1) In “Lessons In Resilience From New Orleans,” Robert Kates, a scholar studying human development patterns, offered some lessons on building resilient communities derived from the history of New Orleans. The lessons are:

The United States is vulnerable to enormous disasters despite being the richest and most powerful nation on earth, creating community resilience is a long-term process, surprises should be expected, the  best scientific and technological knowledge does not get used or widely disseminated, Major response capability and resources were invisible, refused, or poorly used, Disasters accelerate existing pre-disaster trends, overall vulnerability to hurricanes has grown from multiple causes, and efforts to provide protection reduced vulnerability to frequent small events but increased vulnerability to rare catastrophic events.

In regard to citizen involvement in developing that resilience, Kates argues:

In coping with extreme events from climate change and other hazards, there is much talk of partnerships. In every disaster there are unanticipated or unaddressed needs and “shadow responders” often emerge from households, friends and family, neighborhoods, non-governmental and voluntary organizations, businesses, and industry. In responding to Katrina, they were sometimes refused or poorly used by government officials, even though they provided most of the initial evacuation capacity, sheltering, feeding, health care, and rebuilding, and much of the search and rescue, cleanup, and post-Katrina funding. For resilient communities, in advance of hazard events, the tri-level system (city, state, federal) of emergency response needs to welcome, effectively use, collaborate with, and coordinate the combined public and private efforts.

The full post can be found here.

A flooded New Orleans in wake of Hurricane Katrina (Photo: Vincent Foret/New York Times)

The other post, “Building Resilience On A Turbulent Planet,” is an interview is with Robert R.M. Verchick, the director of Loyola University’s Center for Environmental Law and Land Use. He’s on leave as a deputy associate administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, where he is working on developing a national plan for adapting to climate change. Verchick is also the author of a new book, Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World (Harvard Univ. Press).

I thought I would excerpt one question and answer from the interesting interview:

Q: One glaring question is why — even here in a rich, scientifically enabled country — we still tolerate and even subsidize building in harm’s way? (For instance: “Climate Experts Warn of More Coastal Building” and “Development Rises on St. Louis Area Flood Plains.”)

A: Here are two of the biggest reasons, which are related: markets and psychology. Our economic and political markets do not correctly value the benefit of keeping people and development out of harm’s way. Businesses, for instance, have large economic incentives to exploit or develop cheap land — land which could provide a protective barrier from storm surge or which could be a flood plain that would put a proposed residential area at future risk…

When markets fail, government should step in to protect people. But that is hard when regulated businesses and single-issue lobby groups press (sometimes fiercely) for policies that benefit their shorter-term economic interests. The surrounding neighbors can’t compete in this political marketplace because, again, they lack information and, in addition, they lack political access.

…At this point you might be saying, “Well if people just thought about the long-term consequences, businesses and politicians wouldn’t fall for this market-failure trick.” True enough, and this brings us to my point about psychology. Natural disasters are, for the most part, low-probability, high-impact events. Such events — called “black swans” — are notoriously hard to plan for. In the normal course of public protection, government officials are used to managing threats to safety or the environment according to a loose formula in which risk is the product of an event’s probability multiplied by its potential harm. This equation helps set government priorities and in some cases dictates the amount that the public and private sectors will spend on protective measures, including levees and dams, and risk-pooling arrangements like subsidized flood insurance (to refer to your examples from the Times articles).

But if that’s your only decision-making tool, a black swan will eat you for lunch. One reason is that human beings are not very good at evaluating low-probability occurrences and routinely underestimate their significance. We’re pretty good at comparing, say, a 50 percent risk to a 25 percent risk. But when risks fall below 1 percent, we stare at our shoes and reduce all likelihood to zero.

That’s why you probably don’t think much about a major earthquake striking Manhattan or a tsunami battering the Oregon coast, even though each has happened and will probably happen again. It’s why most people never even consider buying insurance for long-term nursing care, although it makes sense statistically. Even experts fall prey to this bias. While assessing flood-control measures before Hurricane Katrina, scientists used a model storm that included data from decades of past events, but that intentionally left out data for two of the strongest storms (Hurricane Camille of 1969 and the Keys Storm of 1935) because they were not judged “reasonably characteristic of the Gulf.”

