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| Speaker: | Stephen E. Flynn, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies, Council on Foreign Relations |
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| Author: | Irina A. Faskianos, Vice President, National Program & Outreach, Council on Foreign Relations |
September 12, 2007
Council on Foreign Relations
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: Good afternoon and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Conference Call Series. As many of you know, our goal is to provide a non-partisan forum for discussion of pressing international issues that affect the priorities and agendas of state and local governments. Today we are pleased to have Steve Flynn with us leading the call on infrastructure and homeland security. As you know, he is the leading expert on these issues. He is the author of the Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation, as well as America the Vulnerable. He has also authored the Council Special Report entitled Neglected Defense. He spent twenty years as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, served in the White House during the George H.W. Bush administration and was a director on the NSC staff during the Clinton administration.
Steve, thanks again for being with us today. It would be great to have you give an update on the sixth anniversary of the September 11th attacks and we saw the bridge collapse in Minneapolis this summer, so it seems that infrastructure vulnerability is hopefully gaining some traction in the policy debate. You have been talking and researching this issue for quite some time so it would be terrific if you could give us your view on where we are and what needs to change.
STEPHEN FLYNN: Well thank you Irina and thanks to all of you who are participating in the call today. Let me first say it's a bit humbling because we've really got people covering the country, from Nebraska, and Arizona, and Alaska, and Pennsylvania, and all corners of Missouri, as I am looking though the list here, Washington state, and my own home state of Connecticut. Thank you all for participating in this. It gives me some hope maybe that this is an issue that we are focused or beginning to focus on, but I really actually would like to say at the outset before I talk a few moments about why we need to do it in terms of what the problems are.
To set the tone though, that I would hope, because I think this is going to be very very important to advancing the agenda to see the issue of infrastructure reinvestment and resiliency, and I'll talk a bit about what resiliency means, as an opportunity; an opportunity in two important ways. One is that we frankly need to make this investment in our society and it is an investment not a cost issue because it makes us a more -- a better place to live. It generates jobs in the process of producing it, good quality jobs and it improves our overall productivity and competitiveness and I would go a step further in saying there's another opportunity that I think is increasingly going to evolve for communities around the country, states, regions to consider, and it is that the more resilient a region is, the more businesses are going to want to locate there and people are going to want to live there. The more brittle, a community, state, or region is, the more they're going to be an outflow of -- of people and business to those areas. Increasingly, I would argue, we're probably going to see the time where the chambers of commerce and states' secretaries of industry, or secretaries of commerce within the states, are going to be talking about the resiliency of their community or of their state, of their region, as a reason why you should locate here and want to be here and the reason for that is because we're really living in the time where probably the one constant we can say about the twenty-first century is that we will be facing disruptions and the disruptions will come from three sources.
The first one unfortunately, as we say play out this past summer in Minneapolis, is the essentially increasing failing of our aging and neglected infrastructure. We are facing, particularly in most of the northern part of the country, infrastructure that was built with extraordinary ingenuity, a lot of investment in treasure, and in some cases in blood, to construct, but where most of this was done in the 1920s and then a flurry of activity after the Second World War, and we've been in many cases, for much of the north part of the country, almost forty years where we've seen very limited investment in infrastructure. Now the south is a little bit better off, in the southwest, because as a growth area of the country new infrastructure is being put down, but there the second variable that is straining our infrastructure plays itself out and that is use and over-use. We combine age with, with real hard demand on infrastructure, not surprisingly it makes it brittle over time and clearly we seem to be at a point for a long time where people have been making, gambling, with this legacy bequeathed to us by a prior generation, but not even adequately maintaining it, never mind making prudent investments to upgrade it. So the reality is one set of challenges where I think all of us are going to face nationwide, and it's going to be also a problem in the international community, but it is that the infrastructures that we rely on as the demands on it grow and as it ages is going to be at risk for being disruptive or failing from time to time.
The second problem is one that we saw play out of course in New Orleans and the Gulf area, now two summers ago, and that is the risk of natural disasters, and when it particularly comes from wind and water, we face a very daunting reality that increasingly scientists are agreeing that climate change, whatever its source, is with us and one of the consequences are that the one hundred year storm event for which most of our infrastructure was built to withstand will become a ten year storm event by 2030 and a three year storm cycle by 2080. Now those are, of course, soft estimates, and can't be taken too much, but the trend is obviously in a direction where we will see increasingly acts of natural, natural events, that will put more, increasing strains on our communities and strains on the infrastructure that supports those communities. And then we are overdue for the other kinds of disasters that don't work on a climate change clock, like on the West Coast, seismic activity, earthquakes, and so forth.
