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DISASTERS AND THE DEPARTMENT OF

HOMELAND SECURITY: WHERE DO

WE GO FROM HERE?

(109–47)

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON

TRANSPORTATION AND

INFRASTRUCTURE

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

FEBRUARY 16, 2006

Printed for the use of the

Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure

(
COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE

DON YOUNG, Alaska, Chairman

THOMAS E. PETRI, Wisconsin, Vice-Chair

SHERWOOD L. BOEHLERT, New York

HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

WAYNE T. GILCHREST, Maryland

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

PETER HOEKSTRA, Michigan

VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan

SPENCER BACHUS, Alabama

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

SUE W. KELLY, New York

RICHARD H. BAKER, Louisiana

ROBERT W. NEY, Ohio

FRANK A. LOBIONDO, New Jersey

JERRY MORAN, Kansas

GARY G. MILLER, California

ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina

ROB SIMMONS, Connecticut

HENRY E. BROWN, JR., South Carolina

TIMOTHY V. JOHNSON, Illinois

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

SAM GRAVES, Missouri

MARK R. KENNEDY, Minnesota

BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania

JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas

JIM GERLACH, Pennsylvania

MARIO DIAZ-BALART, Florida

JON C. PORTER, Nevada

TOM OSBORNE, Nebraska

KENNY MARCHANT, Texas

MICHAEL E. SODREL, Indiana

CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania

TED POE, Texas

DAVID G. REICHERT, Washington

CONNIE MACK, Florida

JOHN R. ‘RANDY’ KUHL, JR., New York

LUIS G. FORTUN ̃ O, Puerto Rico

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

CHARLES W. BOUSTANY, JR., Louisiana

JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio

JAMES L. OBERSTAR, Minnesota

NICK J. RAHALL, II, West Virginia

PETER A. DEFAZIO, Oregon

JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

JERROLD NADLER, New York

CORRINE BROWN, Florida

BOB FILNER, California

EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas

GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi

JUANITA MILLENDER-MCDONALD,

California

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California

BILL PASCRELL, JR., New Jersey

LEONARD L. BOSWELL, Iowa

TIM HOLDEN, Pennsylvania

BRIAN BAIRD, Washington

SHELLEY BERKLEY, Nevada

JIM MATHESON, Utah

MICHAEL M. HONDA, California

RICK LARSEN, Washington

MICHAEL E. CAPUANO, Massachusetts

ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York

JULIA CARSON, Indiana

TIMOTHY H. BISHOP, New York

MICHAEL H. MICHAUD, Maine

LINCOLN DAVIS, Tennessee

BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri

ALLYSON Y. SCHWARTZ, Pennsylvania

JOHN T. SALAZAR, Colorado

JOHN BARROW, Georgia

(II)
(III)

CONTENTS

TESTIMONY

Page

Chertoff, Hon. Michael, Secretary, Department of Homeland Security .............. 8

PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

Boozman, Hon. John, of Arkansas ......................................................................... 54

Brown, Hon. Corrine, of Florida ............................................................................. 57

Carnahan, Hon. Russ, of Missouri ......................................................................... 62

Costello, Hon. Jerry F., of Illinois .......................................................................... 75

Cummings, Hon. Elijah, of Maryland .................................................................... 79

Millender-McDonald, Hon. Juanita, of California ................................................. 86

Ney, Hon. Bob, of Ohio ............................................................................................ 88

Rahall, Hon. Nick J., II, of West Virginia ............................................................. 97

Salazar, Hon. John T., of Colorado ........................................................................ 99

Tauscher, Hon. Ellen, of California ........................................................................ 101

Young, Hon. Don, of Alaska .................................................................................... 103

PREPARED STATEMENT SUBMITTED BY THE WITNESS

Chertoff, Hon. Michael ............................................................................................ 63

SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD

Ney, Hon. Robert, a Representative in Congress from Ohio:

Exchange of letters with Lieutenant General Carl A. Strock, Commander

and Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ................................ 93

Photos .................................................................................................................... 95

(1)

DISASTERS AND THE DEPARTMENT OF

HOMELAND SECURITY: WHERE DO WE GO

FROM HERE?

Thursday, February 16, 2006,

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON TRANSPOR- TATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

The committee met, pursuant to call, at 1:30 p.m., in Room 2167,

Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Don Young presiding.

Mr. YOUNG. The Committee will come to order.

Before I start my opening statement, I would encourage the

Ranking Member, myself, and Mr. Shuster and Ms. Norton to

make opening statements, and I would prefer the rest of everybody

to actually ask questions. It is late in the day and I think many

people would like to have this hearing completed as soon as possible and get the information needed. So I respectfully request that.

Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here today.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I think we have agreed to that on

our side.

Mr. YOUNG. Thank you. And I hope my side has agreed too.

I will start all over again, Mr. Secretary. Thank you for being

here today. You have the distinct honor of being the first Secretary

of Homeland Security to testify before this Committee. Even

though this Committee created all the major transportation security laws, we have jurisdiction over FEMA, emergency management, the Coast Guard, we have been sensitive to the demands on

your time and have not required you to personally appear before

this Committee. However, the Department of Homeland Security

and FEMA are so broken with respect to disaster management that

we have no choice but to bring you before Committee so we can try

and hopefully fix this mess.

The House Katrina Task Force report makes clear that the Federal Emergency Management System is in fact broken. Under the

current system, most of the key disaster authorities belong to the

Secretary of Homeland Security. Those authorities and decisions

should be with the emergency management personnel. Ultimately,

it takes the President not get all Federal departments to respond,

and the President needs solid, professional advice to keep the right

choices.

Whether FEMA stays in DHS or not, we have to put FEMA back

together again. FEMA has been weakened and responsibility has

been spread out all over DHS, being prepared responsibly in one

place and response in another. We need to rebuild FEMA’S professional workforce and emergency response teams. We need to improve logistic capacity and the ability to communicate in a disaster.
2

We also have to do a better job building State and local emergency

management capacity. Since 9/11, we have spent almost $15 billion

in equipment, but when we have a big disaster we can’t get it

where it is needed.

We also have to resolve the tension between our all-hazards

emergency system and our terrorism-only preparedness grants.

These programs, as implemented, have driven a wedge between

many State homeland security advisors and State emergency management directors. The Secretary’s recommendation to strengthen

FEMA’S professional workforce, response teams and communications ability is a step in the right direction, but these recommendations only address a fraction of the problems revealed by Katrina’s

report.

I want to thank Chairman Shuster and Congressman Taylor for

their hard work on the House Katrina Task Force. The report you

help write is a hard-hitting, comprehensive review of what worked

and what failed. As the Committee with primary jurisdiction over

emergency management, the Katrina report will be invaluable for

guiding our efforts to draft legislation to fix our disaster system.

Next week, Chairman Shuster will hold hearings in California

and Missouri to solicit advice and recommendations from State and

local officials and disaster professionals. My goal, our goal is to get

the best advice we can and build an emergency management system that works for all disasters.

Again, thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here today, and I welcome your testimony.

Before I conclude, I made a statement on the House floor, when

the homeland was secure. I made the statement that the worst terrorist that ever existed is Mother Nature. More human life, more

property, more disruption has been created by Mother Nature than

even all the wars that mankind has created. And people don’t recognize that.

And I said at that time we must not diminish the ability to respond to disasters created by the worst terrorist in the world, and

that is Mother Nature, and make sure that we do concentrate and

be prepared for that. Not many people listened to me; most people

voted for the homeland security bill, and I have been proven correctly.

This is not your fault, Mr. Secretary. This is the fault of the organization you were given. Now, it is your responsibility to recognize the statement I made and recognize that the worst terrorist

in the world is Mother Nature, and recognize we must be prepared

for the good of this Nation and the people.

At this time I will recognize the gentleman from Minnesota, Mr.

Oberstar.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You stated the case

very well and very thoughtfully, and recited the history, which I

will go into in a moment. But I would characterize this hearing as

a tale of two departments and a tale of two secretaries.

On Tuesday, September 11th, Secretary of Transportation Norm

Mineta was meeting in his office with the Belgian Minister of

Transport to discuss the upcoming US-EU negotiations. In the

course of that meeting, his chief of staff, John Flaherty, stepped

into the office and whispered into his ear. Secretary Mineta jumped
3

up, stepped outside, and learned that some type of aircraft had

crashed into one of the Trade Towers in New York City. It was only

preliminary information, but FAA Administrator Jane Garvey was

in the meeting with Secretary Mineta. He dispatched her to get the

details and to stay in the office and just fill him in on everything.

He went back into the meeting and informed the Belgian Minister that there had been a terrible accident. Moments later, he got

another interruption from his chief of staff; he stepped out again

and learned that an aircraft was approaching the second tower,

and he watched as it impacted. Immediately he called American

Airlines. He called the Chief of Operations of FAA, asked if American Airlines could account for all of its aircraft, asked if other airlines could account for all of their aircraft. He didn’t wait for a

committee or a commission or a directive from the White House,

he just went right directly to carry out what he knew was his responsibility.

He had set up a structure within the Department of Transportation that, when an incident of any transportation magnitude occurs, the Secretary is immediately informed, the Department goes

into an information-gathering mode, monitors press reports, sets up

the personnel who are already designated to accommodate the

surge of inquiries and of information, and centralize that information and direct it to the Secretary and his Chief of Staff.

Then he decided that he needed to talk to the White House about

this matter, decided that not only he needed to contact, but to get

to the White House and go into the secure room and to take control

of the situation. He directed Monty Belger and Administrator Garvey to find out where all aircraft were. It was alarming, they

couldn’t account for all aircraft. All airlines could not tell the Department and the FAA where all their aircraft were. Some could

not be contacted. There might be more attacks coming.

By then he was convinced this was not just a coincidence, but an

attack, and decided that the air space had to be cleared to stop further attacks. That took one hour. He didn’t look around for blame,

didn’t look around for underlings to finger. He acted, decisively.

Within that hour, he gave the most monumental order in the history of aviation in the United States: to clear the domestic air

space of all civil aviation aircraft. That had never been done before.

And all air traffic controllers got to work and took 4,500 commercial aircraft out of the air space of the United States, so that all

screens were dark within two hours.

Also, as Secretary of the Department in which the Coast Guard

was located, he oversaw the mass evacuation of 350,000 people

from Manhattan. In addition, he oversaw the largest maritime

evacuation conducted in the history of the United States. And then

over the next few days worked with all the modes of transportation

and reopened the roads, the tunnels, the bridges, the harbors, and

the railroads to get essential supplies into the area.

That was without notice, without anybody telling, without the

National Weather Service, without the TV news channels reporting

that this massive force of destruction was on its way, as the Chairman said, Mother Nature was headed our way. You knew about it.

The whole world knew about it.
4

I have to offer a disclaimer here. My wife was born and raised

in New Orleans. We watched with very intensive interest. Her two

brothers were still living there.

You get the information, and what happens? You go off to a conference. A very important conference, I am sure, on avian flu. But

you should have been at your point of operation, directing activities, making sure that everything was in place. You had time to do

this. The Secretary of Transportation had no time. He had to make

a split-second, in effect, decision. And he did the right thing. He

made the right choice at the right time. He mobilized people.

I will further add that he has the experience; he served for 20

years on this Committee, one of the most knowledgeable people in

transportation. But he knew what had to be done and he moved

on it.

Now, when this Department of Homeland Security was created,

I opposed moving FEMA to the Department, as the Chairman did,

opposed moving the Coast Guard into it. Moving FEMA into this

new Department of Homeland Security without a clearly defined

Homeland Security role is, in my judgment, a mistake. There is no

delineation of what is homeland security compared to floods, hurricanes, blizzards, earthquakes, tornados. When your home is under

water up to the eaves, are you going to wonder where is FEMA?

Are they on a mission looking for terrorists or are they going to be

on a mission looking for your lost children and rescuing you from

the rooftop of your house? That is what I said in Committee, on the

House floor.

We didn’t prevail, Mr. Chairman, unfortunately. And now we

have a mess.

I am not among those saying the Secretary ought to resign. We

ought to hold him here. We have got to keep him accountable and

make sure that mistakes, grave mistakes that lead to loss of life,

avoidable loss of life, are corrected.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. YOUNG. Thank you. I will say one thing about your statement, one thing I didn’t agree with about the Secretary of Transportation, and I hope you understand this, Mr. Secretary. My people in Alaska were out in the woods, and there were no planes flying and weren’t real happy with the Secretary, believe me. And

that actually happened for two days, until I got him to lift the restriction so they could get out of there. There were no planes flying.

You can’t realize it in Alaska, when we don’t have many roads,

with no air traffic, what it sounds like.

Mr. Shuster?

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

And thank you, Mr. Secretary, for making yourself available to

us here in the Committee.

This hearing is the first of many in the coming weeks in our effort to improve the Nation’s ability to manage disasters of all

kinds. Hurricane Katrina revealed problems in our system at all

levels of government that have to be addressed, and this Committee has a large role in guiding those efforts to fix those problems.

Hurricane Katrina showed us the disaster system is broken. It

must be a top priority of this Committee to fix the Federal Emergency Management System, and the problem is the Federal system
5

is much larger than FEMA, and just retooling FEMA alone won’t

correct that problem; there needs to be more from the top down.

As we listen to the Secretary’s testimony today, and as we begin

to draft our own legislation, I believe we should keep in mind five

critical reform principles. First, catastrophic disasters require presidential involvement to mobilize the assets of the entire Federal

Government, and the President needs solid professional disaster

advice to make the right decisions. The Homeland Security Act and

the National Response Plan put that responsibility into the hands

of the Secretary.

Yet, I am afraid we created a structure where the Federal Government’s top disaster official will likely never be a disaster professional, because the Department’s number one priority is preventing

terrorism, as it should be, it is not responding to disasters. Given

the experience of the last three years, it is clear that disaster management needs to be somebody’s top priority.

Second, active duty DOD forces need to be involved quickly and

in support of civil authorities. In the case of Katrina, it took several days for DHS to negotiate DOD’s mission assignment. As a result, significant active duty forces did not arrive until after the

evacuation of both the Superdome and the Convention Center.

Time is of the essence in a disaster.

Third, the four components of comprehensive emergency management—preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation—need to

be closely integrated and jointly managed. It is important to note

that FEMA’S core mission was never limited to natural disasters

or to response and recovery only. Being a native Pennsylvanian, I

am quite familiar with the incident that launched the creation of

FEMA.

The failed response to the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island

prompted President Carter to unite the preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation functions into a single independent agency.

The comprehensive management of nuclear accidents, terrorism,

natural disasters, and emergencies of all types was FEMA’S core

function from day one, for the simple reason that it doesn’t work

any other way. During Katrina, we saw what happens when preparedness is too far removed from response.

Fourth, we need a strong professional disaster workforce and robust disaster response. Katrina has taught us that the key to a

successful response operation is to invest in our disaster professionals. We have to train them, exercise them, equip them, and

help them build effective working relations with their State and

local partners. The Secretary’s retooling FEMA initiative helps address these issues. We also have to rebuild and, in some instances,

develop capabilities that we have never had before.

For example, FEMA needs to develop or have access to a logistics

system that can move extremely large amounts of resources and

pinpoint their location at any time. FEMA also needs a communications capability that is portable, survivable, and allows for the integration of diverse systems. Following Katrina, we learned that

FEMA’S national response teams had lost their dedicated communications packages to budget cuts, and that many team members

were not even issued Blackberrys. I am astonished that our readiness deteriorated to such a state.
6

Finally, we must resolve the tension between our all-hazards

emergency management system and terrorism preparedness and

response.

I look forward to hearing from you today, Mr. Secretary, and to

working with you as we move to address this important issue.

Thank you. I yield back.

Mr. YOUNG. Thank you, Mr. Shuster.

Ms. Norton?

Ms. NORTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I very much appreciate

your calling this hearing.

And I want to thank the Secretary, who has had a very long day,

just come from our other committee, Homeland Security, and I

want to say that as Ranking Member of the FEMA Subcommittee,

I conceive my role as problem solver, and not here to offer yet another thrashing to the Secretary.

And part of this is because I have some sympathy for you, Mr.

