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Skriven 2006-08-29 23:31:16 av Whitehouse Press (1:3634/12.0)
Ärende: Press Release (0608295) for Tue, 2006 Aug 29
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Press Briefing on Gulf Coast Rebuilding
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For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
August 29, 2006

Press Briefing on Gulf Coast Rebuilding
Warren Easton Senior High School
New Orleans, Louisiana


˙˙˙˙˙ In Focus: Hurricane Katrina

PARTICIPANTS Don Powell, Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast Rebuilding
Admiral Thad Allen, Commandant of the Coast Guard

2:00 P.M. CDT

MR. JONES: Okay, everyone, we're going to go ahead and get started.
Obviously, with us today is Chairman Powell, who is, as you all know, the
Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast Rebuilding; and Coast Guard Commandant
Admiral Thad Allen. They're here to discuss today federal recovery efforts
and 2006 hurricane season preparedness.

Chairman Powell is going to begin with a couple minutes of remarks. Then
Admiral Allen will, and then we'll turn it over for questions for about a
half an hour. And I think we're going to try to wrap things up around 2:45
p.m., because then we have some other appointments to get to today.

So, with that, I'll turn it over to Chairman Powell.

CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you.

As you know, we've been traveling with the President for the last couple of
days. We've spent time in Mississippi yesterday, and the President had an
opportunity to visit with community leaders, elected officials, and made a
couple of tours. One was a manufacturing plant in Mississippi; the other
was a neighborhood in Biloxi that he had, when he first came down here, had
toured, visited with some homeowners and some citizens that day. Then we
came over to New Orleans and he, again, met with some elected officials --
parish presidents, the Governor, the Mayor, members of the LRA -- heard
from them about some of their issues that they have concern with about
rebuilding.

He then toured a couple of -- had a couple of tours this morning. One was a
breakfast and visited with some citizens; had another meeting with the
Mayor. They went to this school site and had a roundtable with some
educators, and talked about public education, about the opportunities
there. Then, as you know, he made his speech, and he went to a neighborhood
and toured a neighborhood on his way back.

I think it's been a couple of very productive days in that he heard and saw
a lot. The same thing is true for me. I'm down here -- I must spend
approximately 70 percent of my time. When I come down here and I think
about a year, I very quickly reflect upon the magnitude of this terrible
storm, and I'm reminded that the Gulf of Mississippi was literally wiped
out, and that there was more debris in the three counties in Mississippi,
more debris in those three counties in Mississippi than all of Hurricane
Andrew and the World Trade Center combined. And that took two years to
clean up.

So people often ask me about the speed of recovery, and I -- there's not a
point of reference. I mean, we've never had anything as large as this that
we can say, well, here is comparable data. So you say, compared to what? So
those three counties in Mississippi, again, more debris than all of
Hurricane Andrew and the World Trade Center, and that took two years to
clean. When you think and reflect that 1 million 500 thousand people were
affected -- that's the city of Philadelphia. That's the city of Phoenix.
New Orleans was underwater 57 days, an area that is seven times larger than
Manhattan.

So when you think about the size and scope of the storm and reflect on that
and the time frame, I think it's important to reflect and look back. I
think there's been lots of progress. I come down here and I have points of
reference I will look at. I generally come through the same way. I land at
the airport, I take the route downtown. When I'm in Mississippi, I usually
go along the entire Gulf, and I look for signs of progress. I look for
signs of progress. And the first thing I look for, obviously, is debris.
And I'm comforted by the fact that 98 percent, almost 100 percent of all
the dry debris is gone in this city. I think that's remarkable. And 75
percent of the debris is gone in Louisiana. I, too, think that's very
remarkable when you take into consideration the tremendous storm.

Schools are open. Hospitals are open. In New Orleans, I often reflect that
if it were a country, Admiral, it's gross national product would be the
port, energy, tourism. The port is back Pre-K. More ship calls into port
than pre-K. Tonnage is the same. And that's terribly important not only to
New Orleans, but it creates, directly or indirectly, 356,000 jobs in
America. It touches 33 states, affects 62 percent of all the consumers in
America.

Energy -- we saw how important energy was. Twenty-five percent of the oil
and gas domestic production comes from this area. It's all up, producing.

Tourism -- 80 percent of the hotels are open; 62 percent of all the
restaurants are open. So there's been lots of progress. As the President
says, there's a lot more to go, and we're going to continue down the path
-- the path of recovery until the job is done.