The third set of challenges that will feed into the disruption as a cost of the twenty-first century, is something that we, of course, paused in most of our communities around the country to recognize yesterday, which is the post-9/11 reality that we will be facing acts of terror on U.S. soil for the foreseeable future and while we may, we're certainly, certainly with good intentions and a lot of effort and a lot of treasure, the aspirations since 9/11 by the Bush administration has been to defeat terrorism beyond our shores, what we now know, confirmed by our intelligence community through national intelligence estimates and confirmed by what in fact many major city police departments are seeing and as we saw with the most recent arrests with the German nationals who became jihadists, is that the terror threat is metastasizing, it's spreading, and particularly with the European bent, many of the tools we have designed to detect it and to stall it are limited, and the kinds of folks who are becoming terrorists understand our culture, understand our society, and understand its vulnerabilities.
So when I say disruption will be constant in the twenty-first century, I'm looking at three sets of variables: infrastructure itself as it ages, and with the stress of demand, will periodically fail; natural disasters will be visited on large parts of our country; and then we'll have episodic events of terrorism. All that basically should speak to making, I would argue, resiliency a top national priority. And when I talked about opportunity at the outset, after providing that grim prognosis about what we're facing in the twenty-first century, as an opportunity, it is going to be the community, it is going to be the companies, and it's going to be the nation, that basically they can ride us through disruptions when they happen with the least amount of pain and angst and consequence, that's going to be the place where people want to live, and where businesses want to locate, and which will be the most prosperous in this uncertain future. So, the opportunity side lies there.
The other side of the opportunity that I have tried to draw out in my work is the national security background, is that the more resilient we are as a society, the less that terrorism makes sense as a weapon of choice by our adversaries on U.S. soil. The reason for wanting to carry out attacks on civilians and on critical infrastructure is the aspiration that in so doing, there will be cascading consequences that will truly damage our way of life and our quality of life. If those systems are resilient enough that they can take blows when they periodically happen, whether the blows be mother nature, or whether it be accidents, or whether it be malicious intent by terrorists, then those -- the desired result will not be accrued to our adversaries and I would argue therefore has deterrent value in that bringing these attacks on U.S. soil will be something that will be less attractive for them to engage in, and so we get a benefit by investing in resiliency. We do it because we must for things we can't prevent and we get from it a national security perspective because the more resilient we are, the less attractive this new warfare is and the less likely it is to be played out on our soil and so I think those are my overarching...
But now I think it's important to spend a few minutes defining what do I mean by resiliency because to a large extent, what I am trying to do is to some extent substitute the security focus that obviously we've had since 9/11 and with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, to one that basically is increasingly focused around the notion of resiliency as the umbrella conceptual approach which we take to deal with all the hazards that will confront us in the twenty-first century. This is a bit of a challenge because when people have thought about resiliency, they have often looked at it only as the ability for a community to bounce back after it's been hit and from the Department of Homeland Security's perspective, they want to prevent acts of terror happening, so therefore they'd rather not get around to the resiliency part, but what I'm making a case for is that when we build resilient systems, they really have to, they incorporate the kinds of things that need to be done across the board.
Heretofore -- what's fascinating about this term in fact, resilience, is it draws from so many disciplines and it's been used by different -- it also has some complexity because each discipline has got its own kind of baggage to it but some very good work was recently done by an interesting academic group called the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering -- for Earthquake Engineering Research, which interestingly is housed in the University of Buffalo, I'm not quite sure of that one but maybe somebody from upstate New York knows something about seismic risk there that I don't know, but the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research had rightfully brought a lot of people together across disciplines and they fleshed out recently in a very good article published in June of 2007 what they mean by resilience and they call it sort of the "Four R's," and the first "R" is robustness, and robustness is the ability of a system or a system's elements and other units to essentially withstand disaster forces, basically, or in my national security role, to take a punch without significant degradation or loss of performance. In the transportation world, obviously robustness is about building a bridge so when you have seismic activity it doesn't fail, and so one of the first attributes you need to have for resiliency is an inherent robustness and certainly as we build new infrastructure across the country, we need to look at how we can build that robustness into it, given that we're going to face increasing demands. Again, if a one-hundred year event or even a three-hundred year event was the driver before, we need to raise that bar because we're going to see the systems under more strain than what our predecessors had to withstand.
The second attribute of resiliency is redundancy, and this is basically the ability to have alternative systems to sustain whatever the activity is when something, when there is an event that causes a degradation of the service. So, in this case when we look at transportation, redundancy may be that you don't have obviously just one bridge; you have other routes to move through or separate modes of transportation. If you can't make... [if] the bridge falls apart, you can put a ferry in place quickly.
The next is resourcefulness, and the third component here, resourcefulness is basically the ability to diagnose and prioritize problems in -- after the event is in play and initiate solutions quickly. And so this -- and again, back to my transportation analogy, the ability to recognize, "I've got to evacuate and do a reverse flow quickly," would be a measure of resourcefulness that would be fitting into resiliency.