Secretary. Thirty years ago another president asked me to come in

and manage an agency. That agency had been so troubled it had

been all in the newspapers. When it comes to what you are faced

with, I don’t expect you to be in anything but a trial and error situation for years to come, even years after you leave. My criticisms

are guided by the where do we go from here part of the title of this

hearing and my deep concern for the plan you have, at least as I

understand it, which, as I see it, heads FEMA for very deep trouble.

First of all, how do we understand what Katrina tells us?

Katrina was so serious that it goes well beyond the human cost

and the economic cost of the most catastrophic natural disaster in

American history, because Katrina compels the equally serious conclusion that the Country lacks the capacity to either prepare for or

respond to a terrorist attack, which stimulated the establishment

of DHS in the first place.

I say this because, tragically, we must, I now think, face the fact

that Katrina was a dress rehearsal for a terrorist attack, with one

compelling difference. Al Qaeda will not perform, like our outstanding national weather service, with a three day warning. The allhazards approach, Mr. Secretary, I think drowned in Katrina’s

waves and demonstrated that the United States could not respond

to disasters that, unlike terrorist attacks, are entirely predictable,

come every year. That is why the bipartisan leadership of this

Committee has called for making FEMA the nimble, independent

agency, accountable directly to the President of the United States

that it was when it was most effective.

Why would we or why do I focus on structure at all? Because the

problems start with the structure of FEMA. For example, there

were so many bad actors and bad structural barriers that the

threshold, the threshold most obvious actions were not taken. The

National Response Plan, in anticipation of the hurricane, was not

activated until three days late, despite the weather report, so that

resources and plans were not in place before the storm hit landfall.

No one even designated the storm as a catastrophic event in time,

which would have triggered a proactive response instead of waiting

for overwhelmed State and locals to request resources through the

proper channels.
7

Most of all, we need to focus on structure, Mr. Secretary, I think,

because the proposed structural response from DHS would make

things worse. I say that because the response appears to be to dismantle FEMA. Already this dismantling was well along the way

before Katrina, eroding some of FEMA’S preparedness mission by

shifting programs like fire grants and emergency management performance grants, and transferring personnel and budget.

Now comes the coup de grace, with Secretary Chertoff’s second

stage review, which transfers from FEMA altogether any remaining preparedness programs and creates a new preparedness directorate under yet another bureaucracy. The entire emergency management community of experts agrees that transferring preparedness out of FEMA would undermine FEMA’S ability to respond.

DHS’s inspector general warns that disaster preparedness, response and recovery are intricately related and rely on one another

for success.

The Secretary can’t have it both ways. Either he wants all of the

agencies remotely connected to disasters in one agency because

their tasks are interdependent, or they can be disaggregated and

work even better. Members from very different parts of the political

spectrum, from Senator Trent Lott to Congressman John Dingle,

have said the same thing: FEMA cannot be fixed inside the DHS

belly, but should return to its independent status, reinforcing this

Committee’s view.

Mr. Secretary, I want you to know I am on the Homeland Security Committee. I supported consolidation based on my own Federal

experience. But I am not a fool who refuses to learn from actual

experience. That experience tells me that the only way to save the

all-hazards approach is to let FEMA be FEMA, not DHS’s stepchild. The Nation’s increased focus on terrorism preparedness is

absolutely indispensable, but it must be in addition to, and not at

the expense of, FEMA’S far more likely and far more frequent natural disaster responsibilities.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. YOUNG. I thank the good lady for her statement.

Mr. Oberstar.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that all

statements, except those four agreed upon in the bipartisan agreement, be included in the record and any supplemental material accompanying member statements.

Mr. YOUNG. Without objection, so ordered.

Just a short break. I am now going to turn the chair over to Mr.

Shuster, and he will conduct the rest of the hearing.

Mr. Secretary, again, thank you for being here. I believe this will

be constructive, and I hope after this last hearing is over you can

go back and do the charge you have been charged with.

Mr. Shuster.

Mr. SHUSTER. [Presiding] Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Again, welcome, Mr. Secretary. You can proceed with your opening statement.
8

TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE MICHAEL CHERTOFF,

SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

Secretary CHERTOFF. Thank you, Congressman Shuster. I want

to thank Chairman Young and Ranking Member Oberstar for inviting me before the Committee. I am pleased to be the first Secretary

of Homeland Security to be here, not that there were that many

before me. And I am delighted with the fact that we are approaching this hearing with an idea of what can we do to make things

work better in the future and take a constructive approach to this.

I want to begin by saying that obviously Katrina was an unprecedented disaster, and we have all been through a process of learning

lessons. We have had people express their views about what went

right and what went wrong. I know we are going to have further

expressions of views both from the President’s own view that he

has commissioned and from the Senate review which has not yet

been completed.

Some of what I am outlining about the way forward with FEMA

reflects lessons already learned and incorporated, but, frankly, I

am withholding some of the recommendations until we get the final

reports that come in from the President’s review and from the Senate review hopefully within the next few weeks.

I, of course, have very much on my mind the images that I saw

in Katrina, and vividly remember, will never forget, the frustration

and difficulty during those days of not seeing the kind of response

I think this Department owed the people in the Gulf Coast. I also

have another vision ahead of me, and it is June 1, hurricane season, and a very clear recognition of the fact that we have to be prepared to do a better job this hurricane season than we did last hurricane season.

Year in, year out there are challenges. Last year was an exceptional year of challenges. It may not be met again this year by

quite the same degree of catastrophe, but it may be; and, therefore,

we have to get about the business of doing what we can to repair

matters as quickly as possible.

Congressman Oberstar talked a little bit about September 11th

and the Department of Transportation, and it put me in mind of

a couple of observations. When I was in my confirmation hearing

in the Senate a little over a year ago, Senator Bennett, who had

been in the Administration when the Department of Transportation was formed, said it took five years for the Department of

Transportation to become fully matured as an organization. And I

think what he meant by that is that perhaps if 9/11 had happened

in year two, it would have been very much more difficult for the

Department to respond.

I can tell you I was in Government on 9/11; I was at the Department of Justice. I was over at the FBI, in the Operations Center

for the 20 hours immediately following September 11th. By coincidence, my deputy in Homeland Security was the deputy at Transportation. So we have very vivid recollections of the challenge that

we faced in reacting to that particular emergency.

Every catastrophe and every emergency is different. We want to

learn the lessons from the past, but we also want to make sure

that, as we move forward, we consider the full range of things,

challenges that we might face. So let me take on I think what is
9

a central question that has been raised in the opening statements:

What is the role of FEMA and what should the role of FEMA be

within the Department of Homeland Security?

I will tell you that about five months after I arrived on the job,

I completed a second stage review in which we looked at all the elements of the Department, and we spent a lot of attention and a lot

of time talking to people inside and outside the Department about

FEMA. And I don’t think it is a secret that there was not only opposition to the merger of FEMA into DHS by people on the Hill,

there were people inside FEMA who did not want to have that

merger happen. And some of them, I think, perhaps harbored the

hope that the merger could be undone, and that may have colored

the degree to which they willingly integrated themselves with the

Department.

I would draw, by the way, a contrast with the Coast Guard. The

Coast Guard embraced the Department of Homeland Security. It

retained its independent functioning as a component, but it willingly lent its experience and its devotion to the Department as a

whole, and I think it is reflected in the number of people that are

in the Coast Guard who now occupy positions of responsibility

throughout the Department.

One thing, though, I was clear on: we did have to be an all-hazards department. And anybody who suggested that the leadership

of Homeland Security on my sixth month on the job wanted it to

be a terrorism-focused department simply was not listening to

what I was saying. I gave a speech in July and I said, in front of

everybody, one of the critical lessons of the review is we are not

where we need to be with preparedness. I told everybody in July

of last year that I saw that problem, and I said we had to be an

all-hazards department.

And for that reason, within a matter of a few weeks, at the very

beginning of August, for the first time, I invited emergency managers and Homeland Security advisors to come together in Washington and talk about what we needed to do to bind ourselves together and to make ourselves an all-hazards agency and an all-hazards system, Federal, State, and local, top to bottom.

Why do I think it is important to be integrated and do it this

way? First of all, the hazards we face have to be dealt with along

a spectrum. It is true that in many occasions, in many instances

we have to deal with hazards that come upon us that we can’t prevent. We don’t know how to stop hurricanes, so the entirety of our

activity has to be focused on response.

But there are other hazards we can prevent. There are hazards

we can protect against and harden ourselves against. And I think

it is only when we look at the full universe of hazards and deal

with them comprehensively that we have the kind of intelligent

program that give Americans the security they deserve.

Second, I have to tell you it is often not going to be clear, when

we have a disaster, whether it is natural or manmade. A hurricane

is obviously a natural disaster. Bombs in a subway are obviously

manmade.

But a major power blackout, a major explosion at an oil or chemical factory with a large plume can be a terrorist act, it might be

an act of nature. And we are not going to be in a position to nec-
10

essarily know the answer to that in 24 or 48 hours, so we cannot

divide our response or divide our reaction to that kind of a catastrophe in advance. We have to be able to move across the full spectrum and we need to be able to coordinate our response in terms

of law enforcement, in terms of protection, and in terms of response.

On the other hand, it is clear to me that FEMA, as an operational agency, was weak when I came into the Department, and

again I use Coast Guard as an example. Coast Guard was a strong

functioning component, but one that was able to add value as part

of a larger department. FEMA was not focused on its core operational mission. We did not have a twenty-first century logistical

system. We did not have the kind of communications or the ability

to scale up a call center of the kind you needed to deal with the

scope of Katrina.

And I will tell you this is not rocket science. These things exist

and have existed for years, and it is simply a question of making

a decision to bring those things and deploy them into the Department, and that is very much what we are about doing.

So let me tell you what stage one of the way going forward is

as far as I am concerned with FEMA. And I say stage two and talking about some of the more fundamental questions like what

should FEMA’S role be with respect to long-term housing? What

should FEMA’S role be with respect to recovery? What should be

FEMA’S role be with respect to how health care is provided? Those,

I think, are going to have to await some further reporting, some

further recommendations. But the things that we need to do before

this hurricane season, June 1, are the following:

First of all, we have to actually integrate FEMA into the Department. That means two things: it means elevating it and completing

the process of having its status equal with other components and

focused upon its operational missions, but also part of a seamless

provision of an operational picture so that we don’t have a seam

between what FEMA sees and does and what the Department sees

and does. And part of that is building an integrated operational capability that will allow Coast Guard, Secret Service, all the other

organs, and FEMA to see and have visibility into what everybody

else is doing.

Second, we have to have a twenty-first century logistics management system. And what we are going to do for this hurricane season, when we get the contracts done for shipping of commodities,

is make sure that there is a requirement of visibility and location

for all commodities in real-time as part of that contract.

Why was that never done before? Well, it turns out that FEMA

doesn’t actually do its own contracts in this area; it goes and has

the contracts done by other agencies. Eventually, FEMA has got to

do its own contracts. Simply farming out the work to others who

don’t have responsibility doesn’t make a lot of sense. So we are

going to start by changing those contracting systems now.

Claims management. We have got to enhance the ability of

FEMA to scale up its telephone response resources far beyond what

they were in Katrina. And we are currently putting in place contracts that would allow us, both on the Web and through the telephone, to get to a capacity of registering 200,000 people a day.
11

We also are developing a pilot program to move away from the

traditional model of disaster recovery centers, where people come

to us, and actually to give our workforce and our disaster assistance employees the tools to go out into the community and actually

go to where the victims are, as opposed to making the victims come

to us. Part of that is a recognition that FEMA has, for a considerable period of time, relied principally on volunteers as a disaster

workforce. That is not going to work in a situation where we have

a catastrophe, so we have got to actually create a core disaster

workforce around which we can surge volunteers, but which has

the capability full-time and professionally to do the job.

Debris removal. We have a system now which favors the Army

Corps of Engineers. We are beginning the process of correcting

that, at a minimum equalizing the incentives so that we encourage

municipalities to go to local contractors where they can get cheaper

and more responsive service, while preserving the Army Corps for

those things that either require immediate emergency access or immediate emergency response or some specialized engineering skill.

Communications. We are acquiring additional satellite phones

and satellite trucks to be able to get out into the field. We have

created for the first time in FEMA and at DHS teams that can go

out with fully contained communications packages and with the

proper training to give us the kind of visibility that will not require

us to rely upon second-or third-hand information.

So these are some of the steps we are taking moving forward.

One thing I do want to say, just to make sure the record is clear.

I believe the changes that we initiated in the second stage review

make sense. I believe that creating a preparedness directorate

under an experienced manager with a focus across the entire spectrum makes a lot of sense.

But I have to make clear for the record this was not done before

Katrina. When Katrina came, we operated under the old system,

and the old system failed. So I think we need to bear that in mind

as we go forward.

With that, I look forward to taking questions from the Committee and to engaging in discussion about these important matters.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary.

I appreciate greatly that the Chairman is letting me chair this

hearing, but two things I am going to adhere to is, one, the seniority rule when it comes to questioning, and the second is the five

minute rule. If we get through questions and the Secretary still has

time and there are further questions, those of you that want to

stick around, we will do a second round of questioning. So I am

going to adhere to the five minute rule strictly, and I am going to

go to Mr. Coble for the first questions.

Mr. COBLE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, good to have you with us. At the outset, Mr. Secretary, it is my belief that many mistakes were made. New Orleans

officials made mistakes. Louisiana officials made mistakes. U.S.

Government officials made mistakes.

Having said that, despite the well known consequences of a

major hurricane hitting New Orleans and the weather forecast that

I am told was available, why did the Federal Government wait, if

in fact it did wait, until it confirmed that the city was flooded and
12

start pulling boats, buses, and planes and military assistance together later rather than sooner?

Secretary CHERTOFF. On Saturday, before the hurricane hit, the

President declared an emergency, which of course opened up the

legal ability to move all of that equipment forward and deploy it.

That also, by the way, declared an incident of national significance.

At that point the Department of Defense began to deploy its resources, at least what it thought was necessary, into the forward

area. I think they went to Camp Beauregard.

On Sunday there was a meeting of about 50 people, who were

the leaders involved in Louisiana and Mississippi and the other

States, at the regional headquarters in Washington. I participated

in the meeting by video conference. At that time, there was a review of all the kinds of resources that were needed and Defense

Department was plugged into the general preparation.

Looking back, I think there was underestimation of one particular need, and that was the need for buses for a secondary evacuation. And I think it was that underestimation that led to a delay

in the process. I also think, frankly, there was a lack of specific

planning about how to conduct an evaluation, which hampered

things.

Mr. COBLE. You mentioned the Coast Guard earlier, Mr. Secretary, and I think most everybody uniformly agrees that the Coast

Guard probably was the only agency present who received consistent high marks from everybody during the grading. Do you believe

that the Coast Guard would have done anything differently had it

not been a part of DHS?

Secretary CHERTOFF. I think what the Coast Guard did as part

of DHS was enable us to, frankly, compensate for some of the deficiencies in other parts of the Department. I remember personally

getting involved with the Coast Guard on Thursday to have them

change some mission assignments because there were problems in

terms of FEMA getting food and water to certain people.

So I think that Coast Guard actually added value. And, of course,

the culmination was I appointed a Coast Guard admiral to become

principal Federal officer and take over the response operation.

Mr. COBLE. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate your five minute rule,

and I hope you will give me credit for yielding well before the red

light illuminated.

Mr. SHUSTER. I am taking notice and we are making it down.

Thank you, Mr. Coble.

Mr. Oberstar.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Secretary, I think it is a rather feeble explanation to say that it took the Department of Transportation five

years to be fully operational. I served on the staff here on the Hill,

for my predecessor, who was charged with the responsibility of creating the Department of Transportation at the request and initiation of President Lyndon Johnson.

We spent months crafting that legislation. We spent months putting it into legislative language and working with the White House

and the Senate and getting a bill signed. But it was fully, carefully,

structurally thought through with these very issues of integration

in mind. And what I was contrasting was a seasoned transpor-
13

tation professional in Secretary Mineta and a Department that was

helter-skelter.

When FEMA was transferred into Homeland Security, the Office

of National Preparedness was transferred out of FEMA into the Office of Domestic Preparedness. And, by the way, this Committee

had responsibility for creation of FEMA, from civil defense to the

Office of Emergency Preparedness to Federal Emergency Management Administration. I was Chairman of the Subcommittee that

created that language, so I know what we intended.