A second difficulty with black swan events is that because they come in so many shapes and sizes, it is hard to imagine how the next one will be triggered. Too often, we look only in the rear-view mirror, preparing to save ourselves from the last disaster we still remember. We imagine we can avoid our problems with a narrow set of fixes. Worried about tankers leaking off the Alaska coast? Require double-hulled vessels. Terrorists with shoe bombs? Slide your heels and loafers through a scanner. Later this summer, we’ll probably be debating the need for sonar shut-off valves on blowout preventers. By all means, let’s fill the safety gaps revealed in hindsight. But in preparing for the next worst case, what we need more than anything else is imagination.

The full second post can be found here.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed the Task Force, co-chaired by Townsend, President Bush’s top terrorism adviser, and former FBI director William Webster, earlier this summer. Upon receiving the report last month, Napolitano said she would discuss the findings with the White House and other members of the Cabinet before making any policy changes.

Though its members split on whether to retain the color system, the Task Force unanimously recommended that the Obama Administration make the government’s terrorism warning communications more robust, specific, transparent and actionable. It said that if the color system was maintained, the levels should be reduced from five to three with yellow or “guarded” being the ‘normal’ state.

In the interview, Townsend said after the color decision is made there will be a need to develop plans both for what is being communicated to the the public and how best to do it. She said that members of the Task Force were struck by “the lack of infrastructure” that currently exists as well as the need for a “common lexicon” and “doctrine” when it comes to emergency alerts.

Making things more challenging — but also offering new opportunities — is the proliferation of new distribution technologies, including personal communications devices and social networking sites. She reiterated the Report’s findings that there is a need to better integrate social media as well as state and local alert initiatives into the federal efforts.

Townsend’s comments come on the heels of two recent General Accountability Office (GAO) reports that showed the need for significant improvements in the planning, coordination and implementation of the federal government’s emergency communications and preparedness for the public. The first, Emergency Preparedness: Improved Planning and Coordination Necessary for Development of Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, highlighted problems with the federal government’s updating of its alert and warning technologies for the public. The GAO concluded:

“Emergency communications are critical in crisis management and for protecting the public in situations of war, terrorist attack, or natural disaster; yet, FEMA has made limited progress in implementing a comprehensive, integrated alert system as is the policy of the federal government. Management turnover, inadequate planning, and a lack of stakeholder coordination have delayed implementation of IPAWS and left the nation dependent on an antiquated, unreliable national alert system.”

The other GAO report, Emergency Management Preliminary Observations on FEMA’s Community Preparedness Programs Related to the National Preparedness System, foundthat FEMA does not currently have an overall strategic plan for community preparedness or the ability to accurately measure the performance of its various citizen readiness initiatives.

TASK FORCE CO-CHAIR FRAN TOWNSEND (ABOVE)

As I wrote last month, I think the Task Force correctly focused much of its critique and recommendations in the Report on the public (one of the alert system’s “two primary audiences”). By contrast, the Report concluded that the current system has “functioned reasonably well” for the other audience, “institutions” (ie. the government/private sector), especially as alerts have become more targeted geographically and to specific industries. (I had submitted a ‘memo’ to the Task Force during the public comment period with some recommendations: “Put Your Citizen Hats On, Design With/For Public, Integrate Into Overall Citizen Preparedness Program.”)

Townsend’s comments about the lack of existing “infrastructure” and “common language” on emergency alerts are along the lines of something WMD Commission Chair Bob Graham told me earlier this year. His panel’s report urged the government to better inform and engage the public on the WMD threats. However, when the Commission looked for something to recommend, he recalled, it couldn’t find anything suitable currently out there.

The fact is, as been often mentioned on this blog, there is no existing emergency preparedness information model that can be pulled off the shelf and implemented immediately. It will take some time, attention and thought from the government working with other stakeholders to create a new integrated plan as part of an overall citizen preparedness approach.

Townsend, now a partner at the law firm Baker Botts, said she feels very strongly that the alert process needs a ‘forcing mechanism’ to encourage a return to the normal ‘guarded’ level when the threat passes in order to maintain public credibility. (And that recommendation to Secretary Napolitano was included in the Report.)

In the interview, Townsend expressed disappointment that one important stakeholder, major news organizations, citing potential of conflicts of interest, declined the Task Force’s request to offer recommendations on alerting and informing the public. “It’s too bad,” she said, “It would have been useful.”

Personally, I think there should be a way for media companies to provide the government advice without violating ethical boundaries, particularly as the press has such a crucial communications role during an emergency as well as the expertise. In fact, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB), National Public Radio (NPR), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) just announced a new collaboration, Station Action for Emergency Readiness (SAFER) project, to help public broadcasters better serve their communities during disasters.