And the last component -- the last "R" is rapidity, the capacity to restore functionally in a timely way, the ability to bounce back and contain the losses and recover. You know, when we talk about the need to bounce back quickly, and potentially feeding into an important public value but also a competitiveness value, one number that really jumps out for me in this regard is the fact that one of the things that we know statistically is that after every major national disaster, 30 percent of small businesses go belly up and the reason of course is straightforward, they just simply are basically living hand to mouth, most small businesses, and when they face a disruption that extends into several weeks they can't recover from that. They don't have the resources and they often don't have the means to attract capital to get restarted. For any community, the loss of that much small business truly can be devastating and can extend for a very long time the capacity for the community to bounce back. When a community can bounce back much quicker, even after a major disaster, you obviously substantially draw down that risk, that these businesses won't be able to sustain themselves and so that community is back up and running. To the extent that the small businesses feed larger businesses who are dependent upon them, then those businesses can continue to provide the perhaps global reach and they are therefore able to ride through the disruptive event.
So the ability to bounce back quickly, to be resourceful, to be redundant, and robust has to be something that are organizing principals for any investment that communities are making as they think about infrastructure. It's not just about maintaining existing infrastructure or trying to keep existing public safety and public health service on life support, really increasingly we as a nation must think about real investment into these capabilities as key components of preserving our prosperity as well as our safety. And those communities and states, I would argue, that do this quickest and best are ultimately going to be places where companies are going to want to locate themselves and where people are going to live and want to live.
So it's not just about being a professional worrier to look at the issue of our infrastructure degradation; it's not an issue of being a professional worrier to be focused on national disasters or national security. Really what I am asking people to do is act like adults. We actually have always lived as a nation with disruption. The conquering of this continent was not a cakewalk and the frontier was always something very difficult to conquer. It took an enormous investment by our -- by prior generations, of their treasure, of their courage, of their innovation, their raw brawn, to essentially create the prosperous society we have today. They had to do it in the face of natural disasters, they had to do it in the face of warfare from time to time, they had to do it in the face of tremendous physical engineering obstacles, and we are the inheritors of that investment. The least that we must do is to ensure that we can bequeath this legacy like it was bequeathed to us, to our children and our grandchildren and we simply must take the events that we have seen -- 9/11, the Katrina, the failure of the flood control system that flooded New Orleans, this recent bridge failure in Minnesota -- as real red flags, as alarms that should tell is that the days when we could push the envelope on the things that are critical to us have long past and we must as a society make reinvestment into these capabilities a priority for the future.
So, I put a lot on the table here and I know it's often difficult in these conference calls to think about how to engage, but we do have people from such broad parts of the country, I would very much welcome, Irina, folks who would either react to, or amplify on, or challenge, or question any of what I tried to lay out here: the analysis that in fact we are going to be facing a time where disruption is a constant. Whether that in fact resonates or not, I would love to hear some response; the kind of usefulness of looking at resiliency as requiring robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity.
One thing I'll highlight as well, it certainly is expensive to think about how to build robust and redundant infrastructure, [but] resourcefulness and the ability to bounce back quickly, the rapidity component, that's really a human capital issue. That's the ability for essentially people across stakeholders, across the private and public sectors to be able to work together. Typically those all have to be done in advance so that when things happen they can be nimble and things can happen quickly in order to recover quickly. A lot of that's about leadership, a lot of it's about putting in place the structures, the decision making structures, to deal with operational risk when it happens. It's not about huge investments and so there every community has an opportunity, I would suggest, no matter what limited resources, to address those components of building resiliency, even if, you know, robustness and redundancy, the opportunities are primarily in growth areas where you're putting new infrastructure in place, where you're building new roads or new water treatment systems and so forth, there is a real opportunity to think about it. And again, thinking about it as, this is something that you'll be selling to -- to potentially the chamber of commerce or selling as a state secretary or governor, this is what you're going to be selling as why you want, [why] businesses want to be in this neighborhood, or why people want to be in this neighborhood, because this is a place that even when disaster visits periodically, we bounce back quickly and everybody's safety is safeguarded and businesses are able to continue their operations. This is the kind of thinking that I think must be a part of our domestic character and is something that I would be interested to see how folks on this call respond. So let me stop there.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: Terrific Steve and as Steve said, we really do welcome your comments and questions and what you are doing in your own communities, so [Operator], let's open it up.
OPERATOR: Okay, at this time we will open the floor for questions.
QUESTIONER A: Okay, I'm the Director of the Medical Reserve Corps Program with the LSG. Your ideas on resiliency really resounds with me from a national level and it's something that I try to encourage and to bring up to the local MRC units. I was wondering how you would see individuals taking this idea of resiliency to heart and how they can bring that to their leaders, whether it's, you know, of a volunteer organization or to their community leaders to try and have not only the idea of individual resiliency and preparedness but to make sure their communities are more resilient as well?