Now, since that time, the remaining preparedness functions of

FEMA have been systematically stripped out, and now in your second stage review there is a new preparedness directorate that

transfers all of FEMA’S preparedness activities into the new directorate, looking at your documentation. Virtually every professional

in the field outside of the Department says this is a mistake; you

can’t fragment this agency.

That is what you have done, you have fragmented FEMA. And

you are setting yourself up, setting the Department and the Agency

up for a fall in the future. The National Emergency Management

Organization president said it is absurd to think that an agency

can respond effectively and recover from disasters without a preparedness effort to accomplish this task.

Why continue with this separation? Why continue with the further fragmentation?

Secretary CHERTOFF. I agree with you. First of all, preparedness

has to be integrated with response. But I also have to say preparedness is not only related to response. Preparedness is related

to prevention and protection as well. And I—

Mr. OBERSTAR. And in connection with prevention, do you support the Predisaster Assistance Mitigation program?

Secretary CHERTOFF. I do support the mitigation program, but—

Mr. OBERSTAR. Then help us get it reinstated.

Secretary CHERTOFF. But let me say that in looking at the issue

of preparedness, when I came into the Department, there were elements of preparedness scattered in different parts of the Department. Now, if you go to the police chiefs and you go to the State

homeland security advisors, they will tell you that they are very

concerned about preparedness in terms of intelligence gathering

and prevention. If you go to the people who have private infrastructure, who are worried about oil and gas and fuel and water, they

worry about preparedness as it relates to what they have to do.

And then, quite rightly, the responders worry about preparedness.

Seems to me we have got to have all of the preparedness aligned:

grants, training, and planning. And that doesn’t mean parceling it

out among different operational components, it means pulling preparedness as a discipline together in one place with one accountable person in charge, and then having the operational expertise in

the Coast Guard, in FEMA, in other parts of our Department, in

Department of Defense, pull the inter-preparedness to work with

preparedness to develop a holistic plan.

Mr. OBERSTAR. That essentially was the lesson to have been

learned from September 11, interoperability of communications coordination of logistics. But it failed.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, and I will be the first—
14

Mr. OBERSTAR. And you had time—not you personally, although

yes—your Department had time knowing this hurricane was on the

way.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I agree with you that when I came in in

February of last year and looked at the issue of preparedness, precisely what you are talking about, and examined it, my conclusion

in July, which I told the Congress, was we are not where we need

to be.

And I was convinced that what happened is no one institution or

part of the Department had real responsibility for preparedness

across the board, for comprehensive planning, for comprehensive

equipping, and for comprehensive training. And my judgment was

we needed to make it not a stepchild to operational agencies, but

to integrate everything together.

Now, believe me, if I could have gotten it done between July and

August, I would have done it in one month. But I think I was honest enough to say this is a challenge that is going to take a number

of months. I am really committed to getting this done, and I think

a lot of it requires sitting down and actually starting to do some

real comprehensive planning.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, thank you for the time.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you. And you will have an opportunity, I

am sure, to ask another question.

We will now go to Mr. Mica.

Mr. MICA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chertoff, I have to apologize, because I keep looking at what

the problem is, and the problem is not your fault. You just said you

came in last February. Your predecessor, Mr. Ridge, tried to put together Homeland Security, putting 177,000 people into one agency,

more than a dozen Federal agencies.

I remember some of that debate, and the President initially opposed the huge bureaucracy that was planned, and I think we all

got sucked into going along with it. I was concerned at the time

about putting FEMA under Homeland Security, and, actually, if

you look at part of the problem, in the past, FEMA, in an emergency situation, dealt directly with the President, and we have got

one more layer in, you. I would like to take FEMA out and have

it operate at least independently in these cases of a national emergency. What is your response?

Secretary CHERTOFF. My response is that I think from an operational standpoint we haven’t added a layer between FEMA and

the President, we have added a substantial amount of additional

resource and support to allow FEMA to operate. I don’t think—

Mr. MICA. Well, obviously there was a breakdown. Again, if you

look at who was in charge, even your previous testimony, you have

got arguments about who is the principal Federal officer, and that

didn’t work.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, I think it is pretty easy to prove if

you look at the actual facts. Mr. Brown I guess made it very clear

last Friday in the Senate that he actually tried to operate during

his time as principal Federal officer under the old model. He tried

to take his concerns directly to the White House, which, of course,

is not an operational agency. The White House is not going to get

on the phone and order buses.
15

And he tried to duck the Department of Homeland Security, and

I think it demonstrably failed to work. When I put Admiral Allen

in charge, Admiral Allen played the way he was supposed to play

it.

Mr. MICA. But it didn’t work. And, again, I am concerned about

the monster that Congress created in trying to run it. Now, Ridge

put a lot of it together. You have been trying to run it. You came

in in a few months.

Mr. Oberstar just raised one of the things that is still a concern,

one of the issues that we saw after September 11th was the failure

of communications. We saw the failure of communications. A lot of

this could have been resolved if people could communicate. I saw

one example of—and this isn’t your fault, necessarily—of Homeland

Security money going to buy lawnmowers for a Maryland fire station. Isn’t it time that we set as a first priority communications

and interoperability of those communications for disaster and for

those that deal in disasters at all levels?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, I agree, but I will tell you that, first

of all, the lawnmower story—and some of those are several years

old. Our current grant funding is much more disciplined and much

more specific, has very particular capabilities like communications,

and I am told a billion dollars of grant money has been spent now

on communications equipment through grants. So we have made a

lot of progress.

Now, we didn’t make enough to meet the challenge of Katrina,

but, on the other hand, I think, in fairness, we have moved a considerable distance from where we were on 9/11.

Mr. MICA. The final issue—I deal with aviation, as you know. We

have a warning right now—it is a Level 5 warning, if you want to

compare it to levees breaking—with the failure of our passenger security screening system. The Congress has not changed out that

$5.6 billion system. I know you have made some attempts to

change it to a risk-based system. Where do you think we need to

go from here? You have got the balance of my time.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I think, as you know from talking to me

and the Deputy and Assistant Secretary Hawley, we are committed

to moving, first of all, away from screening for some of the things

we don’t need to screen for anymore. We need to move to the next

level of explosive detection equipment.

We are doing some of that now. We have got money in the budget for that now. We are trying to push some of the security now

out into the airport itself, using canine teams, so we get around out

in the area where people are waiting, which is another vulnerability.

You know, we clearly don’t have to keep locking the barn door

against hazards that we have already addressed by hardening cockpits. We need to start thinking about the next generation, and that

is what we are working on.

Mr. MICA. Thank you.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you.

Mr. DeFazio.

Mr. DEFAZIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I always hate to contradict my Chairman, but the President proposed this giant new bureaucracy. A number of us, after 9/11, said
16

we failed to coordinate. We need a cabinet level secretary to make

the FBI, the CIA, and all these agencies coordinate these efforts

better. We did not ask for a giant new bureaucracy; that sprung

full-blown out of the White House on a Tuesday evening, when

they wanted to knock Colleen Rawley off the front page of the

paper because she was spilling her guts about how the FBI failed

to open Moussaoui’s computer and we could have stopped 9/11.

I hate this reconstructionist history. That is Bush’s bureaucracy.

Bush named Albaugh. Bush named Michael Brown. Bush subsumed FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security over the

objections of this Committee and over the objections of many others

who said it would fail, and it failed us horribly. And it needs to be

fixed.

Mr. Chertoff, that is not to you, because this is pre-you. But we

just have to keep the history straight.

I am going to go back to something that was raised by another

colleague this morning, which is the 11,000 modular homes sitting

in Hope, Arkansas. In response to my colleague, you said, well, we

don’t want to put those in a floodplain. Instead, we are putting in

mobile homes. And at the moment, that was somewhat reasonable,

but here is what I thought about.

Along the Siuslaw River in Oregon, FEMA paid, or not FEMA,

but we paid through the flood program to raise modular homes and

put them on pilings so the river can flood. We just had another big

flood; the river went under them; they were all fine. Okay.

And I started thinking about, now, wait a minute, we are going

to put all of these mobile homes, tens of thousands of mobile homes

down into Mr. Taylor’s area, way down into Mr. Melancon’s area?

So what do they become in a hurricane event? How are we going

to get 30, 40, 50,000 mobile homes out of a high wind and floodprone area? They are going to become flying objects. Or do we have

a coordinated plan to evacuate those 30 or 40,000 mobile homes?

Maybe we would be better off using the stockpiled 11,000 modular

homes, which are sitting in a field while people in Mr. Taylor’s district are camped in tents, and putting them up on pilings.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I think we are confusing two different

things.

Mr. DEFAZIO. No.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, I have to answer to explain. What we

are putting down in Mississippi and Louisiana, for the most part,

is trailers, travel trailers.

Mr. DEFAZIO. That is what I mean. That is a mobile home versus

a modular home.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, but a mobile home—well, we may be

talking about different things.

Mr. DEFAZIO. We call them mobile homes in the west. Trailers,

whatever. Same thing.

Secretary CHERTOFF. It is kind of like grinders and subs.

Mr. DEFAZIO. Right. It can be a fifth wheel, whatever you want

to call it.

Secretary CHERTOFF. So let me define what I mean. Travel trailers are things you can hook on the back of a car and move.

Mr. DEFAZIO. Right. We have a plan to get 30,000 or 40,000 of

them out of there in a 24 hour period?
17

Secretary CHERTOFF. Yes. Those we do put down in Louisiana.

We do put them down in Mississippi. Those are permissible under

the regulations exactly because you can hitch them up to the car

and move them out.

Mr. DEFAZIO. But I remember the pictures in Texas. We had a

lot of trouble evacuating people in Texas. Aren’t we going to now

be all piled up with all these people trying to hook up their little

travel trailers, fifth wheels, to the back of their pickups and evacuate?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, you are putting your finger on a really important issue which I am going to be speaking about in the

next couple of months, which is hurricane season is coming up. We

are in the middle of reconstructing.

I don’t know—you know, there are a significant number of people

in Mississippi who do have trailers on their home sites, looking to

rebuild. I don’t know if they are going to be rebuilt by June 1 or

not. And we are going to have to start making plans. That means

I am going to have to sit down with the Governors of both States

and say, what are your evacuation plans in the event another hurricane comes on June 1st? And that is going to require us to ask

exactly that question.

Mr. DEFAZIO. Okay, great. I am glad you are on that.

Let us go back just to the interoperable communications, which

I raised earlier today. And I am still concerned that the Bush Administration has zeroed out all grants to local governments for

interoperable communications, the number one priority I hear from

everybody. But I hear you said on Monday that creating a hardened set of communications capabilities allows DHS, FEMA, Federal, State, and local partners to better communicate. If they don’t

have interoperable communications at the State, county, city level,

what is this new construct of a hardened set of communications

that will allow you to communicate with the State and local partners?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, the first thing you have to have before your communications are interoperable, they have to be operable. The problem in Katrina was it didn’t matter whether they

were interoperable because everything went down. And I remember

there was a shortage of satellite phones. And even with respect to

the satellite phones, there were power packs that weren’t available.

So we are acquiring equipment that will, first of all, give us

much more satellite phone capability. That, at a minimum, would

give the people in command an ability to communicate with their

operations center to give real-time visibility to what is happening

on the ground. So we don’t have to send people in helicopters to

try to figure out what is happening, because we can get real communications.

That is not a solution for interoperability, but this is kind of

basic stuff that when everything goes down, we have got to have

an alternative path.

Mr. DEFAZIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you.

Mrs. Kelly.

Mrs. KELLY. Thank you.
18

Mr. Chertoff, we all know you have a very tough job, and we all

know that we have got to learn quickly from our lessons and be

prepared for any potential disaster, including things like evacuations. In New York we are, understandably, very sensitive to your

concerns, but we have been watching this issue unfold with considerable alarm.

In my district, this concern is particularly acute because of our

proximity to New York City and because it is the home of the Indian Point nuclear power facility. On that point there are a lot of

serious questions right now about the emergency preparedness

plans for Indian Point, and a lot of those questions fall squarely in

your lap.

Three counties in the Indian Point emergency response zone do

not think that the emergency plan that FEMA has endorsed for the

region is realistic or plausible. These counties have not certified the

plan. They have felt this way since 2003, after Governor Pataki

commissioned former FEMA Director James Lee Witt to conduct a

study to conduct a study of Indian Point preparedness. Witt’s report concluded, and I quote, ‘‘The current radiologic response system and capabilities are not adequate to protect the people from an

unacceptable dose of radiation in the event of a release from Indian

Point.’’

Now, I don’t want not suggest that the feds have not done anything since this time to try to address the concerns there, and it

is clear, especially after Hurricane Katrina, that, with these evacuations, they have not done enough. My constituents are understandably apprehensive about FEMA’S ability to lead them on this

issue.

Despite what the Witt report tells them, despite what our local

officials tell them, despite what the State tells them, FEMA continues to say this plan works. FEMA, then, I think, has a responsibility to explain why. People in the Hudson Valley want answers, and

your agency is responsible for providing them. In other words, Mr.

Secretary, if the counties don’t think the emergency plan works,

and New York State doesn’t think it works, what makes you think

it works?

Secretary CHERTOFF. You know, I haven’t looked at this particular plan myself, and, as you know, we are undergoing a comprehensive review of emergency plans for all of the 50 States and we just

got our initial report. I am not sure from what you are telling me

whether there are specific things the State and the county want to

see put in place in order to increase evacuation and make evacuation right, because, if so, those are precisely the things we ought

to work with them on doing; or whether what you are telling me

is that the local officials simply don’t think that that particular Indian Point plant ought to be operable and they want to shut it

down.

I think what we need to do is look at the plan, see what steps—

and I agree, we have to be realistic about whether the plans work

or not—we shouldn’t kid ourselves about it—and then see what

needs to be done in order to make the plan workable with a realistic assessment of what the risk is. I can’t tell you, as I sit here,

that I have looked at it myself. I do think that has got to be part

of the review that we are currently undertaking.
19

Mrs. KELLY. I appreciate that. There needs to be a shared understanding of the Indian Point emergency plan so that we can truly

make progress toward the improvements that are clearly necessary. With that in mind, I would request that the Department of

Homeland Security and FEMA come up to Indian Point for a summit with all of the stakeholders—local, State, and Federal—to talk

about the plan. I would like to see the DHS and FEMA work with

the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to organize this summit for

the State and local officials to reassess the emergency preparedness

plans for the residents of the communities surrounding Indian

Point.

I know that the safety of local residents is always the DHS’s

number one concern. So I think that we have got to make progress

toward establishing a feasible emergency plan that residents of the

Hudson Valley are comfortable with. We have got to ensure that

our local first responders, who are so critical in this effort, are involved and that their input is included and implemented. Right

now they don’t have any confidence in the plans that they are responsible for.

I would like you to commit, sir, if you would, to a summit so we

can work together at every level of government to resolve these

concerns about Indian Point.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, as I say, we have our preparedness

directorate, which now has really the responsibility even to work

with FEMA on these plans. I will pass on to our undersecretary my

suggestion that he send a group up to address this issue specifically with FEMA and with State and local officials so we can validate what are legitimate concerns and what still needs to be done.

Mrs. KELLY. If you would do that, sir, please include all stakeholders at every level of the government. That would be very helpful to us toward working with you to try to come up with an evacuation plan that people can have some faith in. Thank you very

much.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you, Mrs. Kelly.

Mr. Filner.

Mr. FILNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being with us this afternoon. I am

going to ask you about the Urban Area Security Initiative that you

direct. I represent San Diego, California and the whole CaliforniaMexico border, and, as you know, we lost most of the funding from

previous years under that initiative, and when the mayor and others asked you why, this is a quote that was in the newspaper:

‘‘This is merit-based. It is driven by analysis that is disciplined by

career officials using some of the best computer modeling we have

in the Country, and we are going to stick to it.’’

The members of the San Diego delegation asked for a briefing

from your Department, and you did what you just said to Mrs.

Kelly, which I thought was an insult, by the way. You said you

were going to ask the undersecretary to send a group. So some lowlevel group, that is who came to brief us. And let me tell you what

they told us, Mr. Secretary.

By the way, I cannot help but reach the conclusion—and I don’t

know the nickname that the President has bestowed upon you, but
20

after this briefing from your minions, I can only conclude you’re

doing a heck of a job, Chertie.

