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
And one of the things I want to say, Wolf, is we're 100 days from hurricane season, and we've got to start focusing on what we're going to do to make ourselves ready for the next hurricane.
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,
But I think the bottom line right now is to take the constructive criticism and use that to build toward, as I say, the hurricane season that is 100 days away. And we don't have a lot of time to waste before we start to address that next set of challenges.
It is going to be about as ugly a scene as we've witnessed in this country, ... I really want to tell people that we have got some tough days ahead of us.
Our role is not to repair the dikes. Our role is to step in if something happens.
The second is there are some communities that we thought originally would take mobile homes that have decided they don't want them. And we're not going to cram mobile homes down the throats of communities in Louisiana and the Gulf - and other parts of the Gulf Coast.
I'm not going to judge others, ... I did not have a problem dealing with state and local officials.
The whole point of this program is let people decide the fate of their own lives, ... And I think that avoids the whole issue of someone coming from outside and saying, 'You must do this' or 'You must do that.'
If there are contracts that turn out to be not properly cost effective or inappropriate in some other way, we can redo the contracts; we can renegotiate those contracts,
I want to have the people who are present here on the ground
Katrina was a crash course in things that worked well and didn't work well.
The tenor of his discussions on Monday . . . was, this was bad, but it could have been worse, ... There was not a report to me until the following morning that there was a significant breach of the 17th Street levee.
Get yourself into that command center in Baton Rouge!
You can't fly helicopters in a hurricane. You can't drive trucks in a hurricane.