STEPHEN FLYNN: Thank you so much for that and for the good work you're doing at HSS trying to advance this, I mean, we are, I think, struggling almost in a bit of this new loop; our elected leaders don't talk much about this because they don't hear much from the constituents and I think our constituents don't ask much about it because they don't hear much of it from their leaders, so it's a bit of a struggle for those of us who recognize what the threats and vulnerabilities are, but also frankly recognize the relatively low cost opportunities for which every individual could ultimately commit themselves to building this resiliency.
I think one way in which at least I found worked pretty well is, I talked to audiences around the country after my book recently came out, was potentially to talk about resiliency as a true civic virtue and one that in fact is a key component for our national security, and the case I made was simply this: our young men and women in uniform increasingly are making an ultimate sacrifice overseas to protect us in large part because we're so damn vulnerable here that they have had to do what they're doing in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world so my case, in part appealing somewhat to their guilt, is the least that we can do here at home is to make this investment in our own resiliency. This is what in the Second World War generation was their victory garden; this is our victory garden. These are the kinds of things that we can do. So one of it is an appeal that basically says that you know, we really are struggling as a nation, where virtually all the effort dealing with this war on terrorism is on the shoulders of our traditional national security apparatus, the rest of us are shopping and traveling and that's just simply irresponsible and bad citizenship. That's one appeal I make.
The other I try to also make is the case that -- because I think one of the struggles that people clearly have is almost at an individual level, a family level, is that this an act of paranoia that I am making preparations for bad things happening and, you know, I don't want to portray to my children that I am basically living in fear of things happening I can't protect them from. You know, human beings are very good at being optimists and it's, you know, one of our, I think, more cherished values. The way I try to put this is, again with a civic mind in this, there are a limited amount of public health resources, there are a limited amount of emergency medical technicians and emergency room care, there's a limited amount of local law enforcement that can respond to any event and when some people get hurt, they need all those resources we can get to them. The rest of us shouldn't be a part of the problem. We should be self-sufficient enough in our own lives at home or at work that we can ride out any disruption so we're not pressing on the emergency care system, we're not overloading the roads, we're not overloading the telecommunication networks, and so forth. This is something that I think we have to start talking about as essentially a neighborly act of preparedness in order to make sure that the resources that need to be made available for the people who truly are in need get those resources and I think that's another thing that resonates, whether people are from the left or from the right, that that sense of civic responsibility, if reinforced, can get there.
I think [the question of] how you get that message out has certainly been quite tricky. A case that I have tried to make at a number of settings here most recently is it's very difficult, frankly for the government to make -- the government -- ultimately public officials have to talk about, you know, the issues on the national security side I raised, but one of the ways -- best ways I think, to try to advance this within -- and the Council is really reaching out to make -- to CEOs and major employers, and I have tried to do this in a series of conferences for these folks, and you know, saying in many cases that they have more -- that there's more trust between employees and employers in most places than there is, I'm afraid. between the public sector and every day citizens and so, you know, I ask CEOs that you should have, you know, once a year where you're at the top of I don't care how large an organization or small, you're there at the fire drill, you're there when you do -- and you turn that into a town hall meeting, it's not just how we evacuate, but employees get to ask questions of the security officer, ask questions of their continuity or operations officer. and you as CEO basically say, this is important, that employers provide their employees, either discounted or give-away the kits that allow them to be self-sufficient for seventy-two hours.
So I think one of the things we have to do, for those of us in public sector with very limited resources, is really figure out how we multiply ourselves by reaching out to civic leaders at the state and at the local levels here to essentially model the desired behavior and what's the case for them to do that? The case is pretty straightforward, like the small business one I made, the risk of going belly up once communities don't recover but also it's big businesses. Big businesses whose employees don't show up for work have a real problem and when small companies who support them can't show up to work, have a real problem. They have a problem in that they have global customers who are very unhappy when they can't provide the services that they've contracted to provide, so from a pure business continuity of operations, maintaining their market share, they want to be vested in this resiliency, in helping to build it. So I think what's important here is that the case is made to where it can be made by those who are responsible for doing that, the civic virtue can be highlighted, but also the very practical kind of this is a good bottom line thing for you to emphasize where you can do that through civic leaders and the private sector as well.
Those are just a couple of ideas. I am sure there are those on the lines who may have other ones, but I think the key is to recognize we've got to start finding ways to have this conversation and when we do, I think it will resonate. I think prior generations, again, we know were resilient, otherwise we wouldn't be where we are and so it's really calling back on that history that we're doing and promising that -- and showing, demonstrating, that this will make things really better for all of us. about making this investment. These are the kinds of things that I think need to happen.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: Terrific, next question, comment?
OPERATOR: Thank you.