When I asked your folks do you know what the immigration figures are for our region, they said, well, we don’t have those figures.

And I said, well, through my district every day, legally, 300,000

people go back and forth across that international border. Every

day 300,000. Not to mention any illegal situations. And they said,

oh, yeah, we factor in immigration. This was after we just found

a 2,400 foot tunnel that had all kinds of sophisticated improvements that could bring a dirty bomb across, as far as we could tell.

So I moved from immigration, figuring they didn’t know anything

about that, and I said, can you name me an area which has three

nuclear reactors sitting in its harbor—I mean, it is three nuclear

carriers, six nuclear reactors—up to 12 or two dozen nuclear subs

in the harbor, hundreds of ships—because we are the biggest Navy

base in the world—a nuclear generating plant?

I said, does anybody else have a threat that is posed by such a

collection? And they said, well, you know, there are 200,000 military assets, I don’t know what your figures are there. And then he

said, and this is a quote, this is from your briefer, ‘‘The military

assets are invisible to our calculations. Besides, we don’t know

what a threat is if it is posed by a nuclear carrier.’’

I have started to fear for this Nation, Mr. Secretary. We are a

sleeping little fishing village, by your way of looking at it. We have

a few fishing boats. Because everything else, and I quote, ‘‘is invisible.’’ I don’t understand that. In other quotes I have seen that the

Defense Department—the Defense Department is responsible, according to your officials, for the defense of those assets. We don’t

have anything to do with it as the Department of Homeland Security.

I am baffled by that kind of reasoning. I walked out of the meeting. I said to your guys, you don’t know what you are talking

about; you don’t know anything about immigration; you don’t know

anything about nuclear assets that the Defense Department has.

And you are responsible for calculating the threat, a merit-based

threat on our community?

So how do you justify those conclusions and the responses I got?

And those are quotes, Mr. Secretary. And when we asked for more

detailed information about the decisions of the UASI program, we

have gotten no detailed information. Your Department refuses to

give to Congress that information; you just keeping it is meritbased. When are we going to get that kind of information so we understand what you are doing?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, I think, first of all, we have offered—

and if it hasn’t been done in the case of San Diego, we can offer

a classified briefing, which would give some more specificity—

Mr. FILNER. We asked for that, sir, and when they showed up,

they said, well, we don’t have any information.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, I don’t know who they are. And if the

wrong people showed up, then I will get the right—

Mr. FILNER. Well, that is your responsibility, you sent them.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, this is the first I’ve—

Mr. FILNER. We asked you for the briefing, so you must have

sent them.
21

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, I didn’t personally send them.

Mr. FILNER. That is like Mrs. Kelly. You are going to send some

little group off to their major summit meeting too.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, I have spoken to Mr. Foresman, who

is the Undersecretary, who has got the ultimate responsibility now.

Mr. FILNER. Everybody else has responsibility but you, I see. We

have not gotten a briefing. We asked for a classified briefing; you

didn’t give it to us.

Mr. SHUSTER. Mr. Filner, would you yield for one minute? Let

the Secretary answer. Let us give him the courtesy of letting him

answer the question.

Mr. FILNER. I think we are passed the courtesy. We have had 9/

11, we have had Katrina, and we are heading for the same disasters with this kind of reasoning in that Department.

Mr. SHUSTER. I understand. But, still, let us let the Secretary

give an answer. He is listening; he wants to answer. Let us give

him a chance.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I don’t know who particularly was sent to

give you the brief. I do know that we have agreed to make—

Mr. FILNER. Ask the people behind you who you sent. They

know. They know.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I know that we have agreed to give classified briefings to a certain level of detail with respect to these decisions. With respect to the issue of immigration, we obviously addressed the issue of immigration directly by putting more border

patrol into California, among other things, by my finally flipping

the switch allowing the completion of the border fence, which languished for many years until I turned the light on on that.

Mr. FILNER. Except you didn’t ask the Congressman from the

area, who opposed it because it doesn’t do anything for homeland

security. Your people just don’t understand what is going on there,

and you won’t even listen to us when we try to tell you.

Secretary CHERTOFF. No, I will listen, but I will tell you right

now I completely understand I am going to disappoint some people.

My Department is not going to give money to everybody who wants

it. There is going to be disagreement. There are people who are

going to disagree with my—

Mr. FILNER. But explain to us why the threat that is imposed by

the biggest Navy base in the world doesn’t reach your calculations.

Secretary CHERTOFF. What I am going to say to you is that we

will give you a more specific briefing.

But among other things, when we weigh risk, we think not only

of threat, but we think about vulnerability, we think of consequence. When, for example, the First Marine Division is stationed on a naval base, that is a factor which has an impact on

whether we have got vulnerability or not. So I can’t sit here in this

hearing, for any number of reasons, and explain with you or debate

with you about this decision.

We are willing to provide you with a briefing. I accept the fact

that, being risk-based, some people are going to be unhappy. I

could make everybody happy if I gave everybody money—

Mr. FILNER. All we want is a decent explanation.

Mr. SHUSTER. The gentleman’s time has expired.
22

Mr. FILNER. All we want is an explanation, and you are refusing

to give it to us.

Mr. SHUSTER. The gentleman’s time has expired. The gentleman’s time has expired.

I recognize now Mr. LaTourette.

Mr. LATOURETTE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, welcome. And I will be pleasant for a minute and

courteous, and just tell you that my father-in-law, Ken Laptuck,

was in town today. He wanted to come pay his respects, but he is

over at the investiture of another one of your former colleagues

from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey; Justice Alito is getting his robe today at 2:00. So he wanted to be here and make sure

that I extended their hellos.

Second of all, I want to commend you and the Department for

stealing away Dan Shulman from the Transportation Committee.

He knows a whole lot about all-hazards planning and ably served

me when I had the pleasure of chairing the subcommittee that

Chairman Shuster now has.

And then just an editorial comment, because I heard you say, in

response to Mrs. Kelly’s observations about Indian Point—and I

think she has some valid concerns. But I chaired the hearing in

2003, and just from my observation I think what you are going to

find is an inadequate evacuation plan, but what you are also going

to find is that there was a nuclear power plant, and the city fathers

and mothers decided to let people build right up to the power plant,

with hundreds of thousands of homes, and now we have got a lot

of people who can’t get out, and these same people now are wondering why they live next to a nuclear power plant. It is a complicated

problem, but I know you will get to the bottom of it.

I want to make a couple of observations and things that I have

heard. Our colleague, Congressman Riechert is a former sheriff,

and I have good relationships with the sheriffs back in my district.

Just a couple of observations, then I will leave you plenty of time

to respond.

I was glad to hear you talk about the speech that you gave about

all-hazards, that that needs to be the approach, because it has been

our philosophy, I think, on the Committee that if my house is on

fire, it really doesn’t matter how the house got on fire; you want

to put it out and then, after the fact, figure out whether it was terrorism, an electrical fire, an arsonist, or a lightening strike.

There is a feeling, I have to tell you, where I come from in Ohio

that there has been a shift, that when FEMA was subsumed by the

Department of Homeland Security that all of the dollars went into

antiterrorism, all of the efforts went into antiterrorism, and the

core mission of FEMA to respond to all hazards—terrorism is just

a subset; really, again, it doesn’t matter when New Orleans is

under water, whether or not the hurricane did it or a terrorist

broke the levee.

And there is a feeling—and maybe if you could spend a couple

of minutes addressing, that after I make my second point, why you

think that perception is out there. I have heard you say that is not

true, but I have to tell you people think it is true.

The second thing is the Department of Homeland Security recently came in and briefed the Buckeye Sheriffs’ Association—not
23

only my friend, Sheriff Dunlap, but all the other sheriffs—and they

came back and they were chuckling, and they were chuckling because they said we have never seen so many anagrams and new

terms, NIST and XYZ. He said, if I had one suggestion—so I am

going to make it on behalf of my friends the sheriffs—tell them to

speak English; don’t come up with all of these new agencies with

these new fancy shmancy initials that nobody can understand.

I was just at a rail conference in Florida, and the test was here

are five new agencies that Homeland Security has just come up

with; can anybody tell us what they are. And nobody knows.

So father than presiding over an agency that confuses people, if

you have something that is in charge of floods, why don’t you call

it the place that is in charge of floods, rather than the FYBUT,

whatever.

So those are my two observations. One is there is a perception

that you are not all-hazards, that you are all-terrorism all the time;

and, two, if you can speak English in your programs, I think the

folks that I represent would appreciate it.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Let me try to deal with the second first.

When I came into the Department, I was struck by the same thing.

Part of it is there are a lot of ex-military guys, and I find people

in government, in general, and people in the military do use a lot

of acronyms. I also try to have a plain English rule. I get briefings

sometimes. I have got to confess, it is like alphabet soup. I can’t

say I despair of changing that, but I certainly am going to try, as

much as possible, to get people to speak English.

I know the perception of us being predominantly terrorism-focused is out there. Part of it is that a lot of the grant funding that

has been enacted by Congress is focused on terrorism, so we live

within those programs. But I want to talk about a couple things

I have done to try to counteract that.

One is, when we came out with our national preparedness goal,

which looked at a series of different capabilities, we modeled it on

a series of scenarios and specifically talked about hurricanes,

earthquakes, and a couple of other natural disasters. So in actually

coming up with the types of capabilities we would fund in our

grant programs, we looked at things that were pertinent to natural

disasters.

I have also said even under our Urban Security Initiative that

while we have to, by the terms of the program, we have to establish eligibility in terms of risk of an attack, that we are prepared,

in terms of investment justification, to look at things that would do

double duty for a hazard, whether it was natural or manmade.

So we have tried, within the framework of the requirements of

the law in terms of grant, to make sure we are building capacities

that can do all-hazard service. So that is one way in which we have

tried to make that point.

Mr. LATOURETTE. Okay. Well, I appreciate it. As long as you recognize the perception is out there, and whatever you can do to do

it because, again, if you give us a fire truck, we want the fire truck

to put out every fire that happens, not just the one that the terrorist started.

So thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you, Mr. LaTourette.
24

Mr. Taylor.

Mr. TAYLOR. Secretary Chertoff, thank you for being here. Secretary Chertoff, since you brought the subject of FEMA trailers up,

let me walk you through what apparently no one in FEMA has

taken the time to look at.

As people in Mississippi are living in tents still, or in an old

Astro van, or their mother-in-law’s couch, our Nation buys a trailer

for about $14,000. We pay a driver to take it to Hope, Arkansas,

and it sits there, sometimes for months. We pay another driver to

take it to Purvis, Mississippi, and it sits there for months.

When it gets to Purvis, nobody bothers to see if the plumbing

works, if the air conditioner works, if the microwave works, if the

heater works. Then it goes to a staging area owned by Bechtel or

another contractor, and it sits there for months. Then we pay another drive to deliver it. Bechtel sends a team of about four to six

out to install what moms and dads do by themselves every weekend, which is to hook up a water line, find the sewer tap. And the

one complicated part is the electricity, but apparently no one at

FEMA has bothered to get a core group of good electricians to do

this.

So I think a fair question is it has now been seven months. How

much has our Nation paid Bechtel to deliver those 36,000 trailers,

pay all those drivers and have those trailers sit there so long?

Second thing is—and you brought this up yourself—we now have

36,000 trailers sitting in coastal Mississippi where houses used to

be, and we are coming up on hurricane season. Do you, or anyone,

have a plan as to what to do if we get hit again? Because the Navy

Oceanographic Lab says we are in for 10 years of higher-than-average activity and worse-than-average storms. Are you going to leave

them there to be blown apart in the next storm? Are you going to

try to get them out of there? If you can’t deliver those 36,000 in

almost seven months, are you going to get them out in two days?

Secretary CHERTOFF. First of all, Congressman, I know you have

a greater personal awareness than probably anybody in the room

because you have been through this experience in the last hurricane. And let me deal with both of those. I have the number on

Bechtel. It is not in my head; I can get it for you. And I know that

the whole way in which we have delivered things is part of a bad

logistics system, which I have acknowledged we have to correct.

But let me come to your second thing, because I am going to be

honest, that really worries me. It is obvious to me that—and this

is just a matter of the calendar and the weather—you can’t necessarily rebuild your houses, certainly not to the standard you need

to rebuild, by June 1st. There was a tremendous demand for trailers, and I think it was right for us to send trailers down there to

let people work on their property and try to get rebuilt. But we

can’t stop hurricane season from coming.

So what I want to do now, in February, months before, is—and

I am happy to—if you want to take this message back, and I will

certainly start talking about it soon—we have got to start thinking

about what we are going in hurricane season. And it may very well

be the fact that, because I don’t know how you would evacuate

30,000 trailers in two days, we have to start to consider what are

our options for those trailers. Do people want to start to think, in
25

advance of hurricane season, of moving trailers elsewhere? That

would take them off their property and that would really stop the

rebuilding process.

By the way, I am completely open to suggestions on this. I do

not, as I sit here, have an answer. I started to ask this question

a couple weeks ago precisely because I realized that we might not

have people rebuilt by the time that the hurricanes come. So I

would be more than happy to talk to you about what we need to

do to start getting ready while we have—

Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Secretary, if I may. And I hope you can sense

a bit of controlled rage here, because 99 percent of the work I have

done since the storm is doing your job. Ninety-nine percent of the

calls to my congressional office were complaints about FEMA,

whether it is a FEMA trailer or the time it took to get that trailer,

or a complaint about the trailer itself. You have gotten more compare orders than you have delivered trailers.

And, again, when it gets to Purvis, no one takes the time to run

a water check on it, no one takes the time to see if the heater

works, to see if the microwave works. So when you have a core of

people who could fix those things as we accept them, or, even better, make the manufacturer pay for those repairs, it then becomes

the citizens’ expense to send a plumber out, to send an electrician

out, to send someone out with a caulk gun to plugs the leaks.

That is insane. I can see that for the first couple thousand. All

right? I could see that for the first month. But the second month,

the third month, the fourth month, the fifth month, the sixth

month? You are not getting any better.

And I don’t say this happily: I have zero confidence that this Nation is any better prepared for the next storm if it hits my district,

or Alabama or Florida or South Carolina, than it was the last. And

you said we are open to suggestion. You are, and then they are

trash-canned. I have been sending both verbal and written suggestions to your Agency since September. Nothing changes.

I am on the ground, I am talking to people, I am making I what

I think are common sense suggestions all the way from simple

things like you should have bought 36,000 power poles that you

were ready to plug into, and get the local utility company, when

it has to go out and hook up that power anyway, to sink it. That

is the most difficult part of the installation. That is not changing,

so you are paying to have these things wired one at a time. Absolutely no efficiency.

And it kind of hit me, if we turned it over to Homeland Security

to plan D-Day, General Eisenhower would still be waiting for the

landing craft.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, I have to tell you, Congressman, I

completely share your frustration, because I have spent much more

time than I should spend as Secretary of this Department trying

to understand precisely the issues you have, and I keep hearing

about problems with contracts. And that is why, when I got up

here and I said we have got to completely reconfigure the way we

contract these things out, I spoke out of the same sense of frustration you do, because I don’t think you ought to be doing that and

I don’t think I ought to be doing that.
26

The question of how we get things delivered in a way that they

are sound and they can be hooked up in a reasonable fashion is the

kind of fundamental business process that ought to be solved inside

the agency. And if you are going to contract out for trailers, you

ought to contract out for an integrated solution, which is get the

trailer and get it in there in proper shape, and not little pieces of

contracts that don’t synchronize together. And whether this is a

failing of the contract or a failure of the way we contracted, it is

plainly unacceptable, and this is exactly the kind of thing we have

to cure for next year.

The second piece, though, which I don’t want to leave without—

I know I am running over time, but I don’t want to leave without

emphasizing is with the best intentions of the world, if all the trailers were in perfectly right now, we would still confront the second

issue. If houses aren’t built by June 1st—and I don’t know how far

a lot of them are—

Mr. TAYLOR. May I respond to that?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Yes.

Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Secretary, every plumber, carpenter, electrician,

roofer for hundreds of miles has two or three years of work right

now. So please don’t kid yourself into thinking that these houses,

that these 40,000 to 60,000 houses—and even your agency can’t

give me a hard count just for South Mississippi have to be replaced, but I can tell you it is 40,000 to 60,000—you are going to

be nowhere near there, and something you absolutely have to start

considering is the extension of that 18-month deadline.