Townsend also told me an interesting tidbit about the Task Force’s report: while the members divided on whether to maintain the colors, she said the vote “did not break down the way things usually do in Washington” (ie. by political party, geography, state/federal). The members’ positions on the colors may have been based as much on their perspective as citizens as experts — which, by the way, I believe is a good thing. On these civilian preparedness policies, I have increasingly come to the opinion from my reporting that there is a great value in thinking like a civilian.

The book (written with Ron Martz) uses Honore’s life experiences, particularly his work as commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, to help illustrate what he believes is necessary to improve the nation’s ability to deal with disasters of all kinds.

Among his proposals: disaster preparedness should be taught in elementary and middle schools; insurance companies should give weather radios to their customers or provide a rate break for those families that have them in their homes; weather radios should also be required, just as smoke alarms are, in rental properties; Red Cross debit cards should be issued to poor people in areas frequently hit by extreme weather; National Preparedness Month should be in May not September; and a National Preparedness Plan should be developed.

In a recent interview, Honore told me that the nation must put as much focus into disaster preparedness as it does to disaster response. He noted that ironically America’s resources, including the expectation that FEMA and other responders will always come to the rescue, gets in the way of its preparedness efforts. He recounted a recent visit to Cuba which has an extensive citizen readiness system, including regular hurricane drills, inspections by trained high school students and extensive pre-storm mitigation (ie. moving refrigerators and stoves from potential flooded areas): “They are a poor country.  They can’t replace them.”

But he said that he feels there is movement in the direction towards creating that culture of preparedness in the U.S.. He cites FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate frequent public statements on the topic and another interesting metric. “It used to be when you googled disaster preparedness there were 30,000 hits, now you get several million.” Honore is currently an analyst for CNN and frequently gives speeches around the U.S. (more often than not on citizen preparedness). To purchase Survival, click here.

Chertoff’s book, Homeland Security: Assessing the First Five Years (University of Pennsylvania Press) will go on sale Tuesday. In a post earlier in the summer, I wrote about the book’s contents which focus a good deal on the role of the public in homeland security: “In New Book, Former DHS Secretary Chertoff Warns About “Complacency,” Returning To A “September 10″ Mindset”; Urges Government To Have “Frank Discussion” & “Be Candid With American People, Sharing As Much Information As Possible About Dangers We Face”.

We spoke a couple weeks ago at the Washington, D.C. office of the Chertoff Group, a security and risk management advisory firm, he opened earlier this year. (Not surprisingly, the former Secretary looks more tanned and rested than when I last interviewed him almost exactly a year ago at DHS headquarters before he left for the Gulf Coast to supervise Hurricane Gustav preparations.)

As excerpts from a new book from Chertoff’s predecessor Tom Ridge had been released just a few minutes before our interview indicating that politics may have been a part of terror color alerts decisionmaking, I first asked Chertoff whether he had ever felt any political pressure. He said he “never” had.

Yet, Chertoff does believe there need to be some changes made to the current alert system, most notably that the colors should be condensed from five to three levels —  because he says “we’re not going to get below yellow.” He recommended in testimony to the new DHS alert task force that there be “a steady state, a heightened alert and then Red”. Though he believes Red may have to be delineated with a little more specificity (ie. if an incident has happened, but there is no intelligence about another attack vs. when the government believes another strike is imminent).

As far as citizen preparedness, Chertoff says that a key to creating a long-term prepared nation is to focus on schools and kids. In the interview, he sketched out two suggestions  – a “minimum” and a “maximum” approach. The “minimum” would be “to get the fire management and emergency management people to come together to create a program to be exported to the schools on basic preparation.”

Chertoff’s “maximum” option is that there be a more substantive course developed for U.S. schools on planning and preparation which would include teaching “basic skills,” such as first aid, CPR, swimming, driving, basic mechanics and operating a firearm.

“If you’re not going to have a national service then as part of graduation from high school there should be a course over a period of time that teaches you the kind of basic things you might need in an emergency,” Chertoff says, adding “It’s going to do two things. It’s going to create a cadre of more capable people, but it is also going to demystify the process of preparation. Most people are intimidated that they don’t know how to do it. They’re afraid of being embarrassed.”