QUESTIONER B: Thank you, Steve, so much for really providing that long view. I think as I sit here at my desk as a person who's trying to promote the State of Illinois as a place of investment overseas, but that conversation can sometimes get muted by budgetary woes at the local levels that can jeopardize our transportation systems, our distribution systems, and it's really important to always keep in mind that broader view that this really is also an economic thing. I really enjoyed that bounce back theory. One thing I was also hoping you might touch upon is the food distribution networks -- that's something Illinois' got great resources as far as food safety but seeing, you know, the product lines coming out of China and that closeness that we have, perhaps you could flesh out that a little bit more.
STEPHEN FLYNN: Sure. Thanks so much for those comments. You know, the case also that I would make here is, a community like Illinois, I mean, one thing of course that came out of 9/11 was that a lot of very big companies located here suddenly realized that they may want to think about diversifying some of what they do in terms of location as one of the most important ways to deal with risk. Some of them basically said, well let me do that by running overseas, and you know, have gone -- India obviously has been a major source of outsourcing -- and have shown up in places that are extremely exposed for typhoons, who have power problems virtually every day, and who have huge employee challenges getting people to show up for work because of the disruption of the infrastructure not being there. So one of the things that in fact there is starting to be a reverse -- my Wall Street people tell me there's starting to be a slowing of that outsourcing of human capital trend because these disruptions are well known.
One of the things, whether it's in North Carolina, or Illinois, or the Southwest, or any community that's reaching out and trying to get corporations to think about coming to them, it is about being able to say, you know, collect the bases, we've got a good education system, we've got housing, we've got roads that work and so forth that everybody has to make those general sort of the "Rotary Club" style pitches, but I think also what will be added to it is the ability to say, you know, which was certainly the case I know in Chicago, you can deal with snow better than Washington, DC can do it even though you get several feet of it every winter and Washington, DC may get three inches. That's a part of being able to provide a basic need: no matter what the climate throws at you to be able to keep businesses up and running, employees coming to work... but I just think part of the messaging and that will help build this resiliency is, in part, showing how it has value, and I think increasingly, at least this is what the data comes from about where businesses are going, they really are thinking. The flu pandemic issue raised the profile of this, that they have to think about continuity of operations. Large corporations, they have to think about second tier, third tier providers and the way they can support [them]. They have to think about the location of their own critical offices and as they think about where to go and who they want to be, they're going to want to be in communities that don't just have the basic services, but also have the means to deal with these disruptions.
Your second question, you know, it's probably the reason why I am here at the Council on Foreign Relations and I end up talking about things like infrastructure and Homeland Security, is virtually none of the things that will make us safer... You know most of the things that we require to keep us prosperous require us to stay engaged to a wider world, and one of the huge challenges of course has happened in the last twenty years is the explosive growth of essentially offshore food supply in a way that many of us, I'm not sure the demographics of our group here in terms of ages, but certainly when I was growing up, you know, fruits could still be a rather exotic thing in the depths of winter and the kind of things that were very expensive and you'd get -- you were lucky to have once in a while. Today, of course, you take for granted because the sun is warm in one part of the world or another, that you can have year-round, seasonal choices of fruits and vegetables and a whole bunch of other things that feed into our food system, that the result really, which is, is that we have the vast majority of our food now, at least ingredients of it, coming from off shore with none of the systems in place to deal with how, when we have an outbreak, as we saw just a year ago with the spinach issue even which was a domestic issue, how difficult it is to be able to isolate where the threat is and then -- so our responses specifically touch up and down the entire industry. What we're seeing I think overall is a belated recognition playing out actually this week, it's not a question of food, it's things like toys, that ultimately our regulatory systems have to evolve with the nature of these networks, and the value of doing this is that in making sure the food safety, public safety, in terms of dangerous toys and so forth, are public goods. There has to be some government oversight role of these systems for people to retain confidence and trust in these supply chains when they operate on a global scale.
So I think we're actually in a race now, given the neglect of almost twenty years, at the very same time we're becoming more dependent on offshore systems that provide -- end up on our dinner tables, or to put toys in our kids hands, we are diminishing the capacity to actually monitor whether or not adequate safety measures were in place. This isn't sustainable for the businesses themselves, as Mattel is finding out, it's not going to be sustainable for food providers as we have growing incidences of contamination. So we must build this capacity, and the challeng is, while we have some states like the state of Illinois, I know, which is very progressive and engaged on building the -- on detection and good laboratory work and so forth, we have other states in our country who have no labs to test food, who are basically maybe originators, or transport points, or end points for food supplies but with virtually no means to detect or even manage their way through a crisis. The states and locals clearly have to build this capacity, but there also has to be demand that this be done on a national and international level and the sum of our state and local parts, to deal with issues like food safety or product safety, is simply not going to be adequate for dealing with the risks associated with operating in the global environment we are today.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: Thanks. Next question, comment?
OPERATOR: Thank you.
