CRITICAL CONVERSATION TRANSCRIPT

After the Storm: Repairing the Damage

The National Press Club.
Nov. 29, 2005.

JOHN A. MCCARTHY, DIRECTOR, CIP PROGRAM, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW:  We are very pleased with the turnout today.  We thank you all very much for coming. We’re very pleased also to sponsor today’s critical conversation entitled, “After the Storm: Repairing the Damage.”

The program will begin with former FEMA director, James Lee Witt, who will then be joined by three distinguished panelists, who will be introduced later, representing predominantly the private sector and the local government view.

This is the fifth in a series of important discussions that the CIP program has sponsored around critical infrastructure to meet with the national mandate to foster and encourage a national dialogue around this important issue.

The CIP program began two-and-a-half years ago with the goal of building a research curriculum across the University and with other institutions to bring together the areas of law, policy, economics and technology to enhance the security of America’s infrastructure.  James Madison University is one of our key partners.  They’re here today.  Ken is out in the audience.  Thanks for coming up from Harrisonburg.  Got a beautiful view.  I guess the fall foliage is past.

The CIP endeavors to seed research efforts in order to find solutions and offer vital analysis of infrastructure and homeland security issues relevant to both public and private sector leaders.  The CIP program enjoys a strong reputation with its federal partners, the Department of Homeland Security, state and local government and, most importantly, with the private sector.

As Americans, we’re very concerned about the response and relief efforts after the nation’s worst and costliest natural disaster on record.  The storms not only decimated the entire region, disrupting and displacing millions of people, but it taxed our response and reconstitution processes to their limits and significantly impacted vital national and international infrastructures.

The known vulnerabilities in these infrastructures isn’t new, but rather, they were conceptualized back in the early ‘90s by the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection.  The understanding was galvanized by the changes implemented by the government and industry leaders in the wake of 9/11, and they have now been personalized by the public at large in the destructive aftermath of these hurricanes.

I’m very interested as a researcher to hear the thoughts of this distinguished panel

Dr. Merten is our president of George Mason, who has been a staunch supporter of the CIP Program and research, and has built an amazing research capacity in Northern Virginia.  And we’re very pleased to have you here today, sir.

ALAN G. MERTEN, PRESIDENT, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY:  Thank you, John.   I’m glad to be here.

First of all, I want to thank John for his leadership of the CIP Program.  And from day one he has truly made a difference in this project and throughout George Mason University.  And also to thank Dan Polsby, the dean of the School of Law, who has made it possible for this project to not only to survive, but to thrive in many ways.

We at George Mason University are committed to do the type of teaching and research that truly makes a difference, and infrastructure protection is clearly one of those areas where we as a university have and continue to make a difference.

The tragedies in the Gulf Coast have changed all of our lives.  On a small scale, we at George Mason, along with other universities in the greater Washington area, and frankly, universities across the country, have reached out to the students from the Gulf Coast, and those students are now on our campuses.  And also the faculty, in many cases, are on our campuses doing research and teaching, so that they can continue their professional careers in the midst of the tragedy.

We also at the university are doing more and more research in issues related to hurricane prediction, earthquake prediction.  Many of our faculty, particularly in the computational sciences, are very much involved in those areas.  And so, we’re fortunate to participate in these and other related projects.

One of the joys of being at the university in the greater Washington area is, you have access to great students and great faculty.  We also have access to a faculty who maybe are non-traditional in nature.

Several years ago, we were presented with the opportunity to talk to Frank Sesno about bringing Frank to George Mason.  And we were smart enough to make him the offer and I guess he was smart enough to accept it, and it has worked out extremely well.

And one of the early decisions we had to make was what kind of title to give him.  And so, we ended up with the title of professor of communication and public policy.  He’s probably the only person in the country with that title, but it is a title that he not only deserves, but a title that describes what he does on campus, but what he does far beyond campus.

So, it’s my privilege to turn the program over to Professor Frank Sesno.

FRANK SESNO, PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION AND PUBLIC POLICY, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY:  Thank you, Alan, and thank you, John.  And thanks to all of you for attending today.  Certainly thanks to James Lee and our panel, which we will introduce shortly.

It’s a very timely conversation we’re having here today, and one I think that we’ll be able to range through in some detail.  Let me explain how this is going to work.

I’ll start by asking those of you with cell phones, if you’re not currently actively working for the Department of Homeland Security or other emergency management, to please turn it off.  If you are working for those critical infrastructures or organizations, please leave it on.  But put it on vibrate, if you would.

The conversation here will start.  James Lee Witt and I will have an opportunity to range over some topics from his experience in Louisiana and beyond.  We’ll open it up to your questions for a period of time.  We’ll have microphones in the audience.

If we recognize you, I would ask you to stand, introduce yourself, your affiliation and keep your question as brief as possible, so that we can fit as much in as possible.  Then we’ll expand the group to the panel, and we’ll go into areas, as John said, principally private sector, a couple of areas in particular, and municipal government.

There is, as I said, timeliness and relevance to this conversation.

James Lee Witt, welcome.  I’m very glad you’re here.  You all know James Lee Witt.  He’s now CEO and Chairman of James Lee Witt Associates, former FEMA director, a man who has been in the news a bit himself lately, and fortunately, not shy.

Let’s start, if I could, with today’s “Washington Post.”  Front page, big story here.  Sort of a mixed message, really.

Night and day in New Orleans, a picture of assistant superintendent walking some students in to the first public school to reopen in New Orleans, here in November.

A picture here of a city divided, or an area divided.  Lights on the left side of the picture, absolute darkness on the right side and the following paragraph.

This is three months after the floods and the hurricanes – “more than 100,000 homes and businesses remain uninhabitable.  More than three out of four residents live elsewhere.  More than five million tons of storm debris still on the ground.  The power company is bankrupt.  Workers are in short supply.  The pro football team is playing in Baton Rouge.”

Three months later.  Surprise you?

JAMES LEE WITT, FORMER FEMA DIRECTOR:  No.

SESNO:  Why?

WITT:  Simply because this disaster is so catastrophic. I think it's the worst that I have ever seen in the United States.  I was in Asia at the tsunami and made three trips over there, and you could almost compare it to that.  With the impact consolidated in Louisiana and Mississippi and the areas that were so impacted.  So, it's going to take some time. It's not going to happen over night.

SESNO:  How are they doing?

WITT:  You know, I talked to Governor Blanco last night for quite a bit and she's very encouraged.  She went through a special session.  She passed statewide minimum building codes, which is important.

SESNO:  Changed building codes?

WITT:  They did not have statewide building codes.

SESNO:  They did not have minimum building codes at all?

WITT:  No.  And so she passed residential building codes and the international building code for businesses and commercial.  They also passed a lot of tax incentives to get people to come back, on equipment and others.

Also, they passed an educational program where the state of Louisiana is actually taking over the school systems.  And they will look at the schools that worked, the ones that didn't work, and they're going to consolidate them and make education a high priority.

SESNO:  You watched a lot.  You went down in the middle of the storms themselves.  You saw the interaction of the federal, state and local authorities.  Now you've seen the aftermath.  You're going back again?

WITT:  Thursday.

SESNO:  On Thursday this week.  If you were to take all your impressions and distill them onto a bumper sticker, what would that bumper sticker say?

WITT:  Unacceptable.

SESNO:  Meaning?

WITT:  It's easy to be an armchair quarterback, you know.  But I look at the eight years I was at FEMA and I look at the unbelievable hard work, the dedication that FEMA career employees did.  It was just incredible.  They were so dedicated.  They cared about what they did.

And, you know, when you demoralize a federal agency in the way it is now and you take the heart of that agency out, it's very difficult for them, particularly not having the kind of leadership they needed, to be able to respond in a way that's going to work with state and local government.

SESNO:  So you've blamed FEMA exclusively for this?

WITT:  No, I don't.  I think there's enough blame to go around everywhere, at the local level and the state level and the national level.  But a lot of this is reaching out and working with state and local government.  And I think that that was minimized by taking so much out of FEMA and putting it in homeland security.

SESNO:  I don't want to spend our entire time on FEMA, homeland security, and government processes, but would you make a distinction between the structural changes that led to what you think is now this demoralized agency and the leadership at the top?

I was talking with the mayor, who will join us here later, and you can have an agency that is well run, an agency that is poorly run, not change the organizational structure at all and have two totally different outcomes.

WITT:  Sure.

SESNO:  So, how much of this is due to the person at the top, Michael Brown or anybody else, and how much of this is due to the reorganization as a result of DHS?

WITT:  I think the high percentage of it was the reorganization.

SESNO:  You blame the reorganization?

WITT:  Primarily.  Simply for the fact when we had 9/11 in New York City, FEMA was still intact and still was the agency that had the capability to respond to that, and they did a really good job.

After 9/11 and then they talked about creating the Department of Homeland Security, which is really critical and important, don't get me wrong.  We need it.  I met with the White House and they asked me what my thoughts were and I said look, "Take the INS, border patrol, the Coast Guard, and the intelligence gathering and analysis, make -- build that as the foundation the first year.  Make it functional for the president and the country.  That's what he needs and that's what the country needs.  Don't combine 22 federal agencies, 180,000 employees, under one cabinet sector because it will be 10 years before it's functional."

Well, they prepared training and exercise out of FEMA.  They took the National Fire Administration and put it under Department of Homeland Security.  They took all the grant programs and put it under the Department of Homeland Security.  And basically FEMA had left the National Flood Insurance Program, response and recovery. 

