century is to redefine how we manage risks as a
nation, as state, as communities, but more importantly how we manage
risk as individuals.

You know, in the 1970s, one of the things that we identified was that
there was a precipitous number of fire-related deaths in this country
and, you know, we said, gosh, on a per-capita basis, too many people are
dying, children are dying, adults are dying, businesses and our economy
is being impacted, and really the security in many ways of us as
individuals was being undermined.

And so, the fire community got together and they said, you know, this
shouldn't be that hard. We need to have a three-pronged effort. We need
to put smoke detectors in homes, we need to change building codes, and
we need to educate the generation of school children that went to our
schools.

And interestingly enough, we did all of those things. But it took more
than 20 years, 1995, before we saw a precipitous reduction in the number
of fire-related deaths in this country. In large part, because those
children who we taught in the 1970s were parents in the 1990s and in the
beginning of the 21st century, and those ingrained values that we gave
to the young men and women who were in our schools became part of the
culture that they carried into their lives as business leaders, that
they carried into their lives as mothers and fathers, and as support
mechanisms within their community.

And so, one of the things that I underscore today is when we talk about
citizen readiness, when we talk about Citizen Corps, when we talk about
the structures and the processes, it fundamentally comes down to
changing personal behavior, and changing personal behavior has to start
with training and education, and that's why I think what Citizen Corps
has done and will do in the future is absolutely critically important.

I was exceptionally pleased that one of the key things that the
President said this morning is that this begins with an intuitive
understanding among policy officials here in Washington, in the
Congress, and in State Legislatures, and in local governing bodies that
investing in citizen education and investing in citizen readiness is a
key part of the equation to investing in the safety and security of
America, and we've got to do more.

We've made great strides over the course of the past four-and-a-half
years, but we haven't made enough strides. And I know that you all are
confronted in local communities on a day-to-day basis, you're confronted
in state capitals on a day-to-day basis, you're confronted in non-profit
groups on a day-to-day basis, and on an individual level you're
confronted with the challenges of how do you change behavior with
limited resources.

And, so, what I want to do is spend a few minutes talking today about
what we need to do to do a better job of harnessing the existing and
building the new.

One of the chief things that I learned when I came to this job here in
Washington is that this is a great city with a lot of great things. And
in fact, when I got to the Department of Homeland Security, I frequently
tell groups, I learned more in the five weeks preparing for my
confirmation process than I learned in three-and-a-half years as a state
official in Virginia.

And that does not fault my predecessors in the department, but it points
to the real challenge that all of us face everyday, and that is
communication. The Department of Homeland Security as we created and
amalgamated 22 federal agencies, 180,000 employees, multiple business
functions, multiple human resource functions, a number of differing
operational processes, as we try to amalgamate those into a single
organizational unit, we've been so busy doing that we've not been able
to communicate as well as we should have.

And I think that one of the great values that Citizen Corps brings to
what we do in communities is you all become the tool, you all become the
impetus for officials to collaborate where maybe they wouldn't be
collaborating otherwise. You bring unlikely folks to the table, to
create an integrated and a synchronized approach to preparedness. You
underscore that as important as it is for government to do what it needs
to do and the private sector to do what it needs to do, that we've got
to be able to unite those and we've got to build into that citizen
readiness.

So, in many ways, I tell folks that our Citizen Corps efforts in America
is what we want to be and what we're doing today, overall, in terms of
our Homeland Security efforts is simply the reality of where we are at,
and it's not what we want to be. It represents individual stovepipes, it
represents individual turf, and as Tracy pointed out and with her great
help and the great help of 180,000 dedicated men and women in the
Department of Homeland Security, we're working everyday to unite
together the independent into the interdependent.

And, one of the things I will just offer to you all is don't
underestimate the value of what Citizen Corps has provided to
communities in terms of an avenue and an incentive for folks of
different backgrounds and different perspectives to be able to come
together.

So, as focused as you all are on doing the Citizen Corps mission, you're
providing a very tangible benefit, a collateral benefit by bringing
together disparate groups for a common purpose.