QUESTIONER C: Good afternoon. I agree with the observations about the lack of engagement that most people have made about the lack of engagement on the part of elected officials at many levels. An ongoing difficulty that I and many of my colleagues deal with is a lack of engagement by the average citizen, and having worked disasters nationally with a variety of organizations, I know that this isn't unique to New England. The disability advocacy groups have been pounding the pavement in Massachusetts trying to get involved with emergency planning, and when we reach out to the resources they provide to us there's no response. It's been enormously frustrating for everyone involved. Across the board, how do we get the average citizen to engage in the process?
STEPHEN FLYNN: Yeah, it really -- and it's always distressing to hear the stories you relate, but I know it's a common one across the country. One of the things that I think I found most appalling where, with the Katrina disaster, was of course seeing our most vulnerable citizens literally left high and wet, and that's -- and you know, the loss of life that came from that. The numbers are, there's about 20 percent of Americans today have some form of a disability, and that's of course reflective of the demographic trends of an older population, a more overweight population, our inactive population and just, you know, the kind of health-care that allows people with very serious, chronic illnesses to essentially maintain some form of quality of life, but these are the people, especially of course our most impoverished citizens who are, literally are living day to day, who can't provide the kind of, and we can't really reasonably call on them to somehow set food or water supply aside, or have the alternative transportation arrangements, or any of the kinds of the things some of our wealthier citizens should be doing as a matter of course.
So we have a two part problem, we have one, the very and critical need to get, you know, the cross section of our civil society engaged and thinking about building some adequate level of preparedness and resiliency, and then we have to make sure that we help the folks who simply can't help themselves, even if willing in many cases, just either physically unable or financially unable, and I guess what I find discouraging is that this is not the kind of conversation that we're seeing with elected leaders, who have this responsibility, talking about. You know, it's hard to happen at the grass roots level when it's being done in a backdrop where you don't see any of our mayors or you barely see our governors talking about this as a priority. Again, we are making this push for at least major employers to try to push for it here. There's a lot that clearly can be done for -- by those players to take care of the people at least in their sort of company, and those extended families, and perhaps in their neighborhoods, that creates some opportunity if perfected, if mobilized.
You know, I wrote about an example in my book, and it's still in its development stage, but I found it so impressive and it's in a small community outside Minneapolis called Eden Prarie, and Eden Prarie is a relatively new community, it's about sixty thousand people and it has a volunteer fire department with only one full time, paid fire chief, and a pretty small police department, because it's a pretty safe place to live, and yet they have major snowstorms. They have risk of tornadoes, and one of the things that the fire chief, police chief, and the city manager together have done is they have gone out to the big and large companies and they have basically said, look, if something happens, we need to be able to recover quickly, and there's not much of us to go around on the public sector side. We're all in this together. Let's make an inventory in advance of these events of what we could all bring to the table if we had to respond to something large. Now one company said, I have a call center, you could use that as a back up communication, another company uses satellite radios, you could use those, somebody has refrigerated trucks to move flowers, well people don't demand flowers... The thing is that they use this process of doing this in advance to get them engaged. They also reached out, and it turns out they host a mega church out there, one of the big evangelical churches with about I think twelve or fourteen-hundred people, but they reached out to that community as well and there's a lot of infrastructure, not surprisingly, to run a church of that size, in terms of people and professionals who could also work through the parishioners, and you know, that community to get them a bit mobilized and engaged and what's, you know, it's happening on a fairly small scale, but I think that triangulation between the public sector, the private sector and nonprofit, you know, kinds of institutions like churches that bring people together, that people tend to listen to their leaders, and so forth, here, those are the kinds of efforts we need to make at the grassroots level.
But we also, obviously, and that's part of what I see in my job, is we have to demand that we have leaders around our country who start placing value on this and start articulating it as a value. I know that's not a real smooth road map to address the issue that you've identified, but I have found time again, at least in talking to people, that when you lay out the issues as I have tried to lay them out, you get almost an automatic, "How can I help?" And one of my frustrations has been, it's been very difficult often for me to point to very concrete ways in which they could help because many governments and many localities aren't equipped, aren't even engaged, to receive it, even if people would knock on the door to provide it. I know it also works the other way; some communities have organized themselves to try to do this and are not getting much response as much beyond maybe an initial, "Yeah, I'd like to." I think, again, it's important to reach out to the key leaders in any community, whether school superintendents, and church leaders, and business leaders, but we've got to make a priority and we've got to probably just test a lot of things to get where we need to go, amd like with a call like this, try to share amongst each other our best -- when we're successful, and lessons we learned when we're not so successful.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: Steve, we have a few more questions, comments on line, do you have -- are you able to go for ...
STEPHEN FLYNN: Oh absolutely.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: ...another fifteen minutes or so?