Now then, you cannot maintain and build capability and capacity when you do not have the expertise and the leaders and the funding and the people within that agency.  They took 400 positions out of the agency and put it under homeland security.

SESNO:  Well, here's what they say.  What they say is they're going to create a preparedness directory.  And FEMA should focus on its traditional core responsibilities of response and recovery because in an all-hazards environment, you need preparedness to cut across the many agencies and not duplicate and be able to focus it that way.

WITT:  Well, you know, it was interesting.  We had training, exercise, planning and preparedness in one division.

SESNO:  But there wasn't DHS at the time.

WITT:  Yes, but they separated all those, by putting it under DHS.  And the thing of it is, they took one of the best programs that you could possibly have, which we need, a mitigation and prevention program, and minimized it.

You know, if you can work with state and local governments identifying the risk, try to work together to minimize that risk, you're going to save money, and you're going to save lives.

SESNO:  Well, now, what about state and local governments?  Now, I know this is going to be an awkward question for you because you're still consulting, and working for the state of Louisiana so you may not, you know, fire away here.

WITT:  Oh, I'll fire away anyway I think I need to.

SESNO:  Oh good.  OK. 

WITT:  Fire away.

SESNO:  I mean, from the outside, ample criticism of state and local authorities who weren't communicating, weren't coordinating, and were quick to blame the feds when our understanding is that the first line of disaster response lies with local authority.

WITT:  And that's true.  It is.

SESNO:  And local authorities what, dropped the ball?

WITT:  Well, you think about this.  In Louisiana, they evacuated 1.3 million people, which, in Louisiana, is an incredible job.  They survived the hurricane.  The governor actually had National Guard down into -- when the hurricane came through.

And then when the levies broke and the flood water started coming in, what happened was the communications broke down because the communication systems at state and local government broke down.  They did not have any way of even communicating.

SESNO:  That's why the buses were sitting there?  That's why the police were...

WITT:  Well, I can't answer why the buses set.  I can tell you what the governor did, though.  The governor requested 500 buses through FEMA.

SESNO:  It was FEMA's job to supply the buses?

WITT:  Yes.  Yes.  A governor requests a resource to be able to help when they do not have the capability to do it.  That's what the government's role and responsibility is, is to supplement those resources -- ask for 500 buses to evacuate those people out of New Orleans and the areas that did not have a way to evacuate. They told that the buses were on the way.  The buses never came. 

There's a lot of finger-pointing from everyone.  And I told the governor, I said, "Governor, the most important thing that you need to do now is you need to go back and do a day-by-day action report.  Look at this report and what happened, why it happened, and what needs to be fixed and fix it before something else happens."

And the federal government needs to be sent that.

SESNO:  So let me ask you about that.  I have some colleagues here Todd Laporte and Phil's back over there, who had been working on some research and looking into public opinion.

This was their survey for George Mason University and for the CIP Project, taken before Katrina.  And my understanding is you're pursuing a follow-up now.  They found nationally that nearly two-thirds expressed confidence in their local law enforcement.  This was before Katrina. 

Forty-five percent expressed confidence in FEMA, 33 percent in DHS to do their jobs properly, given a disaster.  Now Katrina surely shook confidence further.

I'll ask you two questions.  What do you think the impact of Katrina has been on state, local and federal agencies and how do they go about preparing the damage?

WITT:  Well, first of all, I think the impact on state and local public safety agencies across the country and what's happened to FEMA in emergency management, I hope, has had a tremendous impact.

SESNO:  Tremendous impact.

WITT:  Tremendous impact because the relationships are not there like they used to be.  The coordination and working together is not there.

SESNO:  And that's been revealed?...

WITT:  The National Emergency Management Association, NEMA, has come out with a white paper stating their concerns.

SESNO:  Think the public is aware of that?

WITT:  No, I do not.  But this is so important.  I think when you had FEMA in its role and responsibility and they fulfill that role and responsibility, they could minimize a lot of the things with the state and local government.  Not take it over but minimize and help, you know, people to not only recover but build back better and safer.

But now, to give an example, the state of Texas actually went out on a bid to outsource their public assistance program because they did not have the capability within the state programs to do that.

One emergency management director told me when I testified last year for Congress, he told me it's been like a stake has been driven in the heart of emergency management in this country.

Now, that's serious.

SESNO:  And you believe that to be the case?

WITT:  I do.

SESNO:  You think it's that bad?

WITT:  It's that bad.

SESNO:  If that's true, what's going to happen over the next six to 12 months?  More of that?  More outsourcing?

WITT:  You know, most likely yes.  There's a lot of contributing factors here.  One is inoperability of public safety communications, which I've been preaching since 2001, which you know, is so critical to develop national standards of fixing that problem across public safety.

I shared this with homeland security --bring the private sector in.  Let the private sector be the driver of fixing some of these problems, you know, because you've got technology problems, you've got communications problems.

And all of the grant money that's been going down to homeland security is very important.  But there needs to be a consistency in how it's being developed for the future.

SESNO:  I want to get to the private sector some more in a moment, but I want to stay on this issue of repairing the damage in terms of public confidence to these state, local and federal -- state and local, as well, organizations, if you think there has been an impact in public confidence.  And the numbers weren't great to begin with, though much higher for locals.  What needs to be done to repair public confidence?

WITT:  I think that the president and Congress and all need to revisit how the organization is structured now, and homeland security and FEMA, and look at those roles and responsibilities.

We had a federal response plan when I was there, which worked and every single state mirrored the federal response plan.  We developed the ESF functions, emergency support functions.  Each state mirrored those emergency support functions.

And the state's worked with us diligently in amending the federal response plan to add a terrorism  component to it, after the Murrah bombing in Oklahoma City.

But when they developed the national response plan, they contracted it out, which is OK, but they didn't involve the states at the beginning of it to develop it.

And then they brought the states in, they put it back to FEMA, to basically re-write the national response plan.  Now you have states that still have planning that's under the federal response plan, the OPLAN, and not every state has been consistent in redesigning their plan with the new national plan.

SESNO:  Make it consistent.

WITT:  It's got to be consistent.

SESNO:  What do mayors need to do? What do governors need to do. We watched on television the police department melt away.  We watched the mayor's office that couldn't communicate with his emergency responders.  We watched people gather at convention centers and the Superdome and be left. 

WITT:  I watched it, too.

SESNO:  Right.  And not too long later in Houston, we saw a very difficult evacuation process.  People looked at that and said, "my God there but for the grace of God go all the rest of us."

Now what?

WITT:  Well, I think it's important.  And I think it taught us a really valuable lesson.  There were 1,079 lives lost in this state of Louisiana alone. And I think it's important that every local government and every state government know is that you are not immune from being a victim of a disaster.

It could be a wildfire.  It could be a tornado. It could be a flood.  It could be an earthquake.  It could be a hurricane.  But you are not immune.  And you need to know your risk and prepare for those risks.

And just recently I was in Phoenix talking to the Western Governors Conference. And you know the governors asked, "What do we need to do?"

SESNO:  What did you tell them?

WITT:  I said, "I want to tell you something."  I said, "Under the circumstances I would revisit my state plan with the local communities and then I would start building a public/private partnership with the industry and the businesses across my state. 

Then I would make sure, through those available resources within your state, through this public/private partnership, that I could survive at least 72 hours."

SESNO:  On your own.

WITT:  On your own.

SESNO:  You mentioned private sector a while ago, and you spent this time down in the region in Louisiana.  What most surprised you when you watched the response from the private sector?

WITT:  You know, I was just absolutely amazed at the amount of resources that the private sector put into this.  One of the things that was so critical was getting some form of communications back up very quickly.

And I have to tell you, all the wireless providers that had communications in Louisiana -- and I was working with the Commissioner of Public Works, which is an elected position for the state, and I was working with him.  And I said, "Look, do you have power, a power grid in New Orleans that's hot?"

SESNO:  What did he say?

WITT:  And he said yes. 

I said, "Where is it?" 

He said, "It comes down along through the convention center." 

I said, "Can you get power to those cell sites?"

This is when the water was still over the city. And he said, "I don't know.  Let me check." 

Two days he had power to those cell sites. We met with the cellular -- all the wireless providers.  And I said, "OK, we're going to get power back to those cell sites.  Can you get those cell sites up and communicating?  Because we need communication down there."

And they said, "Absolutely."  They went in there through a partnership with us and got those cell sites back up so we could have some communication.

 And that -- like The Camp Colorado came in there from Colorado.  They set up a camp, a fire camp, basically, that housed 200 people, that fed them breakfast, lunch and dinner every night, every day.

I mean, I the resources from the private sector is actually what got them over the hump.

SESNO:  So, what do you learn from that?  And what should communities and the private sector elsewhere be doing as a result of this experience?

WITT:  They should be working with their state and local governments building this capacity.  I'm going to tell you why.  Because if you are a business, small business or a corporation, and you live in a community or state and your employees are there, OK, and if you are impacted and your business is impacted, then the cost of getting that back up and the loss of revenue can be astronomical.

SESNO:  You think the private sector should have a seat at the table in the preparedness.

WITT:  Absolutely.

SESNO:  And in the response?

WITT:  Absolutely.

SESNO:  And in the recovery?

WITT:  Absolutely.

SESNO:  How do you do that?  The private sector's this big, gigantic thing.

