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
I'm not going to judge others, ... I did not have a problem dealing with state and local officials.
received little or no assistance from the United States.
I hope that by doing what the state officials and mayors are doing now, are getting people who are invalids out of the way, encouraging people to leave early, that when the storm hits, there will be property damage but hopefully there won't be a lot of people to rescue,
because our constitutional system really places the primary authority in each state with the governor.
last summer FEMA, who reports to you, and the LSU Hurricane Center, and local and state officials did a simulated Hurricane Pam in which the levees broke. ... Thousands drowned.
Federal, state and local resources have been fully mobilized,
The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials. The federal government comes in and supports those officials.
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.
The very day that this emerged in the press, I was on a video conference with all the officials, including state and local officials. And nobody, none of the state and local officials or anybody else, was talking about a Convention Center,
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.
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