Michael Chertoff
Michael Chertoff
Michael Chertoffis an American attorney who was the second United States Secretary of Homeland Security under Presidents George W. Bush andBarack Obama, and co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act. He previously served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a federal prosecutor, and as Assistant U.S. Attorney General. He succeeded Tom Ridge as United States Secretary of Homeland Security on February 15, 2005...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublic Servant
Date of Birth28 November 1953
CountryUnited States of America
received little or no assistance from the United States.
People have got to take some responsibility for preparing themselves, ... That means you get yourself three days' worth of food, three days' worth of water; you get yourself flashlights, batteries, either a hand-crank radio or a battery-powered radio, a first-aid kit precisely because you know it's going to take 48 to 72 hours to be able to fully service everyone.
State and local authorities have the principal, first-line-of-response obligation, with respect to a disaster of this kind, ... Obviously, the law recognizes they can't do it themselves.
I think we're going to be ready when it does hit land,
I think we have discovered over the last few days that with all the tremendous effort using the existing resources and the traditional frameworks of the National Guard, the unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model -- one for what you might call kind of an ultracatastrophe,
I think we need to prepare the country for what's coming, ... What's going to happen when we de-water and remove the water from New Orleans is we're going to uncover people who died, maybe hiding in houses, got caught by the flood, people whose remains are going to be found in the streets. . . . It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine.
I think we need to prepare the country for what's coming,
I think that that predication unhappily turned out to be correct and one of the things I said was we're racing the clock. Unfortunately, the hurricane beat us,
I think that was a bad idea, and I directed it not to happen again,
That would be hugely, hugely difficult, and require an enormous expenditure of resources.
managers and supervisors found responsible for violating civil rights or whistleblower protection laws will be disciplined accordingly.
We need more than brute enforcement, ... We need a temporary worker program as well.
We now know people need gas during emergencies and they have a responsibility - those people who run stations and ultimately those people who provide the fuel - have responsibility to hold up their end when a crisis comes.
Last year, New York got $200 million. This year, we're going to give them $124 million under this particular program. But last year was an artificially elevated number to make up from the very low grant the year before.