WITT:  Yes, but you think about it.  Eighty-five percent of our critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector.

SESNO:  How do you coordinate that?  How do you funnel it?

WITT:  That's where I think each of the governors need to take a lead and help build that by working with your chamber of commerce. 

You know, you think about it, Frank.  You know when we started the project in that program.

SESNO:  Disaster resistant community.

WITT:  That's exactly right.  And did you know we had 250 communities involved in that program?  Bu it was a public/private partnership.  We had over 2,000 corporations and small businesses as partners in these 250 communities.

They learned more and were so much better prepared in these communities and they did mitigation and prevention.  They really built disaster-resistant communities. 

Look at Tulsa, Oklahoma.  They had a builder out there that built, had developed subdivisions.  And I was out there at one of their events and speaking.  And this builder walks up and he says, "You know, I pre-sell houses before I build them.”  And one of the big issues after the tornadoes in Oklahoma was rebuilding.  I got Governor Keating and President Clinton to agree to give a $2,500 grant to any homeowner to build a safe room in their home when they build back.

SESNO:  How many people built safe rooms?

WITT:  Just about every single one of them.  Now, here's what's interesting.

SESNO:  They just all had kids.  You see that...

WITT:  Yes.  Yes.  Here's what's interesting.

SESNO:  You need a place to put the teenagers.

WITT:  This builder in Tulsa, as part of Project Impact, he was offering to build a safe room in a new home that he was building when he sold it, before he built the home.

And he said, "You know, I just sold 10 new homes that I'm going to be building, and nine of them wanted a safe room in their home."

Now wait a second.  And I said, "What about that 10th one?"  He said, "Well, they were 75-years-old and they wanted a hot tub."

WITT:  No tax credit for that.

SESNO:  If you were to see New Orleans rebuilt, or Biloxi rebuilt, as disaster resistant communities, how would they differ from what was there before?

WITT:  Well, some things need to happen.  First, the Congress needs to work with the state and local parishes and fund those levies up to a category 5 level.

If they had funded it two years ago when the corp asked them for money to repair the levies, they'd asked for the last two years, they asked for the money to prepare those levies and they never got funded.

So, now they think they'll have it back up to a Cat 3 level by June of next year.  But the levies need to be Cat 5 so people know they've got the protection.  The pumping system needs to be much improved.

Third, they need to do a coastal restoration program.  They're losing the size of a football field in coastal wetlands every day, which is a natural barrier to some storm surge.  Those three things need to happen.

SESNO:  And the rebuilding of the communities themselves?

WITT:  Well, FEMA has a role here.  FEMA needs to relook at the flood elevation on the flood mapping. They need to relook at that, because if people's going to build back and, say they get a Cat 5 levy of protection and they get these things done, then they need to factor that in and establish a new base flood elevation.

So, if someone has to raise their house four feet or whatever, they know how high to build.

SESNO:  We talked about government. We talked about the private sector. Let's talk about individual responsibility for a minute and the lesson that individuals may have learned from this experience.

Again, back to some of the research that my colleagues have done, a survey that they took, nationally they found nearly 80 percent said they had battery-powered radios for an alternative so they could get information.  Eighty-nine percent said they have food for three days or more, 61 percent had enough water for three days or more, and two-thirds had an emergency medical kit.

Interesting numbers?  Sufficient?  Do you believe them?  Do you really think we're that prepared?

WITT:  You know, I think probably we're better prepared today than we ever were because I will never forget, when I was in Manila and I called my wife Lea Ellen and Secretary Ridge had come out with about buying, rolls of duct tape and plastic sheeting and water.

And I called my wife and I said, "Well, how are you doing?"  She said, "I went out and bought duct tape, plastic sheeting, and water because Secretary Ridge said every homeowner should have that."

I think like the capital region campaign here that we've been working on in our office is we have to do a better job of public awareness and public education. 

SESNO:  So you still don't think we've got the public awareness and education we need.

WITT:  Not to where we should be.  No.

SESNO:  As you looked at Louisiana, as you looked at Houston with Rita, as you looked at Biloxi, Mississippi, what more do individuals need to know or do?

WITT:  Each individual should develop a family emergency plan, and just do it. and that's part of the public awareness, public education campaign that we need to do in every single community, and that is where you bring in the public/private partnership as well: federal, state and local and the private sector.

SESNO:  People still haven't done that?

WITT:  A lot of people haven't.

SESNO:  People still haven't done that?  And they should.  And they see wildfires and they see earthquakes and they see tornadoes.  So what is that?  Just yelling and screaming from the mountain tops to get them to do it?

WITT:  Well, that's part of the education program and the awareness.  You do it through your churches.  You do it through your local rotary club, your chamber of commerce.  You do it through your school.

Our son, Jimmy, was the county judge of Yell County, Arkansas.  And Yell County it is a high risk tornado area. So he decided that he wanted to start a tornado awareness campaign in all the schools.  Before they finished they had children going home telling their parents the things they should do at home.

SESNO:  That happens all the time, I have to tell you.

WITT:  Well, if we can educate our children in schools, then it's going to help us to educate the parents at home.

SESNO:  Especially if it's on grandpas and dads.

WITT:  Yes.

SESNO:  My final question to you here is you're working, still, for Louisiana.

WITT:  Yes.

SESNO:  Are we privatizing emergency management?  Are we going to be doing more of this?

WITT:  I would hope so.

SESNO:  The question of whether we should is another matter.

WITT:  Well, you go where the experience and leadership is.

SESNO:  You can look at this and say, "Wait a minute.  The government is supposed to be handling this."  It's great that James Lee Witt is out there and has a good business and that kind of thing.  But at some level this is disturbing.

WITT:  Well, I don't think it's disturbing in a sense of when you have an event of this capacity, it's catastrophic.  You know, last year when we had the four hurricanes cross Florida.  And then, you know, the Cayman Islands got hit.  And the Cayman Islands hired us.  And we managed their entire recovery efforts.

But what we did while we were there, we hired local people and we trained local people to be able to do this job where we wouldn't have to go back to the Cayman Islands.  We worked with them and developed a national plan for the Cayman Islands.

We even worked with them to develop a debris program.

SESNO:  It's not Louisiana.

WITT:  Yes, but here's what we're working towards.  We're working with the state to hire local people, more local people, and train these local people to be able to do this because you know how long this is going to go on?

SESNO:  A long time?

WITT:  Well, Northridge went for 10 years.

SESNO:  Yes.

WITT:  OK?  I'll be too old 10 years from now.  But if we can train local people to fulfill that role in that job then it will build capacity within that state in those local communities and that's what we're doing.

SESNO:  Let me turn to the audience now and take some of your questions. 

WITT:  And you have another former FEMA director, General Beckham now who did a great job.

KATHY RUTTER GMU SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY:  It seems to me in this case we're missing an important point, and that is what, an expenditure of maybe $20 billion and those dykes would not have broken?  It seems part of critical infrastructure must surely be not having everybody respond to disasters but to prevent disasters.

It's very difficult in American public policy at any level to attend to dull things, like infrastructure, and to pay the money at the time it needs to be paid.  I wonder if you would respond to that and talk about how we might attend to these kinds of things so we could spend $20 billion rather than $200 billion and rather than have the suffering we've had.

WITT:  Well, I think there's two issues. I think you need to be able to have the capability to respond together with state and local government if that is needed.  So you're absolutely correct.

In the 1993 flood, we started a program in about relocation, a voluntary program of people in the impacted areas in that '93 flood, which covered nine states. And we were able to buy out and relocate, on a voluntary basis, over 10,000 pieces of property that would never flood again.

And that was used in mitigation dollars.  That was used in CDBG dollars, HUD dollars a combination of federal dollars with the state government.  Forget Governor Carnahan.  We went to Pattonsburg, Missouri together.

And the mayor was showing us in City Hall all the high water marks in City Hall. And it was like 40-something times.  And they kept moving shelves up to protect the records.  They had 18 businesses and 142 residents.

And I said, "Mayor, have you ever thought about moving up on the hill?"  You know?  And the mayor had a town hall meeting and they voted to move up on the hill.  We helped them relocate in Pattonsburg, Missouri and several other communities.

But you know what?  We did a cost benefit analysis on this program.  And it was every dollar spent on prevention saved $3 to $5 in future losses.  They had a flood in '95 after we did this, and guess what?  There was not a single taxpayer's dollar spent on a response.

SESNO:  And they would have been underwater if they'd been...

WITT: That's exactly right.  So, mitigation is worthwhile.

SESNO:  All right.  Question in the back.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT:  Mr. Witt, how much are you being paid by Louisiana and New Orleans for the work that you're doing?  And what are you actually doing?  And shouldn't government be able to do what you're doing for New Orleans and Louisiana?

SESNO:  And could you identify yourself?

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT:  I'm with NBC News.

WITT:  Well, they're not paying me enough.  No.  Our rates are standard rates that has to be approved by FEMA, because they're consistent with any other rights that they have.  Basically the time I was down there for almost four weeks, my work was pro bono.

And we brought in staff to supplement and support the state programs, which they did not have the capacity to do and the capabilities to mirror up FEMA's programs.

Give you an example, FEMA had 2,600 people working in Louisiana and the state had about 15.  And on each of those parts of those programs, it's important that it's consistent, it's seamless and that any of our rates are all approved by the government.

SESNO:  There's a flat fee, but you worked on, sort of, an hourly, ongoing basis.

WITT:  Yes.