Because, remember, the guy who got his trailer in October gives

it up in 18 months. The guy who gets his trailer this month gives

it up in 12 months, because you have an artificial deadline of 18

months from the day of the storm. And I can assure you that that

need will be nowhere near fulfilled by then.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, we can work on that, but the thing—

and this is probably an off-line conversation, probably one we ought

to have with Governor Barber and the other local officials is to

start—

Mr. TAYLOR. He didn’t set that deadline, sir.

Secretary CHERTOFF. No, no. We can talk about the deadline, but

I want to come back to the thing you raised earlier, which I don’t

want to leave without really driving home.

And maybe we ought to have a conversation with the Governor

and others about this. If things are not built by June 1, people are

going to be in trailers, we are going to be in hurricane season. We

have got to know what those people are going to do.

And I want to start talking about that five months in advance,

not five days in advance. And I welcome the opportunity to get

with you and the other officials down there and start to talk about

that, as well as all these other things, because we want to get this

corrected and finished. You know, I don’t think it is right for you

and, frankly, I don’t think it is a good idea for the Secretary to be

spending a lot of time thinking about utility poles and trailers. We

ought to be able to do that in FEMA and we ought to be able to

get FEMA to have a business process that gets that to work, and

that is what I aim to do.
27

Mr. SHUSTER. The gentleman’s time has expired. I am very sensitive to the gentleman from Mississippi’s situation, so when we get

through the first round, if your side doesn’t object, we will go to

you first. Thank you.

Mr. Ney.

Mr. NEY. Thank you.

Secretary, welcome today. I convened in October a couple meetings down in the district I represent, and one of the reasons was

to get input from people, because we have flooding. Nothing to the

order of what happened, obviously, in the Gulf, but we have flooding.

One of the things I want to throw out here today is I think we

have got to be careful that as we approach the natural disasters

elsewhere in the Country and the ones that are going to come up,

when we change the rules, if we change the rules—I think in the

Gulf’s case we have to make some unprecedented changes, I don’t

disagree with them at all.

But I think we have got to be sensitive, as we change rules, to

make sure how they apply to the rest of the Country in regular

flooding situations. Have you looked at anything on that nature, of

trying to assess what works and what doesn’t work?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Yes. One thing I have tried to do as we go

into the—because I think you are exactly right. The Gulf is a separate unique set of challenges, but I also want to make sure that

we don’t lose sight of that fact as we consider and change the kind

of bar with respect to other parts of the Country, because we do

have to maintain some financial discipline; otherwise, we could

wind up with just an unbelievable program.

We have begun to introduce some discipline into the process that

FEMA uses to determine exactly when something is a disaster and

when something is an emergency, and what to be paid for and

what the terms ought to be in terms of cost-share and things of

that sort, because although the Gulf was unique and requires

unique, maybe, changes in the rules for the Gulf, that doesn’t mean

we want to all of a sudden have Gulf standards apply to the routine disaster, where we will wind up for paying for every snow

storm and every flood.

Mr. NEY. Or some rule changes.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Correct.

Mr. NEY. The last part I have—and I am not going to ask you

a question and play gotcha on this. So, without objection, if I can

submit this for the record.

Mr. SHUSTER. Without objection, so ordered.

Mr. NEY. Two letters. And this is not from you, but this shocks

me. I had a hearing—in fact, we were the first House hearing to

go down to Mr. Taylor’s district. I was with Mr. Taylor and also

down to New Orleans with Maxine Waters from the Housing Subcommittee. We focused on housing. But I still want to ask a question outside my jurisdiction, but important, I think, to the Country,

and it is with regards to New Orleans.

I wrote a letter September 29th, and it is to the Army—it was

responded by the Department of the Army, of course, Deputy Director of Civil Works. The letter is shocking to me, and that is what

I have got here. But it will fall under—I think will fall under you
28

and the Department for future situations on the levee. In a nutshell, in response to my letter, it says that the goal—to paraphrase,

the goal was to restore the system to provide Katrina design by

2006, the state of next year’s hurricane system, which is fine in

that regards. Determining the level of protection that is appropriate is an issue for the citizens of New Orleans, the State of Louisiana, and the Nation as a whole.

But what they say in here is that they are going to restore it to

a level 3. Now, it says we currently do not have an approved cost

estimate for providing category 5 level protection to New Orleans.

Preliminary scheduled estimates for providing category 5 protection

for metropolitan New Orleans could take nine to ten years from

when we are given the authority and the money.

What shocks me about this is we are going to rebuild at level 3.

We know that level 3 will not make it. And we are spending

money, and I want to help the people down there, and that is why

we are working on the housing. I guess—and that is why I am not

playing gotcha on this. You probably haven’t seen this letter.

But somewhere down the line the Feds, the State of Louisiana,

and the City of New Orleans, somebody has got to pull the trigger

to make that call. If we rebuild to level 3 and something else happens, I can tell you people are going to say do we respond with $80

billion. And the other thing is there has got to be a way to go faster

than nine to ten years.

So I just raise this because, to me, this is shocking.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, as you know, Congressman, first of

all, the Army Corps is not in my Department, and, second, I have

not seen the letter before. I know from previous statements—

Mr. NEY. Not to interrupt you, but that is why I didn’t want to

play gotcha on this. But I will tell you it is not your Department,

but because of your authority in FEMA and natural disasters, I

don’t think this is just a call of the Corps.

Secretary CHERTOFF. No, I agree.

Mr. NEY. It is going to come eventually to you and the White

House.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I think that what has been said publicly

about what will be done by June 2006 is built to category 3 or—

and you don’t actually build to categories. One of the problems is

the category—save for Simpson’s calendar, hurricanes does not

mesh with the way they describe how they build.

The best way to put it, I think, in simple terms is I think the

intent of the Army Corps by June 1 is to build to what the standards were intended to be prior to Katrina, but with the levees built

properly. Because I gathered that what emerged in some of the

studies is that the levees had deficiencies in the way they were

constructed so that, among other things, one of the levees that

failed didn’t even have water up to the top of the levee, and it

should not have failed at all.

Now, the whole second question you raise is—which goes back to

Congressman Taylor’s question—we are coming—you know, the

clock is not going to wait, and there is going to come a time people

are going to have to make some hard decisions about where it

makes sense to rebuild. And no amount of wishful thinking or po-
29

litical discussion or whatever is going to change the physical realities of what is on the ground.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Mr. Honda.

Mr. HONDA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome, Secretary. I will be real quick. I take it that your answer to Mr. Mica’s question about FEMA being a standalone is no.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I think if we were more standalone, it

would be—

Mr. HONDA. That is sufficient. Just no, right?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Right, no.

Mr. HONDA. Now, we have deadlines coming up on the folks who

have housing, and many of them will be displaced again. I visited

Bayou La Batre, Biloxi, been to Houston, and there are a lot of

folks in Houston who are going to be displaced because of the deadline. Do you have the authority to extend the deadline?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Are we talking about the hotel deadline?

Mr. HONDA. Pardon?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Are you talking about the hotel deadline?

Mr. HONDA. Hotel, motel. The housing.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Let me make clear exactly what the deadline is, because no one should be displaced, if they are eligible and

if they are in touch with FEMA. We have contacted every single—

Mr. HONDA. My question is, do you have the authority to extend

the deadline?

Secretary CHERTOFF. I have authority to extend within legal limits. But I want to make clear that nobody is going to be displaced

without having received money for rental assistance or some alternative form of housing provided they are eligible under the law.

Mr. HONDA. Okay, then. There are folks in Houston, over 15,000,

who are Vietnamese or other Asians who have been displaced from

the Gulf Coast who have no idea how to get in contact with FEMA.

FEMA had no idea how to contact them. And once they knew the

community was there, they made no efforts. They say they tried,

but they made no efforts to station themselves where the population is. Like you say, you want them to go out to the

community—

Secretary CHERTOFF. Right.

Mr. HONDA.—where the folks are. That hasn’t happened. Where

will they fit and will you—

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, I guess I have to ask you a question.

Are these people in apartments? Because we are arranging with—

if they are in apartments, people who were displaced who got

apartments, there is no deadline for them to leave in the near future. I think that the apartments in Houston, there were leases

signed for 12 months. So—

Mr. HONDA. And you are covering that, FEMA?

Secretary CHERTOFF. FEMA is working with the city. I think

FEMA will wind up reimbursing the city. I think the city is directly

paying for the apartments.

Mr. HONDA. But there are some problems with definitions, housing versus shelter. Whether they are in housing, apartments, whatever, it is still shelter for them because they have been displaced.

Is that a big problem in your mind?
30

Secretary CHERTOFF. I think it has been a huge problem, and we

have tried to handle it in the following way—

Mr. HONDA. Well, can we get this agreement, that the deadline

will be extended until those kinds of problems are—

Secretary CHERTOFF. We can get this agreement, that nobody

who is eligible, who FEMA is aware of, will be displaced. Everybody who is eligible—and we can make the FEMA number available and I can give it to you afterwards—

Mr. HONDA. No, the City of Houston has that.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Then they—

Mr. HONDA. So you are saying if the City of Houston say these

folks need the extension, you will give that extension to those

folks?

Secretary CHERTOFF. I want to be careful because I am not going

to give a blank check to somebody. I will tell you exactly what—

Mr. HONDA. Well, let us just assume we are doing it right. Will

you extend it?

Secretary CHERTOFF. The way this is designed, everybody in

Houston who is in an apartment, we will reimburse the city for the

12 months. So there is no deadline for those people. People in hotels will either get direct money they can use to pay for—

Mr. HONDA. I understand that.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Right.

Mr. HONDA. I am asking you, working through Houston, whether

they are in hotels, motels, or homes or apartments, if they are

evacuees and they are from the Coast and they are part of the program that have not been addressed by FEMA because they were

evacuees, they are mostly Vietnamese and other Asians, will you

extend that deadline?

Secretary CHERTOFF. If someone is entitled to get aid and they

haven’t gotten it yet, we will extend it—

Mr. HONDA. Entitled is an issue.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well—

Mr. HONDA. Because if they haven’t been hooked into FEMA in

the beginning—

Secretary CHERTOFF. I understand that. Congressman, what I

can’t do is tell you if someone is not entitled, I am going to pay

them, because that would be a violation of the law. What I can tell

you is if someone is entitled, and for some reason we haven’t connected to them, we will not displace them, we will make sure

they—

Mr. HONDA. And those reasons will be acceptable if Houston

says, because you are a stickler on details and definitions.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I am a stickler on not breaking the law.

Mr. HONDA. Well, okay. I understand that. So I am assuming

that you are saying it is okay if Houston communicates with you

and addresses those issues, even if they don’t fit the definition of

FEMA because they weren’t contacted.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well—

Mr. HONDA. Because let me tell you what happened. These communities did not get communicated in a language they understood.

You have a memo from the Attorney General that says you all have

responsibility to communicate in the language that the population
31

needs, and if that hasn’t been followed and we can substantiate

that, I would hope that you would say let us do the right thing.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Absolutely. I will tell you we will do the

right thing. And if because of whether it is our scoop or just a mistake, someone who is entitled, who is a genuine evacuee, who is entitled to money and assistance didn’t get it, we will make sure they

don’t get displaced, as long as they fit the program—

Mr. SHUSTER. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Secretary CHERTOFF.—they are evacuees.

Mr. SHUSTER. Mr. Honda, we will come around again and you

can continue the line of questioning. I want to give everybody an

opportunity.

I will recognize Mr. Hayes now.

Mr. HAYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, I appreciate your being here. I think you have

been a punching bag plenty. The criticisms have certainly flown all

directions. I want to pay particular attention to my friend, Mr. Taylor, who certainly earned his stripes more than anybody, having

lived through the whole thing. Having said all of that, anything

that might be construed as a criticism of the critics, that is not

true, especially Gene.

A lot of good things happened. The problems we have talked

about in great detail, and it is important we do that. I want to

thank you and particularly your staff. Amy McGinnis, behind you,

has been very, very helpful as we have tried to work through some

very, very serious issues. A lot of things happened that were bad

and a lot of things happened that were good.

I have just gotten my hands on a completed report today that we

have done through the Armed Services Committee—this is obviously a Federal issue—of the incredible job that the military has

done during and after Katrina to help people. So I want to turn

that over to Amy just as soon as we get it printed, but I did want

to call attention to the fact that many wonderful people did many

things for their neighbors, their friends, their churches.

I worked with Gene a lot on many, many individual efforts, and

I want to make sure that, as we go forward, those people, public

and private, are recognized for the incredible sacrifice and contribution that they made.

So thank you for working with us. We want to help the Department in any way to make sure that we do our best in the future.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Thank you.

Mr. HAYES. Having said that, Mr. Chairman, I would like to

yield time to my friend, Mr. Simmons.

Mr. SIMMONS. I thank the gentleman for the yield.

Mr. Secretary, you spent an exciting time this morning before the

Homeland Security Committee, this afternoon in front of T&I, and

we thank you for your endurance and your patience.

I note that on page 1 of the Executive Summary of the Report

of Findings it says both imagination and initiative require good information and a coordinated process for sharing it. So information,

good information and information sharing is a key component of

how we deal with natural disasters, as well as how we deal with

terrorist or manmade disasters.
32

As Chairman of the Intelligence and Information Sharing Subcommittee, I have a great interest in what I call open-source intelligence, in other words, information that is publicly acquired. Unlike a terrorist attack, where surprise is usually a component, we

knew about Hurricane Katrina as early as August 23rd, when it

was spotted off of Florida. It proceeded over Florida.

Once it got in the Gulf, it got to be a category 4, then a 5 storm,

and then landed as a 4. And I learned after the event by Googling

New Orleans and levees that the Louisiana Times Picayune had

done about an eight-part series on the vulnerability of New Orleans

and the levees and Lake Pontchartrain.

So I guess my point is simply this: if we can be nimble and quick

in obtaining publicly available information, processing it through

and sharing it around, perhaps, when it comes to these natural disasters, we can anticipate what might happen. So my question to

you again, as it was this morning, is do you feel that you have a

robust enough capability to acquire, process, analyze, and disseminate information for a manmade, terrorist events as well as for

these natural disasters?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, first I want to thank Congressman

Hayes for his comments. I think the answer is we are working toward that, but we are not quite there yet. Now, if we are discussing the issue of natural disasters, not intelligence, which is a separate set of issues, you know, we do acquire a lot of open-source information.

Sometimes the reliability of it has to be tested and is kind of in

question, but one of the things which we need to do to build out

in the next couple of months is make sure we have better monitoring and better integration and better analysis of that open-source

information, because you collect so much of it that it almost becomes—you have what they call a signal-to-noise problem, and you

have to be able to figure out what is really going on.

So we are certainly—you know, it is not hard to collect it; it is

hard to refine it and analyze it, and that is what we are working

on doing.

Mr. HAYES. I appreciate that answer. I will continue to pursue

this issue, as I am sure you know and understand.

I thank the Chair and I yield back to Robin Hayes the two seconds that remain.

Mr. SHUSTER. Time is up. Thanks.

Mr. Bishop.

Mr. BISHOP. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, thank you for appearing before us this afternoon.

I represent Eastern Long Island, the eastern half of Long Island,

which is a low-lying area with about 300 miles of coastline. We

have been lucky, we have dodged some bullets; we haven’t had a

catastrophic storm in almost 70 years.

You said before that you saw preparedness as being related to

both prevention and protection, so my question to you is what specifically are you doing within your Department and with other Federal agencies to deal with the issue of prevention and protection for

low-lying areas like Eastern Long Island that are ultimately going

to get hit?
33

And also, what is your Department doing specifically? You outline four principles that you see guiding the way FEMA goes forward. What are you doing specifically with local government to

deal with the issue of being ready to respond to a catastrophic

storm?

Secretary CHERTOFF. One of the things which the President mandated that we do and Congress then subsequently put into legislation was to go out to all the States and look at their evacuation

and emergency response plans. We got an initial assessment which

was due—Congress set a due date of February 10th. We met the

due date and we submitted it to Congress. We now have teams

going out, working with the States to raise that level.