MICHAEL CHERTOFF IN HIS OFFICE WITH HIS NEW BOOK, HOMELAND SECURITY: ASSESSING THE FIRST FIVE YEARS

Chertoff, who during his tenure at DHS would often urge Americans to be “vigilant” about terrorism, says Americans need to be aware but not paranoid. As a model, he suggests the ways most people deal with crime: “We all teach our kids not to be afraid to go outside but not to walk down a dark alley at 3am.”

In his new book, Chertoff suggests the government share more information with the public about the threats facing the nation. But he says it is not necessarily a matter of declassifying more things but of doing a better job of “packaging and presenting” the facts at a time when there are so many other issues competing for the public’s attention. His concern — eight years after 9/11 — is that citizens become complacent, and he urges the public to continue to support government investments in preventing and responding threats, particularly in the biological and nuclear area.

Chertoff says he “would have liked to have done more” on citizen preparedness during his tenure. He believes some things were accomplished with the Ready.Gov program, but that it was difficult to communicate with the public on these issues: ”It was hard under our Administration because it got freighted with a lot of political stuff. There were people who viewed counter terrorism, homeland security as a Bush thing and therefore anything you did in that area those people automatically objected to because they were opposed to Bush. In the new Administration, there will be a little less resistance. Sometimes the person who starts something isn’t the person to finish it.”

Chertoff believes his successor Janet Napolitano is “doing a very good job”. He is particularly happy that she has continued the “non-political” and “non-partisan” approach to homeland security which is how he says he tried to run the Department and believes the nation is best served.

As I wrote in my initial writeup, I would recommend the new book to anyone interested in homeland security (and for that matter public policy). Chertoff’s perspective is unique — not only was he of one of three Homeland Security Secretaries in the nation’s history, but he also headed U.S. Justice Department’s Criminal Division post-9/11 and served as a federal judge. It can be purchased here.

In the statement, she also underlines the public’s ‘responsibility’ in the enterprise as well (”Protecting the American people from terrorist threats is the founding principle of the Department and our highest priority. This is an effort where everyone-families and communities, first responders, the private sector, state and local governments, as well as the Department-must contribute.”)

In the earlier post, I wrote that I thought it was very good to see the Secretary highlight the citizen’s role in homeland security especially in the first of the Responsibilities, and that I expected she would be elaborating on the “constant readiness” theme in the future. So, as most of the half-hour “Pen & Pad” was dedicated to questions, I got on the queue to ask her about it. However, in the middle of the session, I along with a couple other participants were cut off from the conference line. It was suggested to me that I should just post the question(s):

“Secretary, in the first of the Five Responsibiliities, you ‘ask Americans to live in a constant state of readiness, not a constant state of fear.’ Could you elaborate on that? Are we as Americans at that ’state of readiness’ (and not a ’state of fear’) yet? If not, how do we get there?

He says he hopes President Obama will take the lead by urging Americans to prepare: “The President has the bully pulpit to encourage preparedness in the same way he has done on public service.” Thompson also thinks the government should provide citizens with more info about the range of homeland security threats as part of the preparedness process: “The public needs a constant flow of information so they know what to do to protect themselves.”

Thompson remembers that on September 11th, 2001 there was chaos on Capitol Hill, even with all the law enforcement there. But he observes Americans are not all that much better informed almost eight years later on what to do if something happens. Though the Chairman cautions that the public education has to be done in a careful, balanced way: “You don’t want to scare people to death to get prepared.” 

According to Thompson, there is a need to bring back the preparedness ethic of the Civil Defense-era, updated for the new century, including integrating a preparedness curriculum into U.S. schools. ”When I was a kid we had civil defense drills in school, so we knew what to do.” Though he notes that while ‘duck and cover’ would not have done much good in response to Russian missiles during the Cold War, there are things that citizens can do now to mitigate the impact of potential threats. The Chairman explains that citizen preparedness should not be seen as something unusual or drastic but just part of our normal life which will strengthen our communities’ readiness for emergencies small or large, natural or man-made. 

U.S. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS)

In the interview, Thompson also emphasized the importance of the public’s role in assisting authorities in homeland security: “We can’t buy enough equipment to prevent every terrorist attack. We need your eyes and ears.” He says the U.S. can learn from elements of the “Israeli model” for public readiness and engagement and making preparedness part of everyone’s responsibility.