SESNO:  So, the more you worked, the longer you worked, the more that will be paid.  Is that going to be public information?

WITT:  Oh, absolutely.  And I'm not charging Louisiana anything if I'm not doing something for Louisiana.

SESNO:  But to the point of the question, is this something that government should be doing?

WITT:  Well, I think that the government should be prepared to be able to do it within their states or communities by building reservist capability.  That's what we did at FEMA.

We had 4,000 reservists across the United States, from community relations teams, public relations teams, you know, all of this, you know, is a reservist.  These are very, very talented retired people that's been in the program for many years and retired.

That is the same type of program that states and local governments need to do, like the CERT program, the Certified Emergency Response Team.  If they will work towards that goal then they won't need somebody like me coming in there.

SESNO:  All right.  Let's take a couple more and then we'll expand the panel.  The gentleman in back.

JERRY HOOTMER PUBLIC ENTITY RISK INSTITUTE:  Jerry Hootmer with the Public Entity Risk Institute.  How do you account for the quality of the FEMA response to the Florida 2004 hurricanes under the same leadership and the Katrina response?

WITT:  Governor Jeb Bush and Craig Fugate, who's the Director of Emergency Management in Florida, have one of the premier emergency management programs in this country.

The years that I responded down there, the state of Florida could respond to any event anywhere.  They're that good.

They have backup systems.  They have wireless providers sitting in their operations center right with them.  They have the private sector sitting in there that has resources that they may need to back them up.

They built a model program for every state.  And that's one of the successes.

SESNO:  Doesn't that reinforce, though, the idea that in Louisiana, much of the responsibility, maybe more than is commonly accepted, rests with the state and local government?

WITT:  Oh, well...

SESNO:  The same FEMA, right?

WITT:  Absolutely.  It does, that first initial response, is with state and local government.

SESNO:  So, has FEMA has been unfairly beaten up, then, to some degree for what happened in Louisiana?

WITT:  Yes.  I'm not beating FEMA up.  I'm beginning to change it, so it can be more effective.  I'm not criticizing FEMA.  I haven't and I never would.

But I think that it was different with Katrina and Rita.  You had two hurricanes that were just unbelievable.  And then you had a flood with it.  They had a 28-foot high storm surge.

SESNO:  But the question is, the FEMA that you're saying needs to be reorganized, worked in Florida. And you say it worked in Florida because Florida has such a well-processed, well-honed machine in terms of disaster preparedness.

So why isn't what's good for Florida what's good for Louisiana?

WITT:  Yes, I totally agree.  State and local governments need to be better prepared.  I'm not saying that state and local governments failed.  Could their response have been better?  Absolutely.

But you have to look at, too, at FEMA's response. You have to look at all of it. There was failure across the board.  But the capacity that Florida had is probably greater than any state in our country.

SESNO:  OK.  Let's take a couple more from the floor.

SHAWN OLDS, PRTN MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS:  Mr. Witt, how do we take lessons learned and make them lessons implemented? And I ask this because coming out of 1993, there were a ton of lessons learned that were actually built into what's called a LLIS.gov, lessons learned information sharing.

WITT:  Yes.

OLDS:  Out of 2001, we had this many lessons learned also added to that.  Yet coming out of this, many of those lessons that we quote, unquote, "learned," were happening again.  We were running into those problems.

So, we talked about public education.  How do we educate the government, first of all, in stuff we've already gone through?

WITT:  I think it's really important, and I told Governor Blanco the second week that I was there, I said, "You need to make sure that you document every single thing that you have done.  It's simply because you need to go back and critique your response to this so that you can make sure that you do everything you can to fix anything that did not work at all or work well."

And that's what we would do at FEMA after every disaster or after every exercise. We'd go back and do a hot wash of what worked, what didn't work, and we'd fix it.  And that's what the local government's going to have to do, at state government and FEMA on the federal side has to do.

And then you bring everybody together and they say, "OK, this is what happened.  This is why we need to make these changes."  And it's got to happen.

SESNO:  We have about three minutes and I want to expand this panel.  Right down here, please?

TODD LAPORTE:  Thanks.  I'm Todd LaPorte from the School of Public Policy.  It's often said that we get the government that we deserve.  And the culture of the United States is one of intense individualism and suspicion of government as some of the data that Frank has mentioned just shown. 

So, how do you then take that sort of suspicion, which often leads to fragmented and private response, and how does the government itself, as the object of that suspicion, then foster the kind of collaborative relationships, the partnerships that you've been talking about, that would lead to support for mitigation and that would foster the sort of collaborative response at a community level that all of us really need in order to respond to a variety of different kinds of problems that can't be necessarily planned for?

WITT:  Look at the program that we had mentioned earlier, Project Impact. I think is a program that would help do a lot of those things, particularly from the private sector and the local government and state.  It was a unique program.

And you know what was interesting in that program?  You remember this was a 7.0 earthquake they had in Seattle.  I think it was 2001.  The mayor was on CNN that morning after the earthquake.  And that day was going to be the third year anniversary of them being in Project Impact.

And the CNN reporter asked the mayor, he said, "Mayor, you had no deaths.  You had very few injuries and very little damage.  What do you contribute that to?"

And he said, "Project Impact."  They retrofitted their schools.  They retrofitted their bridges.  They retrofitted their public buildings.  They went into the elderly homes and apartments.  They did, with the volunteer organizations, the community, and they put the latches on the cabinet doors, they put Velcro on the ship for the televisions.

They took the big books down and put them on the bottom. They did all the things that you're supposed to do in prevention for them.  That was the very day the program was cut.  And that program itself probably built more capacity and capability than any program I've seen.  It was so successful.

It was the federal government giving seed money to a local community, partner with them to build a public/private partnership in that community.  The community identified the risks.  The community, and through this partnership, minimized that risk.

In Tucker County in West Virginia, they became a Project Impact community.  And there's this one lady there decided that she was going to fix the flooding problem in their community because it flooded every year.

She called five of her buddies and they started having bake sales, car washes.  They published a cook book with all their favorite recipes.  They raised $50,000.  They got Project Impact was $300,000.

They asked the governor for a million dollars and got it.  They fixed their flooding problem in Tucker County, in their community.  And that was the first time we had the summit in Washington.  They had about 960 people there.

Well, Katie won the Citizen of the Year award because of what she had done.  And she stood up on that podium in front of all those people and said, "If I can do it, anyone can do it."  Katie was 84-years-old.  And all her buddies were in their 80s.

So, you know, it can be done.  And it just takes giving people an opportunity to help themselves and bringing them together. And it can be done.

SESNO:  All right.  Last question here and then we're going to have the rest of our panel come up here.

KATHY KINSLEY, VERITAN UNIVERSITY:  Kathy Kinsley from Veritan University business school.  I actually want to talk a little bit more about individual responsibility because that's something that sort of hit home with me as you were talking about it.

As we were watching all the disasters unfold in, you know, Hurricane Katrina, we set up a family emergency plan.  And part of it entailed going to this West Virginia home of my partner's friend.

So like we're halfway there and I realized human beings tend towards laziness.  We tend towards inertia.

WITT:  Procrastination.

KINSLEY:  Procrastination, as well.  And one of the things that we know about some, like organ donation programs, is that if you have an opt-in program, it doesn't work.  So, in the U.S., our organ donation rate is something like 10 percent.

If you have an opt-out program, it really tends to work. So in Britain, for example, you have to specifically opt out if you don't want to be an organ transplant donor, and they have a 90 percent rate. 

So I'm trying to think about what an analogy would be for human individual response here that would be kind of an opt-out program. So, you know, everybody would have to be prepared but then you'd have to do something sort special to opt out.  And I don't know what that analogy would be. I wondered if you had any thoughts about that.

WITT:  I do.   I tried my very best when I was director of FEMA, and I met with 25 of the CEOs of the biggest insurance companies in our nation.  That's a lot.  You give a deductible on homeowners if you've got deadbolt locks and smoke detectors.

What if a family minimized every risk that they could on their home or business.  Would you be willing to give them a break on a premium?  I never could get them to do that.  But, if you think about this, if you said, "All right, insurance industry, we're going to put a perk in shutters, we're going to put a hurricane wind-proof garage door, exterior doors.  We're going to have clay tile shingles on our roof, and we have developed a family emergency plan with an emergency kit in our home."

If we can somehow create that carrot that somebody can buy into that they see a benefit from, not just protecting their family but they see some monetary benefit, then we'll have a success story.

SESNO:  It's interesting that you raised that because some of these things, would require individuals to spend more money.  Those clay roof tiles are going to be more expensive than asphalt.  Every time a hurricane or a tornado comes through, we see the same pictures of the trailer parks, which are the first things to go, right?

WITT:  Sure.

SESNO:  But people still move into trailers because it's a cheaper way for them to live.  So, you know, it's not going to go away.  And you're not going to be able to fund all this from government funds.

WITT:   No, but let me share this with you.  During the Northridge earthquake, Senator Clinton came out as first lady.  We went down this one block in Northridge earthquake and that was all historical homes.

Every single home on that block had shifted off the foundations south, because that's the motion of earthquake, except this one house.  We walked up in the front lawn.  This guy came out of this house living there, not a single brick loose, not a single pane of glass broken.  And I said, "What did you do?"  He said, "I went down to the county library and I checked out a FEMA OES videotape on how to retrofit your house yourself."

SESNO:  It's all that duct tape and plastic.