One of the other things that I recognized when I came into this job in
Washington is that when we think about readiness in America, we've
typically thought about readiness in the context of, are we ready for
fires, are we ready for floods, are we ready for terrorist events, and
we've never thought about it holistically.

One of the recent things that we've done inside the department is we've
gone through a very exhaustive process of looking at all of the
after-action reviews from Hurricane Katrina, the House Report, the
Senate Report, the White House Report, and there are a couple of common
themes.

One of the common themes is many of the findings that have been outlined
in those reports are many of the same findings that we saw in 1992 in a
report titled -- "Hurricane Andrew - Lessons Learned."

And so, what I offer to you today is the Hurricane Andrew report, the
after-action report on the mid-west floods, the Northridge earthquake,
the Murrah Federal Building bombing, we have to differentiate between
what are lessons learned and lessons documented.

And so, a large part of our preparedness efforts here in America today,
as we look at it, is to make sure that we don't simply document the
lessons from Katrina, but that we act on the lessons from Katrina. And
that we take the lessons from Katrina and we wrap them together with the
lessons from things like Andrew and the Northridge earthquake, and the
Murrah Federal Building bombing, and the first bombing and the second
bombing of the World Trade Center. That we wrap them together and that
we create a mosaic of those things that we need to do, those tangible
improvements that we need to make to ensure that we're ready for the
full range of hazards and threats that form risk in this country.
Because this is not about reacting to the last disaster, this is about
preparing for the future, and I can think of no entity that has done
better at that than Citizen Corps.

Created in the aftermath of the tragic attacks on 9/11, it underscores
this whole idea that when we talk about national preparedness, we've go
to be able to harness the full resources of the U.S. national power to
ensure our safety and security.

Our Department of Defense and our military is doing great work overseas.

Here at home, police, fire, law enforcement, public health, emergency
management officials are working hard everyday to make sure that our
communities are safer and that they're more secure.

But at the same time, we also recognize that, to create an integrated
and a unified approach to preparedness in this county, we've got to be
able to do a better job of bringing the private sector and our citizen
volunteer groups and our private nonprofit community, and our
faith-based community to the table in a united effort. And in many ways,
Citizen Corps represents the glue that binds together the disparate
efforts to form that layer of security that we felt was so critical in
the aftermath of 9/11.

One of the other key points that I would offer to you in the aftermath
of 9/11 is average Americans wanted to do something.

How many of you all remember where you were on 9/11, raise your hand?

How many of you don't remember where you where on 9/11? Not everybody
raised their hand, so some of you don't like surveys.

But simply put, there was a spirit of commitment in this country that we
needed to harness, and it was a spirit of commitment that would allow
individual citizens to be part of something broader and bigger, and the
way that we chose to do that was through the Citizen Corps initiative.

And I gotta tell you, it's not easy.

It is easy for me, as the Under Secretary of Preparedness, to go up to
Congress and say, we need more personal protective equipment for
America's first responders.

It is easy for Tracy Henke to go up to the Hill and articulate the need
for better interoperable communications capabilities in communities
across America.

It is easy for our Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection,
Bob Stephan, to be able to go and articulate the value to this country
of being able to make sure that we protect the nation's critical
infrastructure, whether we're talking about the financial services
sector, the energy sector, or others.

But you know, it is difficult to quantify the benefit of citizen
preparedness, or it used to be.

I think one of the tragedies, one of the shining lights in the tragedy
of Hurricane Katrina was the fact that the challenges that we faced,
that New Orleans faced as a city, that the region faced in the greater
metropolitan New Orleans region, that the state of Louisiana faced, and
that, frankly, we as the federal government and other states faced in
dealing with the catastrophic disaster of that size, we understood and
we understand more clearly today than ever before, the importance of
citizen preparedness.

