Deanne Criswell:
So, one of the first things we do, this is the kind of incident that is not like a hurricane, where you’re watching it come in and you have days to move equipment and people in place to make sure that it’s ready based on where the impact might be.
This is a limited-notice event. And so you have already lost a little bit of that time, right, because the action or the incident is already unraveling. And so I would have immediately made sure that the teams, and they wouldn’t even have had to wait for me to tell them they would have known to do this, but moving urban search-and-rescue teams and critical personnel like our disaster survivor assistance team members into the area, into the community even before a presidential disaster declaration is made.
What we can’t do is put them to work until after that declaration is made and the state asks for help, right? And so once the state asks for that help, at least they would be there, they would be ready to be engaged immediately. Now we have lost a few days. And that’s just time that you can’t get back.
But I do want to add, right, the role that the Coast Guard played that the secretary talks about is critical. The Coast Guard did amazing work, but they have it within their statutory authorities to be able to respond like that. It’s nothing new. They do that in every one of these types of flash flooding events, because they have the resources and capability to get in there within minutes.
And then FEMA’s role is to start to augment that capability with the technical teams that can come in and help support that ongoing search effort and the search and recovery effort and then help that community start to rebuild.