WITT:  But you know what he did?  He retrofitted his house himself.  But you know how much it cost him?

SESNO:  How much?

WITT:  A thousand dollars.  A family up at Berkley,  during that big fire they had years ago,  when 3,000 homes burnt down, taken it upon themselves to create, block captains. And everybody on their block was trained.

And then they trained everybody and educated people in their community of how to build back better and safer.  They taught many things such as planting shrubs that were more fire resistant, using siding that was more fire resistant.  This was a private couple, individuals, building this. 

One in Oregon started talking and teaching and training people in his school how to anchor your home to a foundation.  We have to just provide them some incentive to help themselves and it can be done.

SESNO:  Well, let's give some incentive to ourselves here.

WITT:  Right.

SESNO:  We're going to expand our panel now.  Let me start out by introducing Mayor Dennis Barbour, who joins us from Carolina Beach, North Carolina. The mayor has endured nine hurricanes.

MAYOR DENNIS BARBOUR , CAROLINA BEACH, NORTH CAROLINA:  Eight hurricanes.

SESNO:  Eight hurricanes since he's been mayor, and certainly was watching New Orleans with great interest.

Cathy Allen, is the CEO of BITS, which is the technology group representing the hundred largest financial institutions looking at the status of financial recovering and reconstitution in the New Orleans area.

And J. Michael Hickey is the Vice President of Government Affairs, National Security Policy, with Verizon.  He is currently the chairman of the U.S. Telecom National Security Committee, Executive Committee Member for the Communications Sector Coordinating Council, and a board member for Internet Security Alliance, among other things.

And here we get into a little bit of discussion not just to the private sector and individual sectors but also, talk about critical infrastructures because, certainly, telecom and what you deal with every day are very important critical infrastructures.

So, Mayor, let me ask you to go first and ask you this question, by way of introduction. What does repairing the damage mean from your perspective?

BARBOUR:  Repairing the damage after a hurricane?

SESNO:  After these storms, as you look at your own situation.

BARBOUR:  I know you've been talking about the federal government and state government.  As we all know, hurricane preparedness, and more especially, communication and coordination are the keys to handling any situation in an emergency situation.   And we also know that the devil is in the details.  Any time we have a hurricane, our emergency plans will be tested to the limits, and any failures in that plan will come out very quickly.

As you said, our local communities, Carolina Beach, has had eight hurricanes in 10 years.  The fortunate side of that is so many hurricanes have allowed us to review our emergency plan through critiques and lessons learned and fine-tune it to the point that we're now at a situation where we know what to do and when to do it to prepare, especially for hurricanes we have received, which are mostly Category 1 and 2 hurricanes.

SESNO:  What did you learn, or what changes after Katrina and Rita?

BARBOUR:  Well, we have made a few changes in our emergency plan, especially communication-wise. Especially, right after Hurricane Katrina and Rita.  We had Hurricane Ophelia, which was our eighth hurricane in October, come directly through Carolina Beach.  And while it was a Category 1, what went first?  A lot of the communications.

We maintained our phone service but we relied upon our emergency personnel using cell phones and 800 megahertz.  Both of those systems went out.  Cell phone service went out because of the lack of emergency backup for the system.

We have since changed companies that have installed an emergency generator to pick up the cell service so we can maintain that communication.

SESNO:  Your communication would survive that same situation now...

BARBOUR:  Yes.

SESNO:  ...just as a result of Katrina.  Other things that you've changed as a result?

BARBOUR:  A lot of the emergency personnel in the town of Carolina Beach were a little bit anxious in terms of going to work too early in the hurricane.  And, as you've seen in New Orleans, they have a tendency to run out of speed if they start too early.

So, we've changed some of our procedures to know when to put those people on the streets.

SESNO:  So you're timing things a little differently.

BARBOUR:  The timing's different.

SESNO:  So they're not exhausted or so they're with family?  What's the purpose?

BARBOUR:  So they're not exhausted when we really need them the most.

SESNO:  What about family issues?

BARBOUR:  One of my points that I was going to make here, again, because we've had mainly Category 1 and 2 hurricanes, we need to look at the effects from different categories of hurricanes.

Category 1 and 2 hurricanes cause incidental damage and very little injuries.  Category 3 and above causes destruction and death.  Now that we have all the information from our eight hurricanes and now the Category 3 and Category 4 have hit the Gulf Coast, we need to look at those different categories and try to predict better what the results of the damage will be and forecast what we can expect to see and educate people, like you mentioned.

Education is key.

SESNO:  Are you prepared?  Are you educating them for the catastrophic events, for the Category 5?

BARBOUR:  We're working on that. That's not something...

SESNO:  You're not there yet.

BARBOUR:  We're not there yet.  We're working on that.

SESNO:  OK.   Cathy Allen?

CATHERINE ALLEN, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, BITS:  Well, first of all, the nature of our industry, financial services, is really to manage risks.  And it's been one of the things that, when we go through an event like Katrina, we not only manage the risk but we look at what are the lessons learned from that.

So, I'm going to share a few of those with you.  Our business is based on reputation. It's based on safety and soundness, making sure that our customers’ access information and their money when they need to.

And during Katrina was a good example of the financial services industry, is weathering the storm pretty well.  It worked.  It worked because our regulators in the financial institutions talked constantly.  There were Web sites up that let you know which financial institutions were down.

There were meetings to relax some of the regulations.  Regarding cash, they planned for it and had cash there on time.  They used mobile ATMs that use wireless phones to get cash to people.

So, all in all there were a lot of things that went very well.  Part of this is because we're regulated, we're required to have business continuity plans for any kind of disaster.  This was just one example of one.  And those business continuity plans are tested and examined every year by our regulators.  So we really have to know what we're doing to make sure that the payments and settlement systems continue to go.

We also have a system in place to communicate with our regulators.  There's a group of the financial services industry players and associations and then a group of the regulators called SERBI, and we meet on a quarterly basis.  We share information.  We share best practices.

We were on the phone all the time during the whole Katrina effort.  And through that, we were able, again, to relax some of the regulations.  A good example is many people did not have identification because they either lost it in the flood or left and were evacuated so quickly.

Well, we have Bank Secrecy Act regulations that say, "I can't cash a check for you unless you have identification."  So we worked around that with the regulators.

SESNO:  How did you work around that with the regulators?

ALLEN:  Well, the Social Security Administration worked with Treasury to make sure that the checks went to a separate deposit, a place, so that people knew where to go get their checks, and then we had verification from the Social Security.

In some cases, we would call people.  They'd say, "I am who I am but you can call this person to verify."  And we would trust on that verification.  So, we tried to work with people.

Treasury, actually it was managed by DHS - FEMA -- piloted a debit card.  Instead of getting checks for people who worked -- that were victims of the storm, they had debit cards.  That actually worked pretty well.

SESNO:  My recollection is that was yanked pretty fast...

ALLEN:   It was.  It was yanked by DHS.  And we won't go into that.

SESNO:  Oh, wait.  There's a story behind the story there.  You can't do that.

ALLEN:  Let's just say it was a good program and it worked.

SESNO:  It was a good program.  It was a model for the future.  Should that be done in the future?

ALLEN:  Yes.  It should be.  Because what it did, it allowed people to use a debit card instead of cash and cashing a check to be able to access ATMs.  And many of the ATMs were running because they were wireless ATMs so that they could get cash.

And there were restrictions, that were taken off so that you could get more cash out of an ATM.  Today you can maybe get 200 or 300 and that was upped.  So, again there's safeguards. 

What happened, I think, there was not enough rigorous control and there was a concern about liability is the reason it got pulled.

SESNO:  Right.

ALLEN:  But let's just say that the program worked and they were able to disseminate.

SESNO:  So, that's something you think should be revisited for the future.

ALLEN:  It should be revisited, definitely, in the future.

The second thing we did is we have to have backup systems, again, by regulation.  So many of the employees were evacuated before Katrina happened to Baton Rouge and Shreveport and other places, so that there was no glitch, that the systems, the cell and the containment systems continued.

Now, not all people who lived in the affected area could access information because they're telecommunications lines were down, but the systems continued to work.  We worked with consumers to try to access not only their cash but information about their accounts.

Another thing that happened was -- and these are the things, really, lessons that didn't work so well.  We always known, very concerned, about our interdependency on telecommunications and power.  Both were out.  If they're out, our customers can't reach us.

And in some cases, institutions that were under water or other systems weren't working, couldn't communicate with each other.  We have advocated the telecommunications industry having diversity and redundancy.

That means separate lines going through separate routes so that you can make sure if one is down the other works.  We also advocate having a satellite system for first responders, and that wasn't necessarily in effect in New Orleans.

There are tax incentives.  There are things that we can do as a government to encourage that to occur, and that's one of the things we think is very important.

This has actually created best practices, things that you as a financial institution, should ask of your telecom provider.  And they're on our Web site.

We have a lot of things that we do that are free to the public. That's at BITSINFO, WWW.BITSINFO.ORG, telecommunications best practices, what we need from the telecom industry.  But there needs to be cross-sector coordination and we think that's a government role.

I really want to commend BellSouth and Verizon, too, because they have been partners in helping the financial sector to understand the diversity and redundancy areas.  So, BellSouth did a good job on that.

Another thing is the communications between local and federal government did not work well.  There are models of regional coalitions.  This and Treasury helped develop one in Chicago called Chicago First.  New York has had an excellent model for some time.  Miami has just instituted one.