In sum, Thompson says that the more prepared the public is, the more resilient the nation will be. (His committee held an interesting series of hearings last summer, titled “The Resilient Homeland” with an terrific group of witnesses, which focused on “the Nation’s ability to quickly and effectively bounce back from large scale disruptions.”)

*Contrary to most disaster movies, “up to 50 years of social research show that people by and large do not panic, they creatively cope…people are reaching out, adapting to changing situations and putting others ahead of themselves.”

*We have to think more broadly about the citizen’s role in public health preparedness. Typically, we’re asking citizens to set aside an emergency stockpile of essential goods and asking them to tune to media in an emergency for instructions. Both are important. But don’t limit citizen role to private action.

*Involve citizens more in community action and decision making. Give people opportunities to volunteer and provide input to public health planning.

*Citizens offer complementary skills and resources to uniformed responders in a disaster.

*To promote community resilience, government should allocate some public health spending for community-based and faith-based organizations who can work along side authorities and medical personnel building up infrastructures to distribute information and mass amounts of medicines if necessary.

Graham’s WMD commission released a report, “World At Risk,” late last year which I have written about on the blog previously. Its last chapter, “Role of the Citizen”, emphasizes the important role of the public. In an interview last month, Graham told me the chapter’s placement was intentional. ”We purposely put at the end not as an afterthought or throwaway, but because of its importance to everything before. If you don’t have citizens informed and involved, you are likely to fail in maximizing the security of the U.S.” 

The bipartisan commission offered thirteen recommendations, the last of which is: “The next administration must work to openly and honestly engage the American citizen, encouraging a participatory approach to meeting the challenges of the new century.”

Graham realizes that briefing and preparing the public on WMD’s in order to meet those challenges will not be an easy task as it is a complex and sensitive topic. And, with so many other issues on the nation’s plate is there room for a WMD educational process that could break through to the public?

“Yes we should do it, and yes we can do it,” Graham contends, noting that public education and preparedness has taken a back seat to other homeland security matters: “In this area, there is the urgent and the important. And the important gets pushed behind the urgent.” But he says informing and engaging the public on WMDs is “urgent”.

Graham acknowledges the commission did not come up with an implementation game plan for the last chapter in part because there just isn’t a ready made plan in this area yet: “We didn’t find a lot of people who could do it right now.” (One of the objectives of this blog is to help develop ways of doing so.) There is still work to be done in developing messaging for the public when it comes to WMD’s; some will draw from existing preparedness work and others will require new approaches. For example, I think one challenge is delineating to the public the varying impacts of different WMDs since, as the Commission points out, biological and nuclear are the most dangerous threats whereas chemical and radiological attacks would be very serious but probably not catastrophic societal ‘game changers’.

Graham, a long-time intelligence expert, says the government has to be more open with its citizens if it expects the public to be prepared before, during and after an incident: ”We have massively over classified information under the rubric of national security. It has made us less secure because institutions and citizens who are not adequately informed can’t take necessary actions.”

Graham believes Americans also have a responsibility to hold their government at all levels — local, state and federal — more accountable for what they are doing in regard to WMD preparedness. But he acknowledges that the government has to provide more information so they even know what to ask. In fact, one of the report’s recommended Action Steps is that the government create a WMD checklist:

“The next administration should, as a priority, work with a consortium of state and local governments to develop a publicly available checklist of actions each level of government should take to prevent or ameliorate the consequences of WMD terrorism. Such a checklist could be used by citizens to hold their governments accountable for action or inaction.”

Congress is now working on legislation to turn some of the Commission’s recommendations into law. And Graham says he expects the Commission’s life to be extended for another year to continue to work on these issues.

Chertoff says preparedness needs to be repositioned so it is viewed by Americans as a responsibility of citizenship for the 21st Century. But to do so, it needs to be better integrated and ingrained in community institutions, particularly schools, and then reinforced at home. He suggests that preparedness be piggy-backed on existing and effective fire safety school-based programs as well as the enthusiasm among youths about the environment (which he thinks is complementary to emergency readiness). Chertoff believes there needs to be a clearer and more sustained preparedness message, delivered to the public by trusted people both locally and nationally, including (he hopes) Oprah, and spread through web-based social networking sites.