Thank you.

Admiral.

ADMIRAL ALLEN: Good afternoon. My slant on the trip was slightly different
than the Chairman's. On the 5th of September, 2005, at about 10:00 a.m. in
the morning, Secretary Chertoff called me in and asked me if I would go
down and lead the response effort in New Orleans. By 7:00 p.m. that night,
I was in Baton Rouge. And by about 7:00 a.m. in the morning on the 6th of
September, I was in New Orleans.

Later that week, on Friday, I relieved Mike Brown as the Principal Federal
Official for the response. I was relieved of my Principal Federal Official
duties on the 1st of February, and went back to being the Chief of Staff of
the Coast Guard, and most recently, following nomination by the President,
I was confirmed to be the Commandant of the Coast Guard, which is my job
now.

My trip back here with the President was more reflective, to see where
we've gone in the last year regarding preparedness for the next hurricane,
and kind of assess the situation of our operations down here regarding what
the Coast Guard has been doing.

We spent a lot of time with the President in the last two days. We walked
the neighborhoods. He was as engaged as he's ever been, talking to
individuals, trying to get a sense for, I think, more of the psyche of the
people than anything else. He got a lot of feedback from the mayors, the
congressional delegations, and the governors about the psychological impact
of this that far exceeds maybe the scope of the physical impact that we see
and how we need to work through that. And he mentioned that in his remarks
today.

I, like Chairman Powell, look for benchmarks when I return here, and I've
been back several times since I finished my PFO duties. We flew in by
helicopter from Mississippi, went down US 90. It's amazing to see, the
shrubbery and the green grass has grown up where there just used to be lots
and debris. It almost looks like greenspace over there now. It's almost a
surreal effect in Mississippi. The debris is almost gone, as Chairman
Powell said. And they're ready to go to work and they are -- and Governor
Barbour has got a terrific commission set up over there and they're working
very, very hard.

One slight spin for the Coast Guard in all this is, for the first time in
our history, we've been mission-assigned by FEMA to do marine debris
removal. In this case, we're looking at the Mississippi Sound, the area off
the coast, from, roughly, Biloxi down to Waveland and Bay St. Louis. A lot
of debris was sucked back into the Gulf, and we are going to be working
over the next year to identify obstacles, debris that's under the water,
and dealing with contractors to move that out. That will take another year
longer than dry debris removal. And, again, this is something that new for
the Coast Guard, but we're working very closely with the state of
Mississippi.

I was struck in flying in on the helicopter with the President today -- we
did a circle around the city before we landed -- at the large amount of
construction that's been going on on the levees. Over 300 miles of levee
construction has been going on. They've been working feverishly for the
last year. The most notable change I saw were the new pumping stations at
the mouth of the 17th Street Canal -- and so forth, where those pumping
stations have been moved up, together with flood gates. They create a
barrier at the mouth of these canals at Lake Pontchartrain, which is the
same as they have in Jefferson Parish. And as you know, water coming back
into those canals were contributory to the levee failures.

The debris removal in Louisiana is not going as fast as Mississippi because
it's a more difficult area to operate in. It's a densely populated city;
the structures are different and we don't have, finally, demolition
decisions by the city. They're moving forward on that. That will all
proceed apace. I think as both the President and Chairman Powell have said,
debris kind of paces everything else; you got to get the debris out of the
way before you can move on. I think they're poised to release a significant
amount of money in terms of reimbursements to homeowners so they can
proceed. And I think the flood gates are about ready to open on that.

Just a couple of comments on the response last year and our preparations
for this year. I walked into a rather extraordinary circumstance last year
on the 5th of September. For a week we had been flowing resources into New
Orleans. There were search and rescue teams, disaster medical assist teams;
Louisiana Fish and Wildlife had resources in here. One of the problems we
had when Katrina came ashore -- and I've said this several times over the
last year -- in my view, this was a hybrid event, it was a very devastating
hurricane. But when the levees were breached and the city flooded, in what
turned out the equivalent of a weapon of mass effect being used on the city
of New Orleans without criminality. And it significantly complicated the
operation, and basically, we had a loss of continuity of government in the
city of New Orleans in terms of having the infrastructure available to
receive the resources the federal government was providing and to do
something with them. And when I got to New Orleans it was clear that we had
resources on the ground, but they weren't being directed in a coherent
manner.