Through the States, through the State government, we are going

to have to—and a big State like New York presents some really

special challenges. They are going to have to work with their local

governments to identify what their most serious risks are. I think

maybe 50, 70 years ago there was a huge hurricane that hit Long

Island—

Mr. BISHOP. The last terrible storm was 1938.

Secretary CHERTOFF. So it is rare, but, as we have come to learn,

rare doesn’t mean non-existent.

We are certainly interested and available to work with local officials on an evacuation plan, for example. What I would say,

though, is—and this is why I come back to the fact that it has got

to be a very—it has got to be a locally focused plan and it has got

to be very specific. They are going to have to ask themselves these

questions: Do they have a transportation plan to reverse directional

flow?

If they are going to use it, do they know where the hospitals and

nursing homes are, and is there a legal requirement that these institutions evacuate people who are infirm? Do they have buses they

are going to use for people who don’t have transportation? Do they

have drivers and a commitment from the drivers and a contract to

have their drivers evacuate? Have they mapped out where the

buses ought to go and communicated to the public that if you don’t

have a car, go to this shelter and you will be picked up? That is,

by the way, what Miami Beach does.

So those are the kinds of things which we are going to work with

the States on. But I guess I want to make this point clear: any

county or locality that sits and waits for FEMA to come and give

it a plan is going to find itself under water. Emergency planning

has to begin at the local level, and if there are areas where there

are missing capabilities, that is the kind of thing that we can help

with and the State has to help with.

Mr. BISHOP. One more question. The Allstate Insurance Company has recently announced that they are not going to write any

new policies on Long Island because of the risk associated with the

likelihood of a storm. What assurances can you give us that FEMA

will be able to coordinate the National Flood Insurance Program

and will be able to work with the SBA to make sure that loans are

available so that there is a stopgap for families and for small businesses?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, as you know, one of the issues we

have to address is the actuarial soundness of a flood insurance pro-
34

gram. Obviously, people in a floodplain have to have flood insurance. I think people outside of floodplain are encouraged to get

flood insurance. What would be a dangerous thing would be for

someone who does not have flood insurance to say I am not going

to purchase flood insurance, I am just going to wait for the Federal

Government to bail me out. I think that would be a very dangerous

and risky thing to do.

Mr. BISHOP. Thank you.

Mr. SHUSTER. Mr. Boustany.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here. I am

from Louisiana, and in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, as

soon as the winds abated, I had the opportunity to fly over New

Orleans and get a comprehensive aerial survey of what had happened. And it immediately became clear to me that our State and

local resources were overwhelmed with what was going on; we were

going to need Federal help.

We went back to the communications center for our largest emergency ambulance provider and we were getting real-time information back from the paramedics as to what was going on, and it was

really clear that we were overwhelmed. We had major difficulties.

We needed help.

I started making numerous phone calls to the Department of

Homeland Security, FEMA, White House, and so forth, trying to

provide information to get help.

On that same day the Incident of National Significance was invoked, but it is my understanding that the—let me get the term

correctly—Catastrophic Incident Annex was not activated. And

that is what kicks the Federal response into overdrive. Why did

that not happen?

Secretary CHERTOFF. I am glad to have the opportunity to clear

this up, because I just think there is a misconception about this,

and people have read the plan in a way that I don’t think is correct. But I also have to say that if we are at the stage where we

have to debate the meaning of the words in a plan, we ought to

rewrite the plan so it is clear.

The Incident of National Significance automatically was triggered by the Presidential Declaration of Emergency on Saturday.

So the President, by declaring the emergency, did the Incident of

National Significance.

The Catastrophic Annex is designed in a case where you don’t

preposition, you don’t have the time to preposition things. That

would be the example of what would happen, for example, if there

was a sudden attack. Here, there was specific pre-positioning, and

I remember this because I was on the telephone call where, among

other things, Colonel Smith from Louisiana talked about how they

had looked at all these different things and they were satisfied that

everything that was necessary was en route or pre-positioned.

So in terms of the status on Sunday, we had things pre-positioned, so the Catastrophic Annex, by its terms, apply, and we had

an Incident of National Significance.

Now, let me get to the substances apart from the paper. In looking back, it seems to me the problem is that there was an underestimation of what would be necessary in terms of all of the contingencies. I think there were millions of gallons of water and food,
35

a lot of stuff, but I think where there was a failure was to conceive

of what would happen if there was a levee breach that would actually totally fill the bowl.

I am not saying people didn’t anticipate the possibility, but there

was no specific plan about if people don’t evacuate the first round,

what is our secondary plan for bringing buses in. And that seems

to me to underscore where planning comes in.

We have got to sit down—and you can’t write these plans 24

hours in advance. We have got to sit down and we are going to

have to do it this year with Louisiana and say, okay, what is going

to happen if Katrina replays? Do you have buses there? Do we now

know that the drivers are going to stick around and bring everybody out? And, if not, can we get buses from other areas?

Mr. BOUSTANY. And, in fact, we did learn some of those lessons,

because Rita came through my district shortly afterwards, and we

were able to successfully get the evacuation done such that there

were no lives lost.

Secretary CHERTOFF. So this is really a matter, ultimately, of

having the planners, the ground planners and the ground operators

literally think through all these things. And I think it is a discipline. We are going to get the military, as we did in Rita, involved very early on, again, not at a high level, where everybody

agrees in principle, but at the level of, okay, I want to know how

many trucks, how many buses. And that is one of the reasons I

said to Congressman Taylor, because there are going to be unique

challenges, particularly in Louisiana and Mississippi, we need to

start that planning very specifically well in advance.

Mr. BOUSTANY. That is right. You know, one of the other areas

that we had trouble with was the fact that we had State barriers

to getting additional emergency medical personnel in, physicians

and others. We couldn’t get the sign-off of the governor and others

during the course of that. At what point is there an override where

you can get around the red tape? I spent a lot of time on the telephone trying to break through red tape over a 48 hour period to

allow for these 800 emergency medical physicians to come in, these

other ambulance providers, and helicopter pilots and so forth.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, you know, here is an area where

maybe legislation needs to be looked at. I understand there was a

problem with doctors coming, they are not licensed to practice.

Your first impulse is, well, forget the licensing; I am a doctor, let

me help out. But then, sooner or later, someone pops their hand

up and says, well, if you mess up, you are going to get sued; and

because you are not licensed, you will automatically lose and you

will be wiped out. And that tends to make a lot of people go whoa,

wait a second.

Maybe one of the things to be looked at is whether, in an emergency of a certain category, you do allow—you have to balance protection of liability and allow people to do what they have to do, and

if they act in good faith, give them some protection and maybe

waive the licensing.

Mr. BOUSTANY. And this is all part of that aligning preparedness

that you talked about earlier, where you are actually bringing in

the private sector into this planning process.

Secretary CHERTOFF. That is exactly.
36

Mr. BOUSTANY. And that is what we need to do. It seems to me

the preparedness part of this was where the real failure occurred.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I agree with that.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you. I yield back.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you.

Mr. Larsen.

Mr. LARSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Secretary Chertoff, for better or for worse, today you are the

most popular man in Washington, D.C. I appreciate your taking

some time to come see us.

I am on the Armed Services Committee as well, and I am sure

we are going to be exploring some of the implications of the report

that came out from Washington State. We are tucked up there in

the Pacific Northwest, about as far north and west as you can get

in the lower 48 from Washington, D.C., and quite a bit away from

Louisiana.

But I can tell you, speaking for folks at home, they were impacted by the images, and hearts were broken as much as any

other hearts in the Country when we saw what we saw in those

terrible days in Louisiana and Mississippi. I wanted to ask some

questions sort from a practical sense that have come up since from

our folks back home, and I apologize for being late and hope they

haven’t been asked yet.

But I did have a question about the emergency management performance grants and the program, because they are something that

allow States and emergency management heads the flexibility to

hire and train staff, and the MPG program has authorized a 50/

50 match between Federal and State dollars. But the program is

underfunded and actually ends up, at least for our guys, as being

about a 20/80 match. And the President’s budget request proposes

$15 million less in fiscal year 2006 and, honestly, from Washington

State’s perspective, the emergency management folks, it is unacceptable. That program needs to be funded well to address not only

issues in States like Louisiana and Mississippi and others, but also

Washington State.

I am wondering if you can help us understand why there is less

money proposed in that grant program this year than over the last.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I think there is generally a view that, with

some limited exceptions, programs that fund personnel costs, salary

and things of that sort, are funding the kinds of requirements that

are really traditional State and local requirements. There are some

exceptions where we think that there are personnel costs that have

been imposed on a State or locality where there is some particular

national externality or national element that we should, in fairness, pick up, like when we raise the alert level to orange, we do

allow for overtime.

But, in general, there are many worthwhile first responders.

First responders are critical. But, in theory, that would put the

Federal Government in the position of paying for all the police and

all the fire and all the emergency personnel all over the Country.

So I guess as a matter of policy we try to really move away from

paying for personnel and getting into paying for equipment, capital

expenditures, research into kinds of technology that we couldn’t

fairly expect the city or State to be able to conduct itself.
37

Mr. LARSEN. I appreciate that answer. I think something that

came out of Hurricane Katrina and Rita is that there is, for a lot

of people, a realization that although we have a debate about what

the appropriate role of the Federal Government is in the Country,

I think what Hurricane Katrina and Rita demonstrated to a lot of

people is that when it comes to natural disasters, sometimes the

only tool in the toolbox that is big enough to deal with these things

is the Federal Government. And not that we are ever going to have

a Hurricane Katrina or Rita size event in Washington State, it

might just be another volcano exploding or an earthquake, but still

that role of the Federal Government has to be there, and it has to

be there to help because it is the only tool big enough.

This gets to another question from some of our emergency management folks. They are concerned about the inability, what they

see as an inability of FEMA to respond to natural or even manmade disasters, and I think there is a concern about your comment

about hiring 1500 new full-time employees as year-round coordinators. Not that there is any opposition to that, but that the response

is those positions were there earlier, but they were moved to focus

on terrorism, and now you are just sort of trying to move those

folks back. Are these new folks or is this a shuffling, one side to

the next?

Secretary CHERTOFF. First of all, we haven’t arrived at a number. I think a reporter tried to guess the number, and I don’t think

her guess is necessarily correct. This is not moving people back,

this is—right now, most of our disaster assistance employees are

volunteers, they go out into the field. And in the ‘‘normal routine’’

disaster, that probably works pretty well, and I certainly appreciate the work the volunteers do. But I think we recognized in

Katrina, when you have a real catastrophe, it requires a level of

professional training that is more sophisticated and also requires

more sophisticated equipment and training in use of the equipment.

We haven’t settled on a number yet. What we are looking to do

is have a core of people who are very specialized in this. And then

if we need to surge up—essentially, they would be like the noncoms around whom we would build the volunteers so that the volunteers could then have available to them, as they go out into the

field, a better set of resources. We have not, however, settled on a

number. And although we do have increased money in the budget

for additional personnel, we haven’t figured out exactly how we are

going to—exactly what the number is going to be or how we are

going to allocate it.

Mr. LARSEN. If I may just follow up. So you are telling me that

whatever number it is, it is not a matter of moving people back

from where they were?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Correct. That is not what we are doing.

Mr. LARSEN. It is new people doing new things.

Secretary CHERTOFF. It is not going to be people who went over

to terrorism who are coming back. There may be some people who

work in FEMA at other jobs who we will train in times of emergency to do this function; and then there will be some new people

as well. The exact number, or even close to the exact number,

hasn’t been determined yet.
38

Mr. SHUSTER. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Mr. LARSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHUSTER. Mr. Reichert.

Mr. REICHERT. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have got to catch an airplane and I know you want to leave.

It has been a long day for you yesterday and today, and I am going

to talk fast.

I was a sheriff in my previous life, 33 years of law enforcement

experience as a sheriff in King County in Seattle, and my issue is

first responders. I also am fortunate enough to chair the Emergency Preparedness Subcommittee under Homeland Security. I was

afforded a classified briefing by people from your Department. It

was held last week, I believe. We made a phone call, I hosted the

event and a number of members of Congress were there, and we

appreciate your having your people attend and inform us of the formula that was used in risk and threat-based analysis.

My issue, as I have stated this morning in your presentation at

Homeland Security, is COPS, and it is personnel costs versus the

costs going to all the Federal agencies. There are those costs. I

think when local agencies provide their personnel to intelligence

gathering efforts for national security purposes, the joint analytical

centers, for example, and the joint terrorism task force, I would

just ask you to please consider assisting local police departments

and sheriffs offices across the Country in providing funding for

those people who are engaged in those non-traditional roles of law

enforcement, now that we have expanded into this new arena of

homeland security.

My second issue—and we talked a lot about that this morning

too—was interoperability. I don’t believe that the answer to interoperability is more and more funding, more and more money. You

and I agreed this morning it was leadership, it was management,

it was performance measures.

And I was excited to hear your firm commitment and your passion that you expressed this morning for raising the priority to the

highest level within the Department of Homeland Security as far

as interoperability is concerned, and to fully staff the Office of

Interoperability and Compatibility. You have four staff people now.

I think in your FTE count it should be 16. So we have to work together to try and make that happen.

I want to just touch on—how long have you served as the Secretary?

Secretary CHERTOFF. One year and one day.

Mr. REICHERT. One year. And how many departments have been

consolidated?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Twenty-two.

Mr. REICHERT. Twenty-two departments. And how many employees?

Secretary CHERTOFF. A hundred and eighty-three thousand, approximately.

Mr. REICHERT. And you haven’t solved all these problems yet?

Secretary CHERTOFF. That is going to take a few more weeks,

probably.

Mr. REICHERT. You know, I had experience in the sheriffs office.

I had 1,100 employees; I had a $110 million budget. I consolidated
39

40 people into an agency with 1100—it took me two years to finally

get people to work together. And part of it was the union agreements and the labor agreements and the disparity in pay and benefits, and I know that is something that you have to work on and

we have got to get that fixed. That will bring people together.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Correct. It will.

Mr. REICHERT. How many committees do you report to?

Secretary CHERTOFF. I have got, I would say on the House side

there are three authorizing committees and obviously the Appropriations Committee. On the Senate side I think there are three

authorizing committees and one Appropriations Committee. I hope

I didn’t miss a committee. Actually, probably four, because the Intelligence Committee is also—

Mr. REICHERT. Does that include the subcommittees? I heard

there were 66 committees that really—

Secretary CHERTOFF. No, I am just going full committees, I am

not talking about—

Mr. REICHERT. Well, there are 66 committees, at least that I

know of, that your agency reports to, which is absolutely unheard

of. So maybe what we ought to do is—you ought to do, sir, is to

follow the example of Congress and create a Secretary of Homeland

Security of FEMA, of Preparedness, of TSA, of FBI, DEA, and we

just divide these all up and make 66 secretaries. Maybe that would

work.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, we would certainly have a lot of people to testify, but we would have a very stovepiped and fragmented

response to everything.

Mr. REICHERT. I have nothing further, Mr. Chairman].

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you.

Mr. Gilchrest.

Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Appreciate it.

Mr. Secretary, if you haven’t been to Secretary Rumsfeld’s place

on the eastern shore of Maryland or the Vice President’s place on

the eastern shore of Maryland, I would like to invite you to my

place on the eastern shore of Maryland to go to canoeing. I am

about an hour or so north of them. I think my area is a little

prettier, a little contour to the land, and we will paddle up a beautiful little tidal basin being followed by the eagles, the osprey, turkey buzzards, and a number of other wildlife things. So just a moment of respite. If you need one, we are always over there.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Say when.

Mr. GILCHREST. Sunday morning. I will have the coffee and the

eggs ready. I will give your staff the directions.

Secretary CHERTOFF. That sounds great.

Mr. GILCHREST. Okay.

I would like to ask some questions about Mr. Boustany used the

phrase the line of preparedness. And I would like to go—you have

been through the gamut here, whether they are trailers or buses

or how to deal with the preparedness issue during the storm and

after the storm. And I think we have all learned a great deal about

how to resolve some of these very difficult issues under this type

of catastrophic event with the local government, State government,

and the Federal Government.
40

I would like to take a look at coastal Louisiana. If we are to be

prepared—I know there have been a lot of problems in Mississippi.

My good friend from lower Mississippi is here today, and he has

experienced a lot of those tragic events, and helped and lived

through them. But I want to focus just on coastal Louisiana.