Again, they're on our Web site, a model of how you create this public and private sector regional coalition to work together.  And again, it's been for the financial sector with all of the others, but there's no reason it wouldn't work for other sectors as well.

There were no standards for credentialing.  A lot of the employees that tried to get into the affected area and volunteers from other regions couldn't get in because they wouldn't allow them in.  There need to be standards for credentialing, saying who you are and that you're allowed into affected areas.

DHS should have had that done.  We knew that.  These are not new lessons.  We learned them in 9/11 and we learned them in the power outage.

SESNO:  But here you sent them over a vastly larger area for a vastly longer period of time.

ALLEN:  Exactly.  But it can be done.  This is not brain surgery to do this. 

We learned some new things.  What happens when you have contaminated cash or safety deposit boxes because the water brought toxins into the areas, how to handle that.  Fortunately our regulators worked with us and very quickly we came up with procedures for that and we'll use those going forward.

I mentioned the identification issue.  And then one last issue that arose, U.S. Postal Service didn't deliver checks, didn't deliver mail.  And in many cases, we found some small businesses that had gone bankrupt because their accounts receivable, they were living on the edge.

And never mind that the financial institutions were getting all kinds of leeway and didn't report delinquencies.  It still impacted them.  So, we have, on the large end is how to work with the post office to get deliveries when we need them.

I’ll close with three things, three questions in a way.  How do we have better communications between the public and private sector?  I do think that the role for government to provide the incentives or the structure for that, private sector will do and are doing a lot.  But we need to have some overarching organization for that and there are models out there. 

Secondly, how can we address the interdependency concerns.  I will tell you, this administration and the DHS are not paying attention to the interdependencies.  The cascading effect of telecom power, financial services, IT, the operating systems, what happens when they're down and how it impacts the critical infrastructure.

And then lastly, how do we treat our citizens with dignity and support them?  I think Katrina was a watershed for all of us to say there is a critically important role for government in treating our citizens with dignity, and it didn't happen the way it should have this time.

This could have happened to anyone, any community, any time.  The next thing we're facing is the Avian Flu pandemic.  That's going to be something that's going to move in faster and, perhaps, be less predictable than what we have.  And the question is, are we prepared?

SESNO:  And the answer?

ALLEN:  I don't think so.

SESNO:  OK.  Michael?  But before you commence, could I ask you to slide back a little bit so the folks to your right can see you and us?  Go ahead.

J. MICHAEL HICKEY, VICE PRESIDENT GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS, VERIZON:  Catherine's touched on a number of issues that I'd like to come back to, but the cross-sector piece is especially important.

But at the outset, let me say that network readiness, network resiliency, is a key priority for Verizon.  We're a company that serves our wireline customers in 28 states. We have nearly 50 million wireless subscribers, and network reliability for all of those individuals on the wireline and wireless side, is really critical.

We're first and foremost a service company.  Our customers do depend on reliable voice and data services, especially during emergencies.  So, it's not surprising that we place a high priority on making sure that we are prepared as a company before we rely on the federal, state, local government or other sectors.

We have to be prepared first to make sure that we can respond quickly to service disruptions, whether manmade or natural in scope.  And where disruptions certainly vary, our approach is consistent, and that's preparedness first and business continuity as really a key.

There are three ways in which we ground our work in emergency preparedness.  One is through policy.  We have a policy that requires all of our business units to really focus on business continuity as a top priority.

And from a governance standpoint, we have a structure in place that allows business units to identify on an early warning basis issues that are out there.  And there's a very direct conduit that our business units have to the top leadership within the company.

SESNO:  So, take us down into New Orleans and examine the situation there where the mayor's office, is literally helping themselves to a Home Depot or wherever to get phones and routers and servers so they can communicate.

What do you see, what does your company see, as ways to prevent that kind of thing.  How, from your perspective, do you repair the damage from these storms?

HICKEY:  I guess my original point is that preparedness is key.  We take that very seriously.  And these storms affected primarily our wireless company.  And our wireless company took a number of very dramatic steps to make sure that equipment and materials and supplies and human resources were pre-staged in advance of these storms.

SESNO:  But they lost, they lost their communications because the storm was huge and towers went down, right?

HICKEY:  It varies based on geographic region and certainly commercial providers were challenged, not just because of the storm impact on our physical facilities, but also on the storm impact on other sectors, of power, and other providers, for instance, T1 providers that would connect our cell sites to switches over a given a territory.

On the whole, as an outcome of the storm, I think we were able to respond, put our cell sites up, back up, very quickly. Again, it had so much to do with the pre-staging of activity and our work with key providers like BellSouth.

BellSouth invited wireless providers into their command center and worked hour by hour to make sure that priority circuits were restored.

SESNO:  And have an opportunity to rebuild in parts of the afflicted area, almost literally from the ground up, what gets done differently?

HICKEY:  What gets done differently?  We need to make sure that we focus on the basics, making sure that we have generators in place for cell sites, certainly backup generators and mobile generators for locations that are more difficult to get to.

We need to make sure from a supply standpoint, fuel is always accessible to cell sites. I think so much of what needs to take place going forward is a stronger and more clear definition of roles and responsibilities at the state, local, and federal level that would enable private industry, for instance, to access sites and to access sites securely and with fuel necessary to get our facilities up and running.

SESNO:  So, that's what you would like to see from the public sector, from government.

HICKEY:  From the public sector, and certainly from a private sector standpoint, continued strong investment.  But again, to the public sector point, we have a very strong ally within the Department of Homeland Security, within the National Communication System, the NCS.

We have a cluster of companies that work as residents at the NCS, the National Coordinating Center, that, on a day-to-day basis monitor and respond to events regardless of scale.  So, our go-to agency is NCS, and despite challenges that we had, given the scope and scale of the storms, we were able to continue to work very closely with individuals there to get the job done.

ALLEN:  I'd like to just comment on that because we worked very closely with the NCS in developing some of the best practices in some of the pilots we've done.  The funding has been cut tremendously, and they're an excellent organization with a really seasoned staff, but they have limited resources.

SESNO:  How does this translate onto the ground for mayor?  I mean, are you working with your private sectors in these ways?  Do you have satellite communications available to you in your small town?

BARBOUR:  We don't have satellite.  We are a town composed of less than 10,000 in terms of residences.  Nevertheless, we are directly on the coastline.  But we do work on our communication systems.  We do work on improvements in becoming more hurricane resistant.  Thanks to Mr. Witt when he was director.

As he mentioned about another town that had a municipal complex in the flood zone, we had repetitive flooding.  We received a grant from FEMA and matched it with about $2-and-a-half million, moved our whole municipal complex out of the flood zone, made it hurricane proof, put 150 kW generator backup system.

And every hurricane we've had since, we've manned the EOC in that building.  There's been no damage to the building and we maintained fairly good communications and power throughout the hurricane.

You mentioned what did we learn from Hurricane Rita and Katrina.

SESNO:  Yes.

BARBOUR:  We learned a lot.  But we've been learning for 10 years now because we've been through so many hurricanes.  And we've transitioned from an unprepared local community to a very prepared local community.

SESNO:  A couple more minutes and then back to the audience.  You heard Cathy talk about the interconnectedness of her industry in telecom, critical infrastructures.  We saw here with the power outages when we had this here in August cascading.

Are all critical infrastructures created equal?

BARBOUR:  No.  But they're all important.  And they all need to be focused on.  And that's why it's so critical bringing that private sector in.

Let me just say, you know, I would really love to see from the federal government that they look across the country at best practices and they take these success stories and they really utilize those to build a national program.

Give you an example like Chicago First.  Chicago First has brought together public/private partnership and really have developed a model program like we just did for the state of Pennsylvania, 105 state universities.  We just finished developing and training a ready campus program to teach faculty and the community working together.

These programs are the kind that need to be showcased, shared, and using these best practices because...

SESNO:  Not happening now?

BARBOUR:  No.

SESNO:  They're happening now?

ALLEN:  No, because, again, this is where I think government can play a role in funding.  Now, Treasury took the Chicago First model that we documented and took it to Miami.  But it takes time.  I mean, that's one last year.

I think these are things that need to be implemented immediately because of the pandemic threat.  And I also think there should be money either from DHS or someone in the government, to make these happen. And there was no opening (ph).

SESNO:  Are you connected to best practices?  Are you connected to some of these things up through the state, through your counties?

BARBOUR:  Through our counties, basically.

SESNO:  Are you getting what you need?

BARBOUR:  Pretty much, yes.  We have a good emergency director for the Hanover County.

WITT:  Very good.?

BARBOUR:  Very good.  And we work closely with Hanover County.  We actually do a good job of coordinating the whole county, which includes four municipalities, three municipalities and the city of Wilmington when it comes to emergency preparedness and coordination and preparation for oncoming hurricanes.

SESNO:  I want to ask one more jump-off question and then open it back up to all of you here.  We watched Katrina, through our media or on the ground there and saw all kinds of surprises.  I mentioned this a bit earlier.

We saw first responders not show up because they were concerned about their family, because their houses had been washed away.  You started talking about contaminated dollars, safe deposit boxes under water, mail facilities that are also under water with all kinds of mail lost.  People are still being identified, coroners simply overwhelmed by what was at task.

If we're talking about, as Michael Chertoff now is, about trying to prepare for, major disaster, catastrophe level disaster, there are a lot of surprises out of Katrina.