STEPHEN FLYNN: I'd be delighted and I understand that we committed to 4:45pm so nobody should feel offended if they need to run.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: Right. All right, so [Operator], let's take a few more.
OPERATOR: Okay.
QUESTIONER D: Thanks Steve. Nice job once again.
STEPHEN FLYNN: Thank you for the good work you do in my -- near my neighborhood in New Haven.
QUESTIONER D: That's correct.
STEPHEN FLYNN: Oh yeah, I'm delighted.
QUESTIONER D: Anyway Steve, again, excellent presentation, and you know, I guess the question is, because we're dealing with this as everyone is from a health-care perspective, it's this whole issue of you know, in some realms at least in the international world in terms of Pan American Health Organization, there's this whole Safe Hospitals Initiative, but what we've embarked on is this sort of, what we're calling the Safe and Resilient Hospital Initiative, and you know, and how it really needs to clearly be integrated with the, you know, World Health Organization, and the ISC's Safe and Resilient Communities, and so I guess the question is, you know, how do we get all of the right players to the table? Is it something that you know, CFR can spearhead? You know, and as I think about it, it's always a challenge for us, we were over in Amersterdam doing some presentations on this, but even then, we were somewhat parochial because you know, we were representing health-care and health-care delivery organizations, and I guess the question is, you know, what would be a reasonable approach to at least begin the... or continue the process of getting the right players to the table? Meaning that it's not just health-care, it's not just public health, it's public safety you've identified, it's all of the other infrastructure partners, both on a public and a private sector role, you know, so it begs the question,, is there any way of getting to you know, maybe some of the professional organizations, the Council of Governors, Council of Mayors, just as an example, the American Hospital Association, the, you know, American Public Health Association, the fire chiefs, police chiefs, you know, is there any value to getting these folks to identify, you know, some of the best practices that have been going on around the world or around the country and bringing those together in some forum, be it electronic, be it in person, where we can sort of begin to one, dialogue, but also share some of those best practices?
STEPHEN FLYNN: Boy, those are all, I think, wonderful ideas and initiatives and I would applaud all of them from happening, and you know, I'm trying in my own way to try to stir interest in groups like that taking it on, I mean, I think obviously preaching to the Council of Mayors or the Chief of Police -- these are all -- it's almost going to be grassroots work hitting each of these communities up. I think one of the challenges that I guess I try to take -- it needs, I know, more fleshing out though but it's what I try to sort of say the opportunity that this is not just about dealing with risk, and, you know, sort of having to think like a pessimist and plan accordingly, you know, this is something that we have to see as a society, not just as a responsibility, but again, almost to an opportunity. I mean, we will not stay prosperous and we will not stay competitive as a society if every time we have a disruption it basically causes system failures, and when you basically put health-care to the edge where it's really able to keep up with routine care, we know it's going to essentially fail, and fail miserably, when there is a surge placed on it here, and that kind of thing is going to be duly noted by citizens, and companies, and everybody else and it's not basically something that's sustainable. So we've got to find some way in which we are getting across to these communities the recognition -- you know, that's why I like the thought of the two "R's," particularly the focus on responsiveness that a core element of resiliency is this ability for essentially you know, being able to diagnose and prioritize problems, initiate solutions, this means you have to bring together a lot of the very stakeholders, not just from the public safety community where things get pretty -- in public health where things can get pretty diverse, but really across other elements of a society and figure out how to be able to mobilize, plan and be able to exercise and operate these events. I mean, the basic drivers, I think we need a few success stories, you know, like I've trotted out the Eden Prarie [example] and even that one, I mean, it's a work in progress and they're having a challenge, I mean, initially to get all the CEOs on board, but when it comes to actually surveying what they are going to do, they have to have follow up meetings. These -- the fire chief, police chief, are putting a lot of work, more than they thought they would have to when they first set off doing this here to try to get it to go here. But once you have at least a few of these success stories, I often find Washington politicians, I always say, have never been driven by data, they are always driven by stories, most of them unfortunately are bad stories but still, in this case, you know, we have -- we can think small to some extent, where small is about illustrating what needs to be done and being able to document the benefits from doing it, and then using that as a message to take to these different forums so it's one, about sort of a general outreach to a lot of players who haven't thought about resilience or haven't thought about this as something that they really need to make a priority, and being able to find a way to do that, but the other of course is making sure you have a compelling illustration or a compelling story about why this works and why this is something that they want to invest in, and just exactly how to choreograph all that, I don't know, but you've given a great list of ideas of people who need to be gotten to, and hopefully we'll find ways among some of the members, of the people, on this call to brainstorm that and move it forward.
QUESTIONER D: Thanks very much.
STEPHEN FLYNN: Thank you.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: And just to follow up on that point, part of what we're trying to do in the State and Local Officials Initiative is we're actively reaching out to the conferences of some of the mayors'associations, the governors, and offering fellows to address their groups and obviously working out what issue would make sense for their specific agenda, but we are -- have that underway, and any help any of you could give or suggestions on how to better connect with some of these major meetings would be most welcome.