I assumed the role as PFO in order to have a more rational approach to that
and unify the effort, especially with Lieutenant General Russ Honor 's DOD
forces. That was a pretty unusual role for a Principal Federal Official to
do. We may never see that again in a natural hurricane -- natural disaster
response. But in the situation last year, the situation cried out for
unifying the effort here in New Orleans, and I took that on as a major task
that I had to do. If you remember, I said I was trying to cut through the
red tape and increase the velocity of the response, and specifically
referred to unwatering the city, finish up the search and rescue
operations, doing it in as such a dignified manner as we could with the
remains removal process, doing the block-by-block sweeps of the city, and
ultimately establishing a morgue and then doing the family reconciliation
that was attendant to that.

I can tell you, moving into this year, our PFOs have never been more
prepared. They are pre-assigned for every piece of shoreline on the East
Coast that can be impacted by a hurricane. We have trained with our FEMA
counterparts. We have conducted drills on evacuation plans. We have
pre-deployed to the states and met with the state and local responders,
and, as we speak right now, we are prepared and are reacting as necessary
in Florida to Hurricane Ernesto.

I think the Coast Guard is a much better agency, being in the Department of
Homeland Security with FEMA; and I think FEMA is a much better agency being
in the Department of Homeland Security with the United States Coast Guard.

And we'd be happy to take questions.

Q Admiral, can you tell us definitely what the state of the levees is, what
category hurricane could it withstand? And how did you get Ernesto to
change course? (Laughter.)

ADMIRAL ALLEN: Well, first of all, I would leave the technical answers on
the levee performance to the Corps of Engineers. They own that
responsibility. But I think the Corps has said on several occasions that
the levees are being rebuilt to pre-Katrina authorized levels.

The Corps of Engineers only builds levees as authorized by Congress with
funds appropriated, and that is described in the legislation. So the goal
for this hurricane season was to build them to pre-Katrina levels, and make
sure they had the integrity of those levees to that height. Any further
height than that, as I understand it, would be pursuant to a study that's
underway right now, and that study is also to include what type of levee
protection would be needed to raise it in two variants. One would be to the
100-year flood plane that's used for determining the National Flood
Insurance Program base elevations for FEMA; and secondarily, what it might
take to go to a category five storm. But those are studies that are
currently underway, they're not finished.

I'd let Chairman Powell offer comment, if he'd like.

CHAIRMAN POWELL: I think you said it well. I think that the Corps has done
extraordinary work in a very short period of time. The one thing I would
add to what Admiral Allen said is that they repaired all the breaches. They
worked on 230 miles of levees, and they are back to pre-Katrina level.
We're on our way. We're on our way to -- in the year 2010, having better
and stronger levees than we've ever had in New Orleans.

But I would caution to add that, just as we've said before, that an
evacuation plan is terribly important and that you cannot protect against
all kinds of risk. And it's important that people heed the evacuation
plans, listen to the elected officials, and act accordingly. I can't stress
that more: Take personal responsibility for those evacuation plans. But the
Corps has done unbelievable work.

Q If a storm the size of Katrina were to strike this area again, what would
happen?

CHAIRMAN POWELL: If a storm the size of Katrina were to strike this area
again, there would be -- that would depend upon the nature and where the
storm hit. But should there be overtopping, there very well could be some
flooding, but it would not be catastrophic type flooding.

Q The President, in his remarks at the school today, talked about
opportunity scholarships just briefly. Can you tell a little bit more about
what's in the plan for vouchers and public schools?

CHAIRMAN POWELL: The President obviously has been very excited about what
he's seen in New Orleans as it relates to K through 12. The citizens of New
Orleans have been committed to making the school system of New Orleans the
best in the country, where other parts of the country would aspire to be
like New Orleans.

As you know, there's something like 53 schools that will be open, and about
60 percent of those are charter schools. I can't tell you how impressed I
am with that component of recovery. And what the President wants to do is
look at ways to enhance that commitment by the local people, and thus he
described that program this morning.

I think the Secretary of Education -- I was with the Secretary of Education
this week. They have committed approximately $1.8 billion to K through 12
in New Orleans.

I might also quickly add that all of the institutions of higher education,
they're all open in New Orleans. Every one of them are open. I think that's
remarkable, too, because they -- everyone suffered a substantial amount of
physical loss and some other concerns that they had.

Great, we're done. Thank you, very much.

END 2:15 P.M. CDT

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