I want to hear from each of you what we, what people in this room, what mayors across the country, should have seen and should be doing now.

HICKEY:  I think a top priority for the Department of Homeland Security should be to try to do a better job in connecting private with local and state government, not just on an introductory basis but for real training.

SESNO:  OK.

HICKEY:  We have a number of exercises that we've participated in over the last 18 months.  They have to become even more real.

SESNO:  But there's still not the connectedness between state, local government and private sector?  That's what you're saying?

HICKEY:  I think DHS has a structure in place.  They're using it to better advantage.  There's a pandemic exercise in New York hosted by the Federal Reserve Board, encouraged by the Department of Homeland Security, where power and telecom and financial got together to begin thinking about and planning for the implications of a potential pandemic.

ALLEN:  There's a key that the Federal Reserve that came up with the idea.

HICKEY:  Through the act of involvement, at least from our view of NCS in the National Coordination Center for Telecommunication.

SESNO:  Cathy?

ALLEN:  Too, I think we could quickly implement regional models of the public/private sector coordination. There are models out there that just very quickly needs to be documented and then implemented and monies to get out to each of these communities.  That's number one.

Number two is this inter-dependency, that you've got to focus on the telecommunications and power in those regions and making sure that there's backup and alternative sources.  Then everything else falls from there.

HICKEY: On that one point, sector coordinating councils are being stood up.  We have one in my industry for both IT and telecom.  I see much more work needing to be done at the cross-sector level, and Catherine's referred to that a number of times.

We can learn a lot of lessons from past experience through that kind of cross sector coordination.

SESNO:  This is urgent business, isn't it?

ALLEN:  Yes.

HICKEY:  It's something that we tend to, as private businesses, every day.

SESNO:  But there's urgency to this.

HICKEY:  There is urgency.

SESNO:  Is it being handled with appropriate urgency?

HICKEY:  I think within the organizations that the telecom sector has access to within federal government, yes.

SESNO:  OK.

WITT:   I'm a firm believer that if we fund and plan and prepare, together and we build, give people our opportunity like the mayor and build disaster-resistant communities, we will be better prepared. 

But I think also that one of the things that we tried to strive to that didn't make any difference, our goal was to never let a local or state government fail in a response simply because American people in other communities deserved not only the best that they could get from the federal, state and local.

So, our goal was we cannot fail and we do not let them fail.  And I think that's important.

SESNO:  Mayor?

BARBOUR:  But it's very important, and I agree with what you're saying, it's very important for local governments to be prepared.

WITT:  Absolutely.

BARBOUR:  And I think there should be FEMA National Guard teams that actually come into local governments that are prone to hurricanes or whatever the disasters might be to do table-top exercises, especially for a Category 1 through 5 hurricanes.

SESNO:  Have you been involved in table-top exercises?

BARBOUR:  Absolutely.  Many times.

SESNO:  And you think there need to be more?

BARBOUR:  Absolutely.

SESNO:  OK.

BARBOUR:  This coordination, if I could finish, this coordination is really necessary, and it will uncover the deficiencies and shortcomings in both the federal level and the local level if the two manage to get together and work through these exercises.

SESNO:  OK.  We have a number of questions from the floor.  Go ahead.  Quickly.

HICKEY:  The exercises need to be stronger simulations, too.  We can talk about the power going off or losing communications but we need to really exercise that.  So, in a given situation, the power does go off.  OK.  Then what do we do?

And those folks around the table, cross-sectorally, need to figure it out.

SESNO:  So, give these tabletops some teeth.

HICKEY:  I think so.

SESNO:  Make it hurt. 

HICKEY:  I've been involved with a lot of them.  I know what you mean because you can sit there and you can work around the table and you can say the power's out but then, you know, three minutes later you move on to something else as opposed to really feel the bite of what happens if the power's really out and you can't communicate.

ALLEN:  But the importance of a leadership communicating to the public, public constants (ph), is a critical issue.

W found, even in Katrina, for the while that people didn't have communications, they heard rumors that there were runs on banks or you couldn't get cash when, in fact, there was plenty of cash and everything down there.

But it's so important, and I think if we're looking at Machiavellian a million forces, one of their goals is to undermine the economy and undermine the public confidence.  So it's critical to have leadership out there saying, you know, we've got this under control.  This is what we're going to do.  This is how we're addressing the problem.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT:  Spokesperson.  You've got to have one.

BARBOUR:  I believe that the mayor, especially in small communities, and even in a town as big as New Orleans, is the focal point in a disaster such as this, my motto is communicate regularly, communicate accurately, and communicate calmly. And that's what I try to do in every situation we have.

SESNO:  Was that done in New Orleans?

BARBOUR:  I don't think so. 

GREG SPRAWL ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY:  Hi.  I'm Greg Spraw and I'm with the Environmental Protection Agency.  And we're the lead agency for the water sector.

And I just had a question for you all about mutual aid.  We've learned some lessons about mutual aid. Water utilities, helping water utilities.  Water utilities in the state of Florida helping out Mississippi, hospitals helping hospitals, banks helping banks.

What would be the role of government in helping to foster mutual aid agreements?

WITT:  And you're absolutely correct, almost every community out there has mutual aid programs and agreements in place.  One of the programs we started when I was at FEMA was called an EMAC program, and that is bringing resources from one site into another site.

What we had to work out was the liability issues through the attorney general or general counsel, but we did.  That program has been so successful because FEMA agreed to approve a reimbursable cost to that state when they activate those resources.

So, it's a mutual aid program but it's much larger.  It's nationwide, state to state. 

HICKEY:  Within the telecom sector there is significant mutual aid framework in place.  For instance, during - in response to Katrina and Rita, Verizon in a series of phased appointments has lent considerable manpower, equipment and supplies to the restoration effort at BellSouth.  We started with 100 techs and 10 managers.  Phase two we did the same.  We're currently in phase three.  And we anticipated an additional two phase deployments through the first quarter of next year to assist with BellSouth.  So, from a mutual aid standpoint there's a very strong relationships between companies in the telecom sector.

SESNO:   Next question.

WILLIAM GIBSON, "SOUTH FLORIDA SUN SENTINEL":  Hi.  Bill Gibson from the "South Florida Sun Sentinel".  I wanted to ask about lessons earned from the experience of Hurricane Wilma.  Florida was cited from the 2004 examples as a model for the nation.  And it's a state that's storm savvy and thought it was well prepared, but it had lots of problems after Wilma: long distribution - long lines waiting for distribution and supplies that never came.  No gas.  It was a lot of problems on the ground.

How to account for that, even for a state like Florida that is considered to be well prepared and carrying out many of the things that you've recommended?

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT:  I'm not answering it.

WITT:  I don't know.  I haven't had really an opportunity to look at Wilma and the response to Wilma.  I've been focused on Louisiana. I did see the long lines on television and I thought, "What in the world is going on here?"  There was a distribution problem, the rerouting of the ice and water. 

We put three warehouses in the United States and put all the things that we need to do on pilot so we could truck or fly in immediately. 

One of the biggest problems we found -- and it showed in Texas too in evacuation -- was backup generators for service stations.  We always tried to work with one of the oil industries, Exxon or Shell,  and made sure that we tried to have that.  But I don't know what happened.

ALLEN:  Just an interesting story t on the generators and the fuel issues.  In the power outage, we were in Detroit.  We had all of our CIOs at a meeting.  And it turned out that Comerica had a special arrangement with the gas station to have the fuel for their backup generators.  And they had it all set up by contract so that that gas station, once there is a disaster, pretty much was overtaken by Comerica for all of their needs, which I thought was pretty interesting.

SESNO:  A good thing.  Did you watch Wilma?

BARBOUR:  To tie the two questions together, and talking about generator systems, we have a list of every lift station for sewer, every well for water, and we know what type and size of generator is needed. 

So, prior to a hurricane coming we have a private contract with private industry to bring in generators.  We already have transition switches and plugs to plug the generators in place.  That's part of our emergency plan.  We require a private company on the beach that has a service station to have an emergency backup generator, because we, when we start our recovery process, we need fuel and gas the same as anyone else.

WITT:  I'll just add something real quick.

That's one of the things that we're advising states and local governments on.  After these storms this year I will do everything I can to put in place standby contracts for any resources I needed.

HICKEY:  Can I just respond to the generator issue?  In our wireless business 80 percent of our cell sites have a generator in place.  And we have a mobile fleet to support others that don't have a permanent unit on place.  On the wire line business, power is even more critical.  And for our switching offices, not only do we have battery backup, but a generator capacity that's mobile and that's available as we need it.

One issue is a security issue that we ran up against.  This is a local and state issue and that has to do with the theft of generators.  We would put a generator out at the cell site and quickly turn around and it was gone.  People were desperate during the aftermath of these storms.

SESNO:  How much did that happen?  How many generators did you lose?

HICKEY:  From a Verizon standpoint, I think we may have lost a couple of units.  We've gotten to the point where we actually mount larger generators on trucks.  In one case, a truck was stolen with that generator. 

So, if it's an issue for us it's certainly an issue for other providers.  That's one of the focal points for state/local cooperation, making sure that not just wireless, but wire line providers our view is a critical infrastructure....

SESNO:  Another question right here.  We'll move across the room.  We're going to go about another seven minutes or so.