QUESTIONER D: I'd be happy to.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: It's something that we really -- we want to be a resource and we want to exchange ideas, and it's obviously helpful for the research that our fellows like Steve are doing, so...
STEPHEN FLYNN: I always get smart every time I talk to folks like on this call.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: Next question please, comment?
OPERATOR: Okay.
QUESTIONER E: Yes, I am in a rural area in Georgia, what we call southwest Georgia, and we fortunately or unfortunately have to rely upon each other down here. We are public health trained with the firemen and policemen and all of those said to be first responders, so we have been drenched in the, I guess you would say, the discussion of what we need to do in the case of a local disaster. I also have -- in fact we had an opportunity to work for AT&T and I managed their international prepaid card network and on 9/11, I lost all communication with Europe, but because of what corporations have to do in order to stay in business to make money, I had a back up plan and was only twelve hours out of being able to handle every call that was headed to there, normally we were going through New York City, going to Europe, I had to send it out of San Francisco, so I am wondering if it wouldn't make sense for us to not only talk about the Council of Mayors and all of that, but since we do have corporations that have been operating internationally ad infinitum, if we should not engage also those people in the same room with our public officials. I have had to draw upon my life of both public and private, and somebody's yelling at me right now to try to pull together a thing in this area of the state and I just think it would make sense for us to try to broaden our outlook beyond what we do. I mean, I work in public health, but I think it's important that I work with the business leaders here as well.
STEPHEN FLYNN: I just loved the point you made in the -- in, you know, the connection between your private experience and the one that you're working here today. I absolutely agree. I mean, in terms of the community, it is not surprising who is best at the resiliency is the telecommunications/IT community that is in a war every day with cyber warfare, as well as kind of events that happened on 9/11, or the blackout that we had up northeast in 2003, and then also the financial sector, that obviously can't afford any disruption.
One of the things, in fact that, happened, that was not all that well known, but you know, when the power went on 9/11, there were a lot of transactions, advances and so forth that were frozen, and there was a real issue of, can you honor a transaction, electronic transaction, that has not been executed, and you know, billions of dollars at stake, trying to figure out how to work that through, and basically, happily, the people made a command decision, yes, we'll honor that and figure it all out in the end, but it was something that the system had not really anticipated. So there are those communities in particular, but there also in the area of transportation and logistics, people are constantly -- you know, there's a UPS ethos, that basically is -- permeates all their management, which is to reward managers for assuming that the package never will make it. The idea is, you don't assume the package is going to get there, there is no trouble, you're reward is because for the customer it should be seamless, but to you, you better have back-up plans and back, back-up plans for being able to deal with the inevitable disruptions that come from moving merchandise around the goods and so you created the culture that anticipates problems and has ready, set solutions just as you did with the pre paid call back-up plan in San Francisco. This is something that makes organizations better organizations, they look at their process, they end up -- they end up finding inefficiencies they shouldn't have, they almost always find, you know, work arounds and challenges that actually accrue to their profit, even where there's no need to use the system. Some of it's cost, but many times there's opportunities that come from this level of change of culture and so there's a lot of that that the public sector, public health and others, could benefit from.
You know, maybe one of the ideas, wherever it could be done here is, you know, hold like a resiliency day or something. I mean, maybe we need a sexier term, but whether it's a mayor that convenes it, or you know, even better of course, a governor that pulls the private sector players together and pulls parts of the public sector and gets people to share these stories or experiences and then poses the [quesiton], how do we as a community build this forward? But you know, a conference that brings in people from the public sector, the private sector, that talks about the kind of relationships that you need to make this sort of thing happen, the processes that are needed, so people stop and they realize that this isn't sort of a bridge too far, this is the kind of thing that's already being practiced but often, maybe in places that they never even thought to look before, and that if we bring it all together, we really build it at a societal level, which is going to be to everybody's advantage.
So, I really applaud you're doing the work you're doing in a place under tremendous resource constraints, where, of course, issues of really life and death and -- literally and in the work you do and -- but acknowledging and recognizing and figuring out how we can draw on the kind of private sector experiences you had to inform the way we approach public sector ones, this is something I think has to be seen as a -- as in everybody's best interest to want to do.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: Terrific. We have one -- let's take one final question before we close out.
OPERATOR: Okay, our last question.
QUESTIONER F: Good afternoon, my -- working here as an epidemiologist in the western part of Tennessee, one of the things that we had seen in terms of disaster preparedness both for infectious diseases, as well as we have a lovely earthquake fault out here that's unpredictable, as they all are, but we're seeing a lot of issues with complacency, and as time passes from national, international disasters, people start thinking, oh, well, it's not that big a deal, and the resources at the community and sometimