Words matter. These are the best Michael Chertoff Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
But I think the bottom line right now is to take the constructive criticism and use that to build toward, as I say, the hurricane season that is 100 days away. And we don’t have a lot of time to waste before we start to address that next set of challenges.
So, all during the ’90s and, you know, for the first half of this decade, we had opportunities to get evacuation plans in place, better communications in place.
The Department of Defense took 40 years to get where it got.
Well, I mean, Congress did originally set the formula for the state grants, and they guaranteed every state a minimum formula. So that was a congressional decision.
We’ve done it in intelligence sharing and certain elements of security. There were parts of the department, in fact, that worked very well in Katrina, like the Coast Guard and TSA.
Now, I’m not suggesting we’re going to wait 40 years or even four years, but I think we have to put in perspective the fact that we’ve come quite a distance. We have quite a distance to come – go, as well.
So that’s why I said, if you look at the average, you would see the money New York got this year was in line with the average across the prior three years and substantially more, by a country mile, than the money given to any other city.
Well, I think first of all there was a failure to have real, clear information at our disposal. There was a real lack of situational awareness. We didn’t have the capabilities on the ground to give us real-time, accurate assessments of the physical condition of the city.
I think the idea that you can go this alone is – was a huge mistake. And unfortunately, there was a price paid in terms of suffering and pain for people in New Orleans.
And if we make the process political, if we start to make it personal, we’re actually going to frustrate good public policy, in terms of managing this money.
Last year, New York got $200 million. This year, we’re going to give them $124 million under this particular program. But last year was an artificially elevated number to make up from the very low grant the year before.
We may have to force people to get together in terms of picking a particular type of technology and starting to build to that technology, as opposed to everybody exercising their right to buy their own system, you know, at will.
And one of the things I want to say, Wolf, is we’re 100 days from hurricane season, and we’ve got to start focusing on what we’re going to do to make ourselves ready for the next hurricane.
And it seems to me correct then, and I think it’s correct now, that job one is get the planning done, make sure the buses are there. When that’s done, it’s completely appropriate to go around and tour around and look at the damage.