ERIC MERTON, UNISYS CORPORATION:  Great.  I'm Eric Merton with Unisys Corporation. My question is for Mr. Witt and Mr. Barbour.  You both mentioned first responder communications and interoperability.  And this problem has been around arguably for about 20 years now.  Why hasn't it been solved?  And what is the message from both of you to both the public sector and the private sector on how to solve it?

BARBOUR:  Well, as I mentioned, currently we do not have satellite communication.  I think that's our next step, because if you have satellite communication then you don't worry about towers or power loss and so forth.  The 800-megahertz system for New Hanover County is currently being upgraded.  They're spending, I think $11.5 million to put additional towers in the southern end of our county, but out of flood zones and out of areas that should receive the wind damage from the hurricanes.  So, those two areas, I think, will significantly help our communications.

WITT:  I think that federal government themselves is working with the states should definitely bring in every single communications provider from the private sector, take the best of the best of technologies and be able to develop the national standard that's going to be consistent from the national federal - I'm sorry, the ...

SESNO:  The national standard, not state by state or community by community.

WITT:  No, the national standard that ...

SESNO:  Is that OK with you?

WITT:  ... everybody ...

SESNO:  Is that imposed on your community?  Are you going to have some pushback on that from ...

WITT: No, wait a minute.  Wait a minute.  You're not imposing it.  If you get - say the mayor got $5 million of grants, OK, and part of that grant he's going to buy $2 million worth of communications equipment ...

SESNO:  Right.

WITT:  ... wouldn't it be important for him to know what the national standards would be where everybody could communicate to be able to purchase that communications equipment?  That's what I'm talking ...

SESNO:  One would assume.  Yes.

WITT:  It's not mandating it.  It's developing a standard for the nation in communications, whether it's National Guard, firefighters, police officers, emergency management across the board. 

When DOD came in to Louisiana, of course, they had about the best prepared communications in the world, but you know still DOD has problems talking to - consistently across public safety, you know.  So, that standard is important and they should do it.

BARBOUR:  Whenever there is mandates put in place by federal government, but they also put the funding there to help with grants, we look at it as a partnership with the federal government, not imposed.

SESNO:  OK. Where are we next?  Right here.  Yes, ma'am.

PAULA GORDON, WRITER, ANALYST, CONSULTANT, GORDONHOMELAND.COM:  My name is Paula Gordon.  I'm a consultant and educator and have a Web site called GordonHomeland.com, which deals with a lot of these issues. 

One of the things that hasn't been brought up that I think is very, very important, particularly with catastrophes, also with quarantine situations, is sheltering, sheltering in place and sheltering businesses and industry and families, and providing public shelters as well as family home shelters adequately supplied, and I would say 10 to 12, 14 days at least and longer if possible.  I'd like to have your responses to that.

ALLEN:  One of the first things they discussed is employees and how you account for employees, how you help them relocate if they have to relocate.  I know the financial institutions that were in the Gulf region went out of their way in helping the families, in helping the families have support at home, to get those employees to be able to come to work.  So, it's part of the business continuity plan.

We're regulated and have to have business continuity plans.  I really think every critical infrastructure business needs business continuity plans.

SESNO: Is there some role the private sector can play in encouraging, even funding some of these preparedness plans?

ALLEN:  Certainly there's communication through the financial institutions to their employee of what they need to do.  We're working right now, on the pandemic to be prepared for that and what are the procedures that they need to do. 

I go back with what James said.  People want to do the right thing.  They want to help.  They want to be part of a community.  They just need some framework of what's the right thing to do.  And we all went through the ridiculous stuff with duct tape.  And that wasn't the right thing to tell people.

SESNO:  Most of the discussion right now, James Lee, is a few days of preparedness.  She's talking about a few weeks. 

ALLEN:  Yes, weeks.

SESNO:  Should we be changing this discussion and saying, "Folks, if we're going to be prepared for a catastrophe, you're going to have to have more than a couple gallons of water"?

WITT:  Well, I agree that at least for 72 hours is what we always said that you need to be prepared to be on your own.  The public education, public awareness program is so important.  You remember 9/11 in Washington D.C. and what happened.  Everybody fled out of the buildings.  Everybody fled to their cars. There was gridlock in the city.  And that was just not knowing what to do. 

One of the law firms asked us to come over and help them put together a business continuity plan, because they didn't know what to do after that.

SESNO:  Should people be preparing for two weeks?  What do you tell your residents?

BABOUR:  We have always planned for 72 hours.  But I think that there's a lack of standardization for training and qualification for shelters, shelter personnel to man shelters, supplies, emergency backup, phone systems.  As we've seen in New Orleans, you also need police protection at these shelter facilities.  So, I think we have a lot of work yet to do in developing better opportunities and durations for shelters.

HICKEY:  Can I make a point on public shelters?  I think Verizon and other wireless providers treated those with a priority in terms of bringing services to those affected and in shelters, from chargers, to all kinds of support for wireless phones, calling cards, and other services.  Private sector was very aggressive in actually going out to sites to provide services. 

SESNO:  Let's do our last question from the floor.

JESSICA ADUL, SECUSAFE:  Hi.  I'm Jessica Adul from SecuSafe.  I wanted to know what role the insurance industry can play in all this.

ALLEN:  I would say that about 20 board members are insurance companies.  They play a huge role in everything from helping customers be able to file claims and to get money up front to help them just in their relocation.  There's a number of the companies that have really done an outstanding job, first in education in the Gulf area, and then secondly in trying to help people realize their claims.

I think there's more to do.  Just as James was talking about the incentives, I think there's a role that the insurance companies could play in saying here's best practices that we want you to implement.  I you do this, then you get a deduction or a lower premium or whatever in your insurance.  As an incentive tool, the insurance industry is looking at ways that they can incent people to perform best practices.

WITT:  I totally agree.  If you think about it, even if they didn't lower the premium, if they just lowered the deductible, that would make a huge difference for somebody to give them an incentive to do this. 

SESNO: Anything...

HICKEY:  I've seen the insurance industry play a very positive role in organizations such as the Internet Security Alliance.  It's to incent appropriate behavior, adherence to sound practice coming out of organizations like the Network Reliability Interoperability Council.  So, the insurance industry is there, I think strategically located in associations and encouraging a private and individual solution rather than mandates.

SESNO: I'm going to give you each 15 seconds going down the row here.  But I'd like to here two, three, four bullet points, 15 seconds of what should happen in the next, let's say, 12 to 24 months, if we're serious about learning from Katrina and these storms, repairing the damage and moving forward in a better prepared way, tangible action points.

HICKEY:  I guess I have two points.  The interoperability issue needs to be addressed.  I think that needs to become a top priority.  House and Senate up on the Hill are addressing it in a number of different ways.  There needs to be funding and there needs to be a stake in the ground in terms of sound practice. 

Second, I think the inner sector work that Catherine spoke of is critical.  These sector coordinating councils are up and running, but sectors need to work more closely together, I think, especially financial power and telecom.

SESNO:  Catherine.

ALLEN:  I think we need a sense of urgency.  I think we still do not have a sense of urgency about the next disaster that may come.  And, again, it may be a pandemic.  It may be a terrorist attack.  It may be some other natural disaster.  But I think we're complacent and not reacting.

SESNO:  At all levels?

ALLEN:  At all levels.

SESNO:  Private sector, state, local, fed, everybody?

ALLEN:  I'd say the federal and state level be prepared or not ...

SESNO:  Private sector's doing just fine?

ALLEN:  I think the private sector, because they have a vested interest in business, are more attuned to ...

SESNO:  Public compliances ?

ALLEN:  And, again, I give great kudos to our regulators, the financial sector regulators, because they're attuned to this also.  So, one is a sense of urgency. 

Two, there needs to be federal coordination.  I looked back at DHS, or if it's not DHS somebody, who's got to step up and say, "Here's best practices.  Here's regional models.  Here's state models.  Implement them.  Here's money to do that and to put that."  We could have that done in six months if there were coordination. 

Thirdly is the interdependency issue.  Somebody has got to pay attention to that other than the private sector each trying to work together.  I think we really have to have a coordinated effort in the federal government.

SESNO:  Mayor Barbour.

BARBOUR:  Well, it may be reiterating what I said earlier, but I think we really have to concentrate on educating people better for category three and above hurricanes.  One and two hurricanes now considered fairly minor along coastlines.

SESNO:  By extension it'd be earthquakes, it'd be windstorms ...

BARBOUR:  Whatever it might ...

SESNO:  ... you name the disaster, people need to be better educated?

BARBOUR:  Better educated.

SESNO:  All right.  That's one.

BARBOUR:  Education is key. 

This may seem radical, but for category three and above hurricanes, I think the government should have a rapid response, airlift teams set up to come into these local communities to help with coordination and resource and recovery...

SESNO:  Not to open a can of worms now, but military?

BARBOUR:  National Guard, FEMA together could work together on that.  I think that would really be helpful because that initial response is what needs to be picked off.

SESNO:  Three type thing?

BARBOUR:  Interoperability of public safety, communications, best practices and national standards.

SESNO:  I'd like to thank all of you for attending the event this morning.  I'd like to thank our panelists.  I'd also like to thank folks over at the Critical Infrastructure Project in George Mason University for making this possible, in particular Amy Cobb and Brian Day , who really helped to pull together details. 

Folks, you can linger here for a couple minutes if you have some more questions, but we wanted to get you out by 11:00.  We're a few minutes over that.  I apologize for being a little bit late with things, but it was, I think, a terrific and very interesting and important discussion.

So, thanks to all of our panelists.

END