Government will be able to do as much as it can reasonably do in the
aftermath of an emergency or disaster. But we have not built our
government structures nor does business have a motivational incentive to
construct our systems and our processes to be able to deal with a full
range of emergencies and disasters that potentially will confront this
nation. In other words, we're not going to always have shelter for 1.8
million people at the ready, ready to flip a switch to turn it on.

We are not going to have in place transportation resources that could
quickly, in 24 hours or less, move hundreds of thousands people form a
major metropolitan area to other areas in the aftermath of an emergency
or disaster.

So, what do we do?

We have got to be able to have in this country, the capacity for
flexibility that allows us to ensure that while the resources are
available, to mobilize them will require time.

And that capacity comes in the form of what Citizen Corps is able to
offer to communities. It's the ability to be able to ensure that
individuals and that communities are prepared to operate with a level of
independence in the case of communities from their states and in the
cases of states from the federal government to be able to operate with
that level of independence while we mobilize the resources.

I've been in this business for 20 years. I used to be in the fire
services, spent time in law enforcement, spent time in EMS, and you know
the hard battle was why do you have to have the fire truck in the
firehouse? Very simple answer, in case there is a fire. Why do we need
to have Citizen Corps? Because there is going to be a disaster, and
we're never going to have sufficient resources at the federal state or
local level to always have the means ready, to be able to respond within
moments notice to a large-scale catastrophic event like Hurricane
Katrina.

We will be able to mobilize them from across America, but they're not
going to be there in hours, they're going to be there in days.

And so, the way that we create the level of self-sufficiency in a
disaster-impacted community, irrespective of the causative factor, is by
putting in place programs, training and education, that allows
individuals and allows communities outside of the governmental structure
to have that degree of self-sufficiency necessary to sustain themselves
for a period of time, and that's what Citizen Corps is all about.

Now, I'm going to tell you there is a challenge here because I've talked
to many of you all over the course of the last several years on a wide
range of topics, but I'm absolutely passionate about personal and
community preparedness.

And the reason that I'm passionate about it is, I have the seen the
heartbreak and the devastation of disaster victims. And I want to tell
you a little story.

Back in the last 1990s, during Hurricane Floyd, we had a major flood in
a city in Virginia called, Franklin, Virginia. Franklin sits down in the
southeastern portion of Virginia. And when that flood occurred, we did
what we normally did, we had contact with them and about halfway through
the storm, we lost contact with the city of Franklin. We lost contact
with our National Guard. We lost contact with our state, very limited
contact with our state police down there, and we were worried. What was
going on in Franklin?

So, early the next morning, the skies had cleared, we jumped on a
helicopter, we flew down to southeast Virginia, and in the distance, I
knew we were getting close to Franklin, I said to the pilot, I said,
"What's that lake up there?" He said, "That's Franklin."

So, we landed in Franklin, we met with the mayor and he told us about
the value of preparedness. How their fire department, how their city
hall had all been flooded, how they had moved to an alternate location,
how they were continuing to do business, how the citizens were ready to
take care of themselves for a period of time, but that they needed help.
But they had some flexibility in terms of when that help needed to be
there. He said, "We're okay for 24 hours and we may even be okay for 48
hours, but we won't be okay for five days."

And that provided us at the state level in Virginia, the ability to
mobilize the assets that we needed to put on the ground to help the city
of Franklin deal with their flood event.

About four days later, we were back down there, the water had gone down.
I was walking down the street and I can remember, we had one of the
youth corrections groups down there, one of the boot camps as we like to
call them down there, helping to do flood debris removal and flood
cleanup.

We're walking down the street and there is all of this activity except
for this one house at the end of the street, and there is this very
elderly lady sitting on the porch. I went over and I said to her, I
said, "Ma'am, can we help you?" And she said, "No, I'm okay." I said,
"Why are you okay?" She said, "Let me tell you something son," son,
(Laughter) she was very elderly. (Laughter) She said, "I've been through
a lot worse. I've got canned food. I've got a place to sleep. I've got a
roof over my head, and yeah my house is flooded, and my treasures are
ruined, but I've got me and I've got those things that will keep me
operating. All those families up the street, they have children, and
they don't have" \-- she didn't use the word resilience \-- she said,
"they weren't as ready as I was." She said, "You know, they need to get
those children settled down, they need to get their lives back in order,
and I can wait."

