Last week we noted that three key Senators had expressed disappointment with the Homeland Security Department’s draft National Response Framework. In particular, Homeland Security and Government Affairs Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Ranking Member Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Subcommittee Chair Mary Landrieu (D-La.), expressed unhappiness that changes they thought they had wrought in the structure and duties of FEMA following its Katrina debacle had been ignored by DHS in the “Framework.”
In a speech on Friday to California firefighters the International Association of Fire Chiefs, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff tried to explain what the Framework is and is not. Here are excerpts:
Some people have been critical about this framework. And let me explain as clearly as I can what it is and what it’s designed to do. First of all, the framework is a framework. It is not a detailed set of plans. It is supported by more detailed sets of plans that look at 15 different kinds of emergencies and 15 different kinds of incidents, which are very different from one another. Some of them are natural disasters with which you are familiar, hurricanes and earthquakes. Others may involve terrorist types of things, multiple improvised explosive devices across the country, maybe devices that don’t cause a lot of damage, but that create a ripple psychological effect.
Another element of the plans that we have deals with the pandemic flu, not a fire incident, not an explosion, but a huge, very challenging public health emergency. Cyber attacks, again, would have no real necessarily explosive effect, although there could be some collateral explosions, but would be a huge impact on our infrastructure and our way of life.
So we have to develop a framework that embraces all of these, gives us the flexibility to adapt, depending on what the particular incident is, and then builds a set a specific plans down to the local and community level where the really specific process of identifying steps to be taken has to be put together. …… ***
As described in the National Response Framework, FEMA will continue to lead the federal response efforts for emergency management and for Stafford Act disasters. We are committed to supporting FEMA as it’s significantly increased in size and capabilities over the last two years, and that will continue. I think we all agree that’s appropriate.
Other incidents, of course, may not be FEMA incidents. A cyber attack will probably have a response led by other elements of DHS and other agencies. A public health emergency is likely to be led with HHS as the lead agency with the incident being coordinated by our department so as to make sure collateral consequences are being addressed.
What we are doing in the National Response Framework, and I encourage you to read it, is to give public leaders across the country in plain English the broadest concept of what incident management is, to allow them to understand that there are times they need to be dealing with emergency management, there are times they need to be dealing with computer issues, times they need to be able to deal with law enforcement issues. But whatever the challenge, they need to deal with them using a unified command system and an incident management system, which I might say, was pioneered by the Fire Service, particularly the Fire Service in California……
-- Beverley Lumpkin
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