Michael Brown
Michael Brown
Former administrator of FEMA who resigned from his position after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Many americans blamed him for the slow response to help those in New Orleans in the aftermath of the deadly hurricane.
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth8 November 1954
CityGuymon, OK
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There is no question in my mind, that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was.
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There is no other government agency that reaches people in a more direct way, ... It has been the best job in the world to help Americans in their darkest hours.
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We're not a first responder agency. We're there to coordinate and help people prepare and coordinate in times of disaster. And so if the country wants us to be more, then we should have a great public policy debate whether that's true or not,
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Yes, I learned about that, the federal government learned about that (Thursday), ... And that shows how difficult communications are in the situation where there was virtually no communications, except for our teams on the ground.
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Well, the state had their National Guard troops here. The state was overwhelmed because of the vast size of this. That's why, in cooperation with the state, when they made that request and said they needed that additional help, we got it to them.
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I think the important thing to remember is in emergency management you prepare for the worst. Whether there had been a breach or topping of the levees you still need to be getting rescue people in there immediately.
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We are grateful for the outpouring of support already, ... But it's important that volunteer response is coordinated by professionals who can direct volunteers with the appropriate skills to the hardest-hit areas where they are needed most. Self-dispatched volunteers and especially sightseers can put themselves and others in harm's way and hamper rescue efforts.
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We recognize your immediate focus is to provide relief for the hurricane victims in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, but hope you will reconsider your denial of individual assistance for our communities.
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This story's not about me. This story's about the worst disaster of the history of our country that stretched every government to its limit, and now we have to help these victims. That's all I've wanted to do.
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What we have right now is a situation where, with my having access to the military, bringing in the National Guard troops, securing the area, we'll be able to continue the relief efforts that we have been doing over the last several days, ... We'll be able to ramp those up and continue the evacuation.
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We are seeing people we didn't know exist
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We are meeting every request that we get from the state, ... Late Edition.
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They're a good team -- there's no doubt about that -- but there were a few things that we could have done that would have changed some things,
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They're not taking patients out of hospitals, taking prisoners out of prisons and they're leaving hotels open in downtown New Orleans. So I'm very concerned about that.