And I think that that reminded me and that was a galvanizing point for
me in terms of citizen preparedness. Here is a woman who'd spent her
whole life toiling to live a life of independence and self-sufficiency,
a major disaster occurs, and she was still ready for self-sufficiency
and independence.

And I think what it underscores is, if we can provide to our citizens
that level of self-sufficiency and that level of independence,
particularly in the aftermath of an emergency or disaster, we do one
very important thing \-- we reduce fear. And when you reduce fear, you
increase the capability and the capacity of a community and an
individual to recover.

And so, when you look at our recipe for preparedness in America, it is
in part government, it is in part the private sector, and it is in large
part the American people, because preparedness in America depends on the
ability of the American people to be part of the structure that helps us
prevent, deter and to protect, and to respond, recover, and to mitigate.
And in many ways, they are part of the first line of our defense, both
on the front-end in trying to prevent and protect as well as on the
back-end in terms of responding and recovering.

So, what I say to you all today in the context of where we are and were
we need to go, let me give you a little report card because as I told
you, I don't have any way to measure citizen preparedness.

We'll do a survey, another survey.

How many people in this room have a personal and family disaster plan,
or have participated in a disaster education program that would make you
better able to immediately respond to an emergency or disaster that
affected this building with little or no warning, whether it be a fire
down the hall, major terrorist event, or a natural disaster, please
raise your hand?

How many people don't, raise your hand?

Alright, now I'm going to give you the statistics. The statistics are
about 80%, maybe 85% of you raised your hand, that you do in fact have
in place a plan, you do in fact, you're ready.

When I do this in every other setting and Adam Killian will tell you I
do this on a regular basis, Liz and Tracy know that I know that I do it
on a regular basis, about 10 to 15% of the people raise their hands.

You all live and breathe personal preparedness. You all live and breathe
community preparedness. You all understand the value of making sure that
you all are part of that mosaic, part of that shield to make America
safer and more secure.

I will measure success in this country in terms of what we're doing with
Citizen Corps, and what we're doing with our efforts to prepare
Americans to deal with the full range of risks that we face. When we
walk in the door and I ask that question, 80% or 60%, or some percent
greater than 10 or 15% raise their hands. And it's not that hard.

This morning I got up to drive to work, I got in the car and I put my
seatbelt on, I managed my risk.

This weekend, I will travel out of the region to go give a speech
somewhere. The first thing I will do before I get on the plane is I will
check the weather forecast. I will manage my risk.

What do we do when we change the clocks twice a year? What are we
supposed to do?

AUDIENCE: Check your smoke alarm batteries.

UNDER SECRETARY FORESMAN: Alright, a little better than that.

AUDIENCE: Check your smoke alarm batteries.

UNDER SECRETARY FORESMAN: Check your smoke alarm batteries.

It is an ingrained culture of what we do to manage risk, but
unfortunately, we've made managing risk on the individual and the
collective too difficult in this country.

We've said we want to focus on terrorism that scares people. We say we
want to focus on natural disaster, some people say that does not happen
in my community. Well, what we want to do is focus not on the hazard,
but focus on managing risk. And focus on a culture of preparedness that
allows us to manage risk. That culture that starts with what we do to
manage our risk in the automobile, in our home, in our business, and in
our community.

So, the charge that I give to you all and that I will want report back
on, Liz, is how do we do a better job? How do we make sure that we get
beyond 10 or 15% of the American people who are prepared? You all are
going to talk about that today. You all are going to talk about the way
ahead.

Well, my challenge to you is "think outside the box." What we have done
in the past has worked. What we do in the future has to work better. And
so, I'm, looking for innovation, and I'm looking for out-of-the-box
thinking. Now, that's your part of the deal.