Chertoff says that during his tenure at DHS he has thought a lot about the reasons why it has been so difficult to get the public to focus on preparedness:

“One is hesitancy to think about things that are unpleasant if you don’t have to. The second is kind of an uncertainty about what to do and the avoidance about taking on a task you may not seem well suited for because it seems overly complicated. So it seems to me the cure for both of those is a consistent public messaging we haven’t had up to this point…For most people, it is unfamiliarity, and when you are unfamiliar and something scares you, you dismiss it because you can’t deal with it. [But] if you are comfortable with your ability to deal with an issue, then you engage people and that’s the piece we haven’t cracked yet.”

Cracking it, according to Chertoff, can start at home. Parents, like himself, have to:

“take personal responsibility for ourselves and for our dependents and not assume that we’re going to be rescued by somebody in the absence of taking reasonable steps on our own to help ourselves. We all send our kids thru school we expect to be able to succeed in school to get to college and people can be quite motivated to micromanage their children to make sure they do all they can to maximize their preparation for a SAT exam…Why don’t we take that personal responsibility with respect for an emergency or in event for our well being in the event of an emergency? Again, we tend to take our kids in for their vaccinations. tend to pay attention to flu season. Why don’t we do that in the event of a hurricane or a flood? Is it because it’s not common or is it because we haven’t done a good enough job of getting our institutions to promote this with people?…Schools don’t get engaged enough in this so the kids don’t come home and really agitate for it.”

Chertoff points to another familiar school-based model:

“I see we have done some things to train people in certain areas like Driver’s Ed. We’ve gone considerable distance in teaching how to get behind a wheel of a car. And how to maintain the car and knowing what to do in an emergency. Again we’ve enlisted the educational establishment it seems to me in disaster response is exactly the area where the educational establishment if people want to volunteer as part of public service.”

He looks (with some envy) at the enthusiasm and engagement of young people in other social education campaigns, including those for the environment:

“It became unavoidable…They made it easy to do…So, the question is why we can’t get the same kind of level of intense messaging on this thing which would include engaging the schools as well as popular media in newspapers getting on on Oprah. I don’t know whether it’s because it is too intermittent and therefore not broadly appealing enough or because it’s kind of a bummer.”

Chertoff actually sees environmental and emergency preparedness activity as complementary, because both involve a ‘personal responsibility’ message and enlist the public in developing a more resilient society. In fact, he argues that individual citizens can actually have more personal impact on preparedness:

“The pitch that has been made on global warming is that ‘everyone should take personal responsibility to reduce your carbon footprint’. And yet for most people there’s actually very little impact that they can really have. And you would think that people would shrug their shoulders and say ‘what can I do’ but it has become so fashionable as a statement that people are doing it even if it is not clear that the marginal benefit is significant. In the disaster area, the reverse is true. In personal preparedness, each individual can make a huge difference. It is really an area where you can empower the individual yet it does not have the fashionable quality.”

In order to accelerate that process, Chertoff told me he had visited a number of web-based social media internet companies to enlist them in the effort. And the Department recently announced an agreement with MySpace to help disseminate hurricane information.

Chertoff says citizens must take responsibility for taking care of their families (and their neighbors when possible) to ensure their safety, but there is an additional responsibility to do so to avoid complicating the work of and endangering the lives of first responders.

Chertoff notes that in a number of places in the nation, particularly in coastal areas, disaster preparedness is always been part of life. The challenge is spreading that ethic to areas throughout the U.S. that do not get regular reminders from Mother Nature. He points to Switzerland as a model of individual preparedness in part due to their mandatory national service commitment (during which everyone learns basic skills, including first aid). However, Chertoff believes that there can be a similarly useful preparedness training here in the U.S. without compulsory service.

“In Switzerland everyone’s prepared, and I realized as part of national service everyone has learned some basic stuff and that includes how to shoot a gun, how to do first aid. It’s given them a confidence level and a cultural familiarity with taking responsibility for maintaining yourself that translates to other things. I think it is argument for some kind of public service requirement in our educational system that would bring people into a training program where they would learn basic competency skills. They might train specifically for disaster management or they might train for other things. But as part of that process there’s a core curriculum of basic life skills and that would elimintate anxiety element that surrounds this for people who have never dealt with that…It’s not that you should train for every possible thing that could happen, but once you get the basic skills and the basic mindset and learn how to do it. Then it is not hard in a particular emergency to take those steps and be able to implement them in your own life.”

Chertoff would like to see private philanthropy get more involved in the area of preparedness education:

“Here’s something I would like to challenge: a lot of extremely wealthy people nowadays in philanthropy stting up programs I would love to have them to set up a program to empower young people to both educate themselves and engage in form of service that relates to disasters. Whether disasters in this country and overseas anything that will expose and train them in the kinds of skills that would useful.”