There was a report put out some time ago that it is still being

worked on, there is still some draft scientific evidence coming to a

conclusion that by the year 2050, if nothing was done in Louisiana

and we had reasonably expected storm cycles and calm cycles, we

would lose about 500 square miles of coastal Louisiana. If they did

everything that they could and had $14 billion, they would only

lose 250 square miles of coastal Louisiana.

So if we are going to save much of New Orleans and lower Louisiana, I think my message to you is three things, all big-picture

observations: to understand clearly the hydraulogic cycle of a third

of the United States, a third of the U.S. drains right through Louisiana. And then look at the hydraulic system that we have put in

place to move that water with pumps and levees and channels and

canals, etc., to protect New Orleans, the infrastructure of oil and

gas, communities and towns and so on.

Then, if we take that and understand that lower Louisiana is

subsiding, it is sinking, for a variety of reasons, but in fact it is

being compressed, so it is getting lower, sea level is rising. The

area of protection is being eroded away. The area of protection is

the sediment coming down the Mississippi River that used to provide for fast land.

That sediment provided for more land. That sediment has been

channeled either by dams upstream or by pumps before it gets

there, or it shoots right out into the outer continental shelf of the

Gulf of Mexico and is of no value. The other thing is the marshes

and the wetlands that, on average—and Dr. Boustany knows this—

about 25 or 30 square miles are lost every year. In this hurricane,

Katrina, 100 square miles was lost.

So line of preparedness. Look at the big picture of the

hydraulogic cycle going through Louisiana. How do we protect that

barrier which protects the economy, which is oil and gas, tourism,

fisheries, but the cities? What do we do to understand the

hydraulogic cycle and what do we do to protect that marsh area in

coastal Louisiana that fundamentally protects what we all know

about Louisiana?

I am sorry for that diatribe, but that is sort of the big picture.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I agree, I think it is the big picture. Preparedness is what we do for right now, in terms of things that are

going to happen that we can’t stop. But you are really asking fundamental questions which have to be answered to really understand the configuration of the Gulf Coast and rebuilding over the

next 20, 50, 100 years.

Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you.

Ms. Norton.

Ms. NORTON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I apologize to the Secretary that I was called off campus and had

to leave. I would like to give you an opportunity to respond to my
41

criticism about bifurcation of FEMA itself within DHS. We can’t

find any experts in emergency response that agree that you improve matters—they all argue you make matters worse—if you separate preparation, response, and recovery. Your second stage notion, as I understand it, was separate out preparation. I think you

were responding to FEMA’S failure.

But how would you respond to them that these three notions are

not just interrelated, they are part of continuum, they are seamless

if you separate and create another bureaucracy, not under FEMA,

that is in charge of preparation, and then everything else somehow

is left with FEMA?

Secretary CHERTOFF. This is how I would respond. First of all,

I want to say that we came to this conclusion actually talking to

emergency managers, inside and outside, military people who

talked to us about how they reorganized the Defense Department

to make it operate in an integrated fashion. I agree with you about

the continuum.

I think the problem—I have to begin with this proposition: When

preparedness in FEMA was separated from other elements of preparedness, because preparedness covers a lot of things, it covers

protecting infrastructure, it covers law enforcement, it covers intelligence. When preparedness was linked up with FEMA in a separate directorate, which was what the situation was when Katrina

hit, preparedness had not been done.

When I came into the Department, there were large elements of

preparedness that had not really been attended to, and I think,

frankly, part of that is because, at bottom, FEMA is an operational

agency and has to be able to really respond to an emergency and

a crisis doing the kinds of things like moving supplies, going into

afflicted areas, providing relief. And since we know that the Country, at a minimum five to six months of the year, were going to

have a series of those, if not 12 months a year, the head of that

combined directorate is inevitably drawn to dealing with a crisis

and not paying attention to the long-term planning.

What I wanted to do was I wanted to integrate, exactly as you

say, the whole spectrum of preparedness, recognizing that some of

it is intelligence, some of it is prevention, some of its protection,

and some of it is response. And the idea isn’t to disconnect FEMA

from preparedness, but it is, rather, to have preparedness draw

upon all of the disciplines that we have—FEMA, Coast Guard, the

law enforcement agencies that we have, TSA, which gets us transportation—so that when you draw plans and when you do grants

and training, you are looking across the entire spectrum of what

the needs are and recognizing, by the way, that in some places they

need to differ.

I will give you an example like Washington. Take Washington,

D.C. Sure, an element of preparedness in Washington is response:

evacuation; recovery; what do you do if there is, bringing health

care in if there is some kind of a disaster.

But another critical element is prevention. What do we put up

in order to make sure that we have fused intelligence, that we have

trained our law enforcement to prevent a terrorist incident from occurring or dealing with it if it does occur? How do we build protections around our critical areas of the city?
42

And if, in dealing with preparedness, the District of Columbia

had to go to FEMA for dealing with one kind of preparedness, and

to a law enforcement agency to deal with another kind of preparedness, and to an infrastructure protection component for dealing

with another kind of preparedness, we would simply be continuing

the stovepiping that we have been trying to fight in other parts of

the government, where the firefighters don’t talk to the police, who

don’t talk to the emergency managers. I mean, you can go to some

cities and some of them get along great. In some cities—I am not

saying Washington—the fire chief and the police chief barely speak

to one another.

So our vision was look at the whole thing as a system, preparedness. And it is not that you don’t want to have the operators, the

experts like FEMA, involved. You want to have them involved like

we have Coast Guard involved with preparedness. But you want to

have someone who owns the process and the responsibility for the

outcome across the entire spectrum.

The one other thing I ought to put into the mix to give you a full

picture of what we want to do is we do need to have regional preparedness, and there we do want to fuse preparedness and the

FEMA regions. And I think the vision we have is to put in each

of the FEMA regions a cell of people from preparedness and a cell

of military people from NORTHCOM and the people who are the

FEMA response people in the region, and have that combined, unified group work with the governors and the mayors in that region

to actually do this integration of preparedness and response.

So I do think we have taken account of the issues you have

raised, but at the end of the day I have to look at somebody and

say, you know, you have got to own preparedness, and you can’t

be off running around dealing with all the emergencies that are

going to overwhelm you. You have got to be able to get your team

together and do planning and discipline day in and day out, whether there is a hurricane, whether there is a fire, or we are never

going to get this thing done.

Ms. NORTON. I can see you are responding to the police side of

emergency management, but I am not convinced—and perhaps we

can discuss it at some later point—how creating yet another bureaucracy within the Department makes us ahead. At least I understand something of what you are doing.

Could you just take me through, finally, the whole notion, the

perpetual criticism about roles and responsibility? One of the reasons that taking FEMA out of DHS and making it nimble seemed

to make sense is because it has to move quickly. I still don’t know

who is designated to do what.

I know who is in charge. The President of the United States is

in charge; you are in charge. But I want to know if a disaster, allhazards, any disaster occurs tomorrow, what happens? Who responds? Who is designated to respond to what? If you could just go

down the list.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Sure.

Ms. NORTON. And what happens if the State and locals somehow

don’t respond next time?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Let me divide disasters into two categories:

routine disasters and catastrophes. Routine disasters, which we
43

have year-in, year-out, even big ones, State government is usually

the principal—

Ms. NORTON. I am only interested in ones that involve principally your action because they are so massive.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Okay. Okay. So now if we deal with a catastrophe, I have the responsibility in DHS to be the incident manager. That does not mean, by the way, I have command and control

over the entire United States Government, but it means I have to

manage the process under the same system that governors use to

manage their States.

Ms. NORTON. So FEMA has to go to you first.

Secretary CHERTOFF. No, they don’t have to go to me, because—

and the model I would use is the Coast Guard. I don’t actually require FEMA to come and ask me permission to do things. What I

do is I appoint somebody to manage the incident in the field. And

that person has the power to coordinate all of the tools of the Department and all of the tools of the Federal Government and assign

everybody—

Ms. NORTON. Is that person appointed right now?

Secretary CHERTOFF. The person is appointed for the particular

catastrophe depending on where it is and what it is.

Ms. NORTON. So that has to happen. Is there somebody you could

tap tomorrow?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Yes. I have got a list of people. Last time,

after Mr. Brown was removed, I went to Admiral Allen, and he

went down. And we have a list of people who are trained to do this.

Some of them are senior members of Coast Guard or Secret Service

or other components who have been specifically trained in managing incidents, have a lot of operational experience.

Depending on where the incident is and what the nature of the

incident is, it might be a different kind of a person. Obviously, in

a maritime environment you might go to Coast Guard; in a city you

might go to someone with urban experience. It doesn’t even have

to be a person from DHS; I can reach out to somebody outside.

Then, at that point, there is no bureaucracy involved. The incident is managed at the lowest level, with people who are in the

field, like the combat general, and they have available to them all

of the organs of government. All they need to do is say to the Department of Transportation you have to produce a transportation

capability to do x, y, z; or, to the military, you have to produce a

medical surge capability. If we have planned it properly, that capability is available and begins to move immediately.

What we need to do, though, is to complete this process of process and integrating. And that is what happened us in Katrina.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Secretary, suppose—

Mr. SHUSTER. The gentle lady’s time has expired.

Ms. NORTON. Can I just—

Mr. SHUSTER. As long as this is it.

Ms. NORTON. This is it. Thank you.

Let us assume that the State and locals aren’t on point once

again. What do we do about the fact that the procedure requires

us to go through—and, understandably, this is a Federal republic—

go through them, wait for them?

Secretary CHERTOFF. It doesn’t require that.
44

Ms. NORTON. That is what we were told. We were told that because they didn’t respond, that is what the problem was.

Secretary CHERTOFF. No. Generally, the expertise—look, the people who know the community best are the local people. And one of

the reasons we do want to be a little more regional is to get a little

more visibility into what is going on locally. But I can tell you from

New Jersey, where I am from, the people who know best what is

the best way to evacuate New Jersey are people from New Jersey.

Ms. NORTON. Well, they didn’t know best in New Orleans.

Mr. SHUSTER. The gentlelady’s time has expired. You have gone

over five minutes.

If you want to sum up, sir, then we will go to the next question.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Obviously, if the people in—let me pick my

own State, just so we don’t get into a thing about Louisiana—and

I am sure in New Jersey they do it great. But in the first instance

we would go to the people in New Jersey and say what is the best

way to evacuate, what is the plan. If they didn’t know or they were

incapacitated, then we would have to then build a plan. That would

take more time.

And one of the reasons we are doing, right now, this exercise of

checking everybody’s plans is because if the State were incapacitated, at least we would have the benefit of a plan that we have

prepared in advanced and we can say, okay, here is the plan for

New Jersey, here are the highways you have got to reverse

contraflow on, here are where you have to put the fuel bladders so

people can get out of town.

I mean, this is a very complicated system that requires—we don’t

need the States to do it, but we have got to have plans in place

or we are not going to know the terrain in the way we need to

know to do it effectively.

Ms. NORTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your indulgence.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you.

Mr. Poe.

Mr. POE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Good to see you again. My district down in Southeast Texas is

somewhat unique, it is like Mr. Boustany’s in that we border each

other. The Sabine River separate us, Louisiana and Texas. Katrina

hit and about 250,000 from Louisiana came right through Jefferson

County, headed to Houston and other parts.

About 25,000 of them stayed in Jefferson County. Took care of

them, put them up, fed them, clothed them, sent them to church.

Then Rita hit. So we were hit twice. And we have a double problem, as in western Louisiana, because they have two hurricanes in

a very short period of time.

I will be very candid with you: the people in Texas feel like they

are treated like second class Americans because of Hurricane Rita.

It is the forgotten hurricane. All we hear up here in Washington

is Katrina, Katrina, Katrina. There were two hurricanes. Rita came

through an area the State of Texas that produces 25 percent of the

petrochemical products for this Country. Local responders took care

of business, and to this day they feel like they are being treated

differently by, specifically, FEMA and other government agencies.
45

I have a few questions. And I appreciate, being a former prosecutor, you know, the brevity of a witness, just answering the question.

The City of Beaumont has incurred about $8.5 million. They

have asked to be reimbursed for that out-of-pocket expenses. They

are working on the forms. They heard first they could get an advance on that; now they hear they can’t. Their problem is they are

spending $32,000 a month in interest to the local banks. Is there

any possibility they can get an advance, or do they have to finish

all the paperwork first?

Secretary CHERTOFF. I don’t know the answer, but I will find out.

Mr. POE. Okay. Thank you.

Next concern that I have is, being a former judge, I have read,

as everyone else has, the absolute criminal conduct of some people

that are preying on these two hurricanes, the people that are stealing social security numbers from dead people and then making a

profit out of it, and then spending the money on all kinds of things

that we probably shouldn’t even talk about here in this Committee

hearing.

I think those people need to be in jail. And anybody in the Federal Government that helped and abetted in that, they need to be

in jail as well.

Now, we hear about the abuses. My question is is there any plan

to get those people locked up and prosecuted?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Yes. The Department of Justice set up a

task force working with our inspector general and other law enforcement officials, and they have in fact, I think, prosecuted and

will continue to prosecute people who have ripped off the system

Mr. POE. And my last comment has to do with waste. It seems

to me that having 10,000 mobile homes or trailers or manufactured

houses, whatever you want to call them, worth $50 million sitting

up in Hope, Arkansas—some reports that they are sinking in the

mud—is FEMA planning to use those trailers?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Yes. The answer is yes. We envision or we

predict that of the 18,000 to 20,000, maybe about 8,000 or 9,000

will ultimately be used in places that are not in a floodplain for

Katrina and Rita people. Others will be used in other parts of the

Country where we don’t have a floodplain issue. Some have been

used, for example, where there are wildfires. And they actually envision that the remaining 9 or 10,000 will be, in the normal course,

used for people who are displaced for all other kinds of disasters

during the coming year. So it is anticipated that they will in fact

all be put to use.

Mr. POE. I have a suggestion where to store those, rather than

in Hope, Arkansas. Nothing against Arkansas, but down on the

south Texas border, as you know, we are looking for places to

house people that illegally come into the United States, and we

could use those 10,000 trailers down there to house illegals. And

if they are needed in a disaster, than use them in a disaster. But

maybe you might consider doubling up on those trailers and using

them as temporary residents for illegals until they are deported

back to their home country. Just a suggstion to you.

Secretary CHERTOFF. That was actually suggested at a hearing

I was at yesterday, and then someone raised the objection that if
46

the mobile homes were too comfortable, it might actually encourage

people to migrate across the border because they thought they

would get better housing.

Mr. POE. We can hook them all up and just take them further

south of the Rio Grande River, back to the countries those folks

come from, if that is a problem.

Thank you for being here and spending the day with us, and the

Texas delegation especially yesterday.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Thank you, Congressman.

Mr. SHUSTER. Mr. Secretary, I want to take the opportunity now

to ask a few questions that I have. I became chairman of this subcommittee about a year ago, about a month more than you came

on as Secretary, so in some regards I feel like I have been going

through this with you, although not to the intensity that you have

had to go through it.

All throughout this last year I have been talking to people

around the Country that understand emergency management, their

thoughts on when you brought your second stage review, we were

talking to local and State folks about their thoughts, and my concern is, as we are moving forward again, there is a sense, I bleieve,

in Congress that wants to take FEMA out of DHS. You have made

your position known; you don’t think that would be a wise thing

to do.

But I think it is important for us, instead of just getting into an

Administration and Congress fight over this, what do the stakeholders say, and that is the States, I think, are major stakeholders.

So can you tell me how have you included them in this process as

we move forward? Because when they took preparedness out two

years ago, when it came together, the State emergency managers

were opposed to it, so we didn’t listen to them. So can you talk to

me a little bit about that?

Secretary CHERTOFF. You know, when I went through the second

staeg review, we, in fact, went out and talked to a lot of emergency

managers. I talked to some of them myself; others in the process

talked to them, State, we talked to experts inside the Federal Government, and we continue to do so.

And when I had the emergency managers and the homeland security advisors in at the beginning of August last year, we talked

pretty candidly about this, and I understood that—and I have to

step back and say I have been in law enforcement and I have been

in this job, and if I sit down with a bunch of police chiefs, all I am

going to hear from them is you are giving all the grant money to

the first responders.

