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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was the tipping point for all the other things that either went wrong or were exacerbated.
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We've been able to put those things we've learned in the past in place and save many more structures,
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We're going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event.
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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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We've already started calling in additional troops that we have available to us like the Coast Guard Auxiliary, ... We have plenty of resources, plenty of people.
easy
Yes, it is painful. There is nothing easy about this.
deal
We didn't want to deal with it at that point,
became best budget country couple decided director disaster fema figure gave model money picked president serious time
When I became the director of FEMA a couple of years ago, I decided it was time we did some really serious catastrophic disaster planning. So the president gave me money through our budget to do that. And we went around the country to figure out what's the best model we can do for a catastrophic disaster in this country? And we picked New Orleans, Louisiana.
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We want to make sure the first time someone straps on a football helmet isn't in August of their freshman year. We've had some youth programming, but it's been piecemeal. With the new plan, we're trying to coordinate this.
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We want to make sure that this evidence ... is preserved in such a way that NASA can come in afterward and find out what caused this tragedy.
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We're grateful for the outpouring of support already. But it's important that volunteer response is coordinated by the 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.