Though public preparedness has not made the kind of inroads he would have liked, Chertoff believes it can pointing to the success of the effort to increase citizen vigilance on terrorism (the most well-know being the “See Something, Say Something” campaign created by the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Transportation Authority):

“I have been positively surprised of how good the public has been on the issue of vigilance with respect to potential terrorism…There we succeeded to in getting people to understand when you see if you see something funny you should say something…Why did that campaign work? It worked because it is something people understand. It’s not something hard to do. But it did require public to overcoming that initial sense of embarrassment of not wanting to get involved so that’s fascinating that really worked.”

As he enters the last months as DHS Secretary, Chertoff thinks he might be a more effective advocate for preparing average citizens when he himself becomes an average citizen on January 20th, 2009:

“I think the constraint in general when homeland security speaks is terrorism and while it is true that a lot of what we do is not terrorism. I think it coming from the federal government terrorism, ‘boots on the ground’ megaphone. And I wonder whether as getting out and operating as a private citizen albeit one more knowledgeable than the average one it doesn’t give you a people’s receptivity may be a little different because it is not the government lecturing on what you should do, just another person, albeit a little more knowledgeable one, saying this is what you should do.”

In the interview, I asked Townsend for her thoughts and recommendations on how the next Administration should approach the challenge of preparing and informing the public for future terrorist attacks, catastrophic natural disasters and other major threats. Townsend served as President Bush’s top Homeland Security aide from May, 2004 through 2007. She is now an adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We spoke in her office at the Chamber located directly across from the White House.  

Townsend told me that the next presidential administration — no matter who wins — should make citizen preparedness a “national priority”. It is a subject that she took a major interest in while at the White House. But Townsend acknowledges that while some progress has been made through the Ready Campaign, the Administration has not been able to fully galvanize public attention on the subject nor achieve the level of civilian readiness and engagement that she believes is necessary. 

Many of the ideas we discussed during the interview were originally proposed in a largely overlooked portion of the White House’s “Katrina Lessons Learned Report”, also known as the “Townsend Report, whose writing she oversaw. In the last of 17 sections in the Report’s “Recommendations Appendix”, under the heading, “Critical Challenge: Citizen and Community Preparedness,” there is a list of proposals offered to boost civilian readiness. Yet, Townsend says that outside events and the news cycle have a way, particularly in the homeland security area, of “reshuffling policy priorities”.

It’s why one of Townsend’s recommendations is that the next President appoint a high-level official with the specific responsibility for citizen preparedness to make sure what she calls “a very important” subject does not does not get lost, adding: “There needs to be someone who has ownership and accountability for citizen preparedness.”

Though Townsend views disaster preparedness as first and foremost community-based, she believes the federal government has a key role in focusing attention to the subject, catalyzing state and local government efforts and bringing together a coalition of stakeholders including business, schools, non–profit groups and the faith-based community. 

Below are some of Townsend’s citizen preparedness recommendations for the next Administration discussed in the interview:

*Provide incentives and adequate seed money for states and localities to develop civilian preparedness programs, including citizen training and expanded civilian drills, and tie grants to a commitment to the initiatives. As much of the work will be done on the state and local level, Townsend says a key will be getting governors on board and committed to citizen preparedness early on. 

*Encourage states and localities (as well as the federal government where applicable) to report to the public on their level of public preparedness and create metrics for better measuring readiness.

*Offer a tax writeoff to citizens to purchase preparedness-related product purchases as a way to encourage participation and to signal the government’s seriousness about the topic. One state and local initiative she supports is a tax-free period for consumers to purchase preparedness supplies which has shown initial success in Florida, Virginia and Louisiana. And has been introduced in other states, such as New York.

*Target personal preparedness assistance to citizens who cannot afford to prepare. (The experience of Katrina underscored to Townsend that “those who can prepare, must; but for those who can’t, it is the community’s moral responsibility to help.”) 

*Commit to educating the public on emergency preparedness including briefing Americans on the range of unfamiliar terror and public health threats in a straight-forward, open and accessible manner. (For a good model, the “Townsend Report” specifically recommends — and I would concur — the Rand Corporation’s clear, user-friendly guide, “Individual Preparedness and Response to Chemical, Radiological, Nuclear and Biological Terrorist Attack”.)