And if I sit down with the emergency managers, I am going to

hear you are giving all the money to the police chiefs. And I feel

very strongly we need to have an honest broker in the middle,

someone who can look at the entire range of needs and make sure

we are funding and training the entire range of needs.

And one of the things I committed to was that the decisions

would be made by having people from FEMA participate in the preparedness directorate, by having people from Coast Guard and law

enforcement. So I did involve them in the process, and as we go forward with the lessons learned I want to continue to talk to them.
47

Mr. SHUSTER. And I think I understand what you are saying, because I talk to folks and hear about the money issue, but I am talking more about the structure of it, because at the end of the day

they are the end-users, the local firemen, the local folks, the State

emergency managers. They are the customer. And it is important

for us not to be an honest broker, but listen to them on how they

function.

And it is my concern, as I go around the Country now talking

to people—and we are going to be holding hearings next week out

west—their concern is that preparedness and response is not

linked.

I am also a student of history, and you look back to when we set

up FEMA in 1979, 1980, after Three Mile Island. Preparedness and

response were not together, so we created FEMA. In the 1990s they

experimented within FEMA to separate response and preparedness, and it didn’t work. And you made the point that you were operating under the old system, and that was preparedness and

FEMA are separate, and it didn’t work.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, they were together. Under the old

system we had, the first two years of this Department, we had a

directorate of preparedness and response, which in theory did exactly what you say, it unified the two. The problem is that the battle rhythm of the agency as an operational agency understandably

focused on the crisis and, as a consequence, the preparedness was

not really being integrated. And what I want to do is make sure

that we have people like the military, they have planning people

who are different than the operational people and different than

the combat people.

Mr. SHUSTER. But they are out there practicing every day. That

is almost akin to having a practice team and a game team, and if

they are not working in practice on those things when it comes

game time, they are not going to perform well. And I think with

emergency management that is the sense I am getting, not from

me, but from what I hear from the folks out in the field. And I

know there are differences of opinion out there, but I think that is

something we have to weigh heavily on.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Can I just—

Mr. SHUSTER. Sure.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I think we agree more than may appear, for

this reason. The structural issue is a question of accountability and

making sure that there is somebody who owns the responsibility to

fix the problem.

But I completely agree with you that they have to be integrated

across the board. And one of the reasons I mentioned this regional

issue is because I think as we get into the operational area, which

is the regional interaction with the actual responders, there I do

see a unified effort, where we do, in a unified command or a unified

place, put our FEMA people, our preparedness people, and our

military people to do exactly what you say.

Mr. SHUSTER. Another thing that troubled me, and what I hear

from the States and some of the local responders, but I know now

that you are in the process of hiring a FEMA director, and I understand that a couple people, significant emergency management

folks have turned it down. And the word that I hear is that they
48

are turning it down because they are not confident that we can go

forward the way that is proposed. Can you touch on that a little

bit?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Yes. I don’t think that is an accurate story.

I think that there are some very experienced, well-known names

that we have spoken to, and we have not made a decision yet.

Sometimes people take it, matter of fact, because of family issues,

but the people that I have spoken to I think are very excited about

what we are trying to do.

And one thing I will tell you is we are looking to get a real superstar, and the example I give you is George Foresman, who we put

in charge of preparedness, who I think you can go around anywhere and people are going to say this is the kind of guy we ought

to have doing this.

Mr. SHUSTER. I met with George just yesterday. Excellent guy.

But I am still hearing there have been people saying no thanks.

So that is a concern.

And my final question is from the Katrina Committee, which I

served on, one of the findings we had was that the President was

not receiving advice and counsel from an emergency expert, a senior, experienced person on the ground. So how, moving forward, are

we going to rectify that situation? Because you are a capable,

bright individual, but some would say now you are an emergency

expert after your battle-testing Katrina.

But what are we going to have set up that the President can confer, just like he does with the Joint Chiefs or the military experts,

are we going to have something like that?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, first of all, I probably am more of an

expert now than I was, but one thing I think I have been pretty

forthright about is I am not going to substitute my—try to pretend

I have the experience of a 30-year-old manager. I have got to get

the right person in charge of FEMA.

At that point I think I will be able to give the President and

make them available to give the President the kind of advice the

President needs to hear directly from someone who has a substantial amount of operational experience. That requires putting the

right person in charge of FEMA, the right person in charge of preparedness.

Mr. SHUSTER. I don’t have any more questions, but I have told

a couple of members I would give them a second round. I know you

have time constraints. So what I am going to do is do a three

minute questioning, and I think, Mr. Boustany, do you—I am really only going to do three members, the Ranking Member, Mr Taylor, and Mr. Boustany. So I will start with Mr. Taylor.

Mr. HONDA. Mr. Chairman, with your indulgence, I have one

more question to ask.

Mr. SHUSTER. We will see how we go here, because we have time

constraints on the Secretary also, and we want to be respectful of

his time. Let us see how these go here. If Mr. Taylor can be brief,

we might be able to do that.

Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Secretary, I am told that you are also in charge

of the Federal Flood Insurance Program.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, it is part of FEMA, correct.
49

Mr. TAYLOR. As you know, in the authorization bill that passed just before Christmas, it was $4 billion for the people of Mississippi

who lived outside the floodplain, who had homeowner’s insurance,

were denied their claims. So our Nation stepped forward to do

what the insurance industry should have done and didn’t do.

I say this because I think if the private sector is going to fail us

that miserably, then our Government has the obligation to try to

do what is right. Which leads me to the question would you be willing to work with Congress on the creation of a natural disaster insurance program—not a floor insurance program, natural disaster

and terrorism—where the premiums are based on the risk, where

it doesn’t matter if a person’s home is destroyed by wind or water

or tornado, it is gone, and if he has been paying his premiums and

doing what our Nation asks him to do to try to protect that property—because what I fear is going to happen in Mississippi, the

next storm, people are going to stay in their house with a video

camera and video record their houses being blown away in order

to get a claim paid, because that is the only way that shameful industry is going to pay a claim. And it shouldn’t come to that.

Second thing is it is now a good six months since the storm. With

satellites we can tell the elevation of every square inch of America

from space instantaneously; yet, FEMA has not come forward with

hard and fast flood maps. You have issued recommendations. On

the Mississippi Gulf Coast you have full-time mayors, but every

governing authority or part-time city councilman and

businesspeople full-time.

So what your professionals are afraid to do, you have punted to

a bunch of part-time elected officials. That is not fair, quite frankly.

If your organization won’t take a stand on the elevations and what

they should be in order to ensure people, you cannot force that decision on part-timers. That is just not right. And it is not fair to

the taxpayer at the end of the day, because right now all you have

is recommendations, and most of the cities are responding by going

up four feet. In the case of my home, that would still put me about

11 feet under where the storm went.

And I would like to hear your suggestion on that, because I have

got to tell you, as an individual, I now face this dilemma, of building a one bedroom, myself, a shack that is a throw-away house

where I just say I am not going to get Federal flood insurance, the

heck with it, or spending a substantial amount of money to go 26

feet up in the air, which is where the storm went. And we can

measure how high the storm got by the debris line on the trees.

So I really think your organization, if you were doing this on a

business-like basis, instead of having hard and fast rules, would

incentivize people to make the extra investment and say this is

your rate if you go up above Katrina, this is what you are going

to pay if you choose to do it at ground level, and incrementally

have a price somewhere in between for the people who are willing

to—if they are willing to accept some risk, then you should be willing to accept some risk, or vice versa. But what you have done now,

quite frankly, is absolutely nothing since the most catastrophic

storm that has ever hit the Continental United States.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Let me address both of those. First of all,

I certainly would be willing to discuss the possibility of a national
50

disaster insurance fund, particularly one that requires premiums

and that is actuarially sound. I think that is very important.

Mr. TAYLOR. Absolutely.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I think that is very well worth talking

about, because I recognize the fact that that lets people make judgments about appropriate risk, because they have to decide what

premium they want to pay.

With respect to the flood maps, I know that the advisory flood

base elevations have gone out. I know the general recommendation

of FEMA is to have those adopted as local ordinances and use those

as the standards, recognizing that the flood map calculations and

the flood map issuance, which is probably not due until the fall, is

likely to be very close to that, it may be slightly different.

And as far as the question of whether we ought to give people

a series of options, a certain level gives you a certain measure of

protection, I am all—

Mr. TAYLOR. And a certain premium.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Yes. I am all in favor of that. I think that

what you were suggesting makes a lot of sense. We ought to have

a program that really empowers people to make decisions. They decide how much risk they want to take, they decide how much premium they want to pay, and then we get—you know, people are

going to make rational judgments. We clearly know—and one of

the things I know is being looked at in these lessons learned is

maybe we need to look at the whole flood insurance program and

the way we do it now. And I think this is exactly the kind of thing

we ought to be talking about.

Now, I don’t think that is going to get all retooled by this June.

I do know we want to get the flood maps out. I know that it is not

just elevation; there are engineering issues, there are questions of

historical loss. I am not an engineer, I am not a flood map expert,

but I do know the AFBEs, if adopted by local ordinance, will give,

I think, an approximation of what would be a good flood elevation

level based on projecting what we are likely to get in the flood

maps.

Mr. SHUSTER. The gentleman’s time has expired. We really have

got to move on.

Mr. Boustany.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, as a heart surgeon, I would never go into an

emergency operation or even a complicated operation without a

well organized team. And you mentioned the spectrum of preparedness and these cells of unified command, but we have got to somehow get that down to the local level so that it really is a seamless

system.

And one of the things we experienced both in Rita and in Katrina

was that in the surge capacity that was implemented, a lot of inexperienced volunteers were down there under the auspices of FEMA,

and somehow we have to have a more organized approach to that,

with people on the ground in that surge capacity that know what

they are doing. So I hope you have some thoughts on that.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, we do want to have a cadre of experienced people in disaster management, so that when we surge we

can put them in and then build volunteers around them.
51

But I have got to say there is also a fundamental issue. At the

end of the day, unless FEMA becomes 25 or 30 times the size it

is now, you are not going to have a permanent group of people who

are going to be ready to come in and really professionally do things.

So we have got to strike a balance between doing a better job of

getting a core of professionals, but also recognizing we have to have

a standby surge or reserve capacity for extreme circumstances.

Mr. BOUSTANY. And that surge capacity ought to come from local

and the immediate periphery, rather than having people flying in

from multiple States over, if possible. That way you have a little

bit more of a team approach.

Secretary CHERTOFF. That is true except for one issue. If local

people are actually caught up in the event, or their families are,

it is awfully hard to ask them to leave their families and get to

work. And one of the reasons we do bring people from outside is

precisely so they are not torn between family obligations and professional obligations.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you.

Mr. SHUSTER. Mr. Oberstar.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Secretary Chertoff, I listened with interest when you said if you

talk to the police, they would say you are giving all the money to

firefighters, and vice versa. On Saturday I was meeting with firefighters in my district, volunteer fire departments from a 10,000

square mile area, and they are all complaining that for their applications for FEMA grants, they are told by FEMA that Homeland

Security now wants them to justify their breathing apparatus, their

fire truck equipment, response equipment by showing a homeland

security connection.

That is baloney. And I have seen their applications. You have got

to stop that. That is a colossal waste of energy, time, and an affront to our firefighters.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Are we talking about Fire Act grants?

Mr. OBERSTAR. Fire apparatus.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, here is the question I have—

Mr. OBERSTAR. No, just listen to me, because the Chairman says

we are on a limited time here.

I want you to take that and think about it. That is a colossal

waste.

Now, on Saturday, August 27th, the National Weather Service

was reporting a category 4 or 5 hurricane was going to hit New Orleans. That day you were at home. You could have, and should

have, appointed a principal Federal officer or convened, or both, the

Interagency Management Group. Why did you not?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Because we had a team of probably the

most experienced people in Government in dealing with hurricanes

sitting around the table at FEMA headquarters at the National Response Coordination Center in Washington; because those people

were following the hurricane for the prior week; and because my

judgment was that in terms of expertise in dealing with the hurricane, recognizing that the issue of a hurricane hitting New Orleans

has been out there for 20 years, that there wasn’t another group

of people I could convene in Washington—
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Mr. OBERSTAR. And you are saying that they didn’t think that it

was serious enough?

Secretary CHERTOFF. No, I am emphatically not saying that. I

want to be completely clear about this. Everybody—

Mr. OBERSTAR. Well, you are just talking, not answering my

question.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I am answering. Here is my answer. The

President declared an emergency. As a matter of the literal, specific language, that created an incident of national significance. As

to whether I needed to empanel a separate group of people to come

in for the Incident Management Group, I had a group sitting in

FEMA managing the incident of the senior-most officials, with dozens of years of hurricane experience, sitting around the table who,

as far as I was concerned, were the best people in the Country to

anticipate everything that was needed in the case of a hurricane.

Mr. OBERSTAR. So you are saying that everything was in place

that needed to be in place at that point?

Secretary CHERTOFF. I am telling you that based on what I knew

at the time, I did not know—and, frankly, I still do not know of

a better group of people that could have sat around—

Mr. OBERSTAR. Oh, well, look, it was a lapse of judgment. That

is the answer.

Mr. SHUSTER. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Wait a minute, Mr. Chairman. Just a minute,

now.

Mr. SHUSTER. We have gone—

Mr. OBERSTAR. The Secretary has plenty of time to sit here and

listen to us. We have people who are out of their homes,—

Mr. SHUSTER. I understand that.

Mr. OBERSTAR. People who are dispossessed, and there are some

questions that they want answers to and I want answers to.

Mr. SHUSTER. And he has been answering questions for almost

three hours, and we have gone through and let people have a second round, and I have let people go on beyond that. I have great

respect for the gentleman from Minnesota, but Mr. Honda is going

to have the last question. And I am certain that the Secretary

would answer any questions in writing that need to be answered.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Well, in writing is not sufficient, and this is—

Mr. SHUSTER. Well, as I said—

Mr. OBERSTAR. This is a serious lapse in this Committee.

Mr. SHUSTER. Well, I am sorry you feel that way.

Mr. Honda, go ahead.

Mr. OBERSTAR. No, I am angry about it.

Mr. SHUSTER. Mr. Honda?

Mr. HONDA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I will be very quick.

The memo I shared just a while ago from Assistant Attorney

John Kim says that agencies should be taking care of civil rights

issues in terms of language and making sure that national origin

and language, limited English proficient communities are taken

care of. That didn’t appear to be the case during Katrina. Will you

direct your deputies and your directors to make sure this is complied with?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, I have done that. I have made sure

that we have a person—I am told we had translators and speakers
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who cover 187 languages, but after Katrina I met with the head

of our civil rights office and, as we go forward in talking about

what we do in the next disaster, we have built into our process his

input to make sure we are doing what we need to do to reach out

to all communities, including appropriate language translation,

dealing with people with disabilities, and things of that sort.

Mr. HONDA. So you are saying, yes, you will be doing this.

Secretary CHERTOFF. Yes. We will be doing what we need to do

in order to make sure that we have outreach to all communities.

Mr. HONDA. Because the reason why there was over 16,000 folks

in Houston was because of the breakdown in language. I want to

make sure it doesn’t happen again. And the indicators will be flyers, posters, and those kinds of means of communication. You are

telling me that those things will be done, including personnel?

Secretary CHERTOFF. Well, we are committed to making sure we

comply with these requirements.

Mr. HONDA. I will hold you to that, sir.

Thank you.

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you, Mr. Honda.

Mr. Secretary, we really appreciate your coming here before us

today. This Committee is a serious committee that works to make

sure we have an issue in front of us, we want to be able to communicate with you. Spending your time here today is important to us.

As we move forward, we are going to continue to have a dialogue

with you. I am sure Mr. Oberstar has many more questions to ask,

and, as I said, I am confident you will respond to those questions

that he has.

The Chairman has not called you before the Committee before

because he knows what a big job you have out there, and we want

to make sure that you are getting things done and not spending

hours and hours before this Committee. And I appreciate your folks

have been coming up to the Hill on a regular basis. I met with the

Under Secretary yesterday, I met with Michael Jackson a week

ago, so I appreciate your making sure that they are available to us

for those questions.

So, again, thank you very much for being here today.

Secretary CHERTOFF. I am happy to appear.

[Whereupon, at 4:20 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
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