My part of the deal is what can I do to help you?

Well, as the Under Secretary of Preparedness in the Department of
Homeland Security, my job is to not simply look at what we do in the
Department of Homeland Security, but is to look at what we do as a
nation to ensure our resiliency, to be able to protect and prevent, and
to respond and recover against the full range of hazards and threats
that we face on a day-to-day basis.

And if I were to measure our report card, government is doing okay, the
private sector is doing okay, the American public as a whole are not
doing okay.

So, my job working with you all is to provide the avenue and the
motivation, the incentive, the blocking, the tackling, the
quarterbacking, the coaching, all of the other descriptive terms to
allow you all to be successful with taking Citizen Corps to the next
level.

I will commit my time and energy to it, but I need you to commit and
recommit your time, your energy, and your thought process, because as I
said, what we've done to date as worked, what we do in the future has to
work better.

In closing, let me offer just a couple of quick perspectives for the
upcoming hurricane season.

We learned some valuable lessons in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
about what we needed to do at the federal level to make sure that we
were better prepared to support states and communities. We're
implementing those 224 recommendations. I'll give you a few statistics.
About 224 recommendations between the House, the Senate, and the White
House reports, about 43% of those tell us that we're not doing as what
we should be doing in terms of planning and operational procedural
development.

We also know that as we look across those things, that we've got to make
sure that we do a better job of communicating with the public pre-event
as well as post-event.

Having been in this business for nearly a quarter of a century, I have
committed to the Secretary, and I've committed to my partner
stakeholders and I saw Jim Walker and others here, that we're not going
to simply document the lessons from this event, we are in fact going to
learn the lessons from this event, and we're going to learn the lessons
from the events of the past that have not been acted on over the past 10
and 15 years.

The issues we confronted with Katrina were not new, but they were
broader in scope and scale than any that we had seen before.

And if we're going to do this right, we have a moment in time where
we've got sustained federal funding to states and communities, where
we've got a commitment among policy officials in the aftermath of 9/11
and an event like Katrina, that we need to make sure that we're doing a
better job of insuring the safety and security of our communities, of
our states, of our nation as a whole.

The private sector in post-Enron environment is focused more
aggressively on managing risk \-- physical, information technology,
dollar risk.

All of this together is not something that was in place in the aftermath
of Northridge or the aftermath of Hugo or the aftermath of Andrew or the
aftermath of the bombing of the World Trade Center.

So, in many ways folks, we're on the precipice of a perfect storm that
rather than producing tragedy can produce progress. And we have a moment
in time that we need to grab hold of it.

And I will leave you with a thought that when we talk about this moment
in time, there is nothing as critical in terms of our ability to grab
hold of, in terms of grabbing this teachable moment, grabbing this
teachable moment in time for the citizens of America.

I can't do it as the Under Secretary for Preparedness. Secretary
Chertoff can't do it as the Secretary of Homeland Security, and even
President Bush can't do it as America's leader, it's gotta happen in our
communities, in our livings rooms, in our school rooms, with average
Americans who understand, who embrace, and who begin to live a culture
of better preparedness.

We're going to work hard to make sure that we get you more resources,
that we get you the flexibility that you need to have to be able to do
your jobs, but I will tell you, I've put the onus on Liz, no mediocrity
today, make them think hard, make them think innovatively, and we look
forward to continuing our strong partnership.

We're going to push you harder than we've pushed you before. We're going
to give you more resources than we've given you before, don't know how
I'm going to do, but we're going to do it. I am absolutely committed to
doing it, but at the end of the day, I want you all to join with me to
be the disciples of preparedness and the disciples of personal
readiness, and the disciples of Citizen Corps in our communities, in our
states, and in our nation, because I truly do believe, like the
visionaries back in the 1970s that said we can make a difference in how
we deal with fire-related deaths in this country, I think we can make a
real difference in how we deal with the level of community and
individual preparedness in this country, but we need to take advantage
of it.

Thank you, good luck, it has been good being with you. (Applause).