*Focus on the younger generation by working with governors and educators to integrate preparedness training in schools ‘piggy backing’ on existing fire safety programs. Townsend says that it is her children, more than any PSA campaign and governmental edict, that make sure she recycles and puts her seat belt on, and the same dynamic needs to occur on emergency preparedness. A mother of two school age children, she says we shouldn’t be afraid to talk to young people about this subject: “Kids are smart, they can handle it.” 

*Galvanize the private sector to take on disaster preparedness in the same way they have with disaster response, particularly in the aftermath of Katrina, in order to make it easier for the public to prepare. 

*Enlist the entertainment industry to bring attention to preparedness. She suggests, for example, asking Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt who are rebuilding homes in New Orleans if they would take on the issue of advance preparation for disasters. (Townsend is now part of the media herself appearing as an expert commentator for CNN.)

*Consider providing all citizens in-home medical kits with medicines that can be used in case of a public health event such as biological attack or pandemic. This is the first time Townsend has commented publicly on the idea. She says she is enthusiastic about the concept if the cost, distribution and other logistics can be worked out. She believes that providing Americans with these kits in their home would address the challenge of distributing medicine quickly in the event of a public health emergency while also having the positive biproduct of engaging the public in their own preparedness.

*And finally, she strongly suggests the next president appoint a high-level, widely-identifiable preparedness leader to manage the effort, keep attention on the issue and ensure it remains a priority inside the Administration and around the nation.

But more important than the policy recommendations above, Townsend says that ultimately citizen preparedness comes back to the citizens themselves. She emphasizes that it is the obligation of individual Americans for their own preparedness and that of their communities. (For example, she says: “It should be every parent’s responsibility to make sure that they know their children’s school emergency plan and have a communications plan for their family.”)

Yet, as she approaches the issue as both as policymaker and a working parent of two young kids, Townsend realizes the not insignificant obstacles facing average Americans when it comes to preparedness. It’s why she thinks the government has to give more attention to addressing them and believes the time is right for the next President to do just that.

Paulison says he wants Americans to know that FEMA has worked very hard to overhaul itself in the years since Katrina. ”This is a responsive organization again,” he says, adding, “There has been a change of culture. We have gone from a reactive to proactive agency.” 

Paulison took over FEMA in April, 2006, and the agency has received largely good reviews for its work in recent major disasters including this summer’s floods in the Midwest and last year’s Southern California fires. The agency has doubled its budget and distributed $25 billion in preparedness grants to communities around the U.S, according to Paulison. ”The public should know that FEMA is ready.” 

However, he emphasizes that FEMA and local authorities are relying on the public to do its share when it comes to emergency preparedness. In fact, Paulison says that citizens are an integral part of the nation’s disaster response effort by taking care of themselves and their families (as well as neighbors who need assistance) and therefore lightening the load on emergency personnel. ”All the states, local communities working together cannot take the place of personal responsibility for taking care of yourself,” notes Paulison.

He says every citizen should have emergency supplies, a communications plan and know where they would go in the event of an evacuation. ”If individuals don’t take that responsibility, this country is not going to be ready and be able to take care of everyone.” Paulison says emergency personnel rely on those who can help themselves to do so so they can focus on those who, for physical, mental, logistical, or financial reasons, cannot.

Interviewing FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison at the agency’s Washington, D.C. office

Yet, Paulison acknowledges the difficulty of getting the personal readiness message through to much of the public. ”We need to return to a culture of preparedness. We’ve gotten away from the preparedness ethic of the 50’s and 60’s.”

To me, a way to engage the public and spur a greater commitment to preparedness might be to more explicitly communicate the two choices (one positive, one negative), as described by Paulison, that citizens can make when it comes to personal emergency preparedness: you can either be part of the problem and make things more difficult for first responders, but you also can be part of the solution by helping them by what you do before and during a disaster.

This public messaging approach would combine a bit of both the stick and the carrot. It would also underscore to the citizenry that emergency responders see them as an integral part of the nation’s disaster preparedness and response effort, something I do not think that most people realize. It would also help explain the citizen’s role and responsibility in emergency preparedness, and give them a better sense of where they fit in the bigger picture.

I don’t believe the government should be afraid to explicitly tell the public that each of us can either hinder or help relief efforts by what they decide to do before and during a disaster. And, that it’s up to each of us to choose. I think that’s a choice and a challenge that might get people’s attention and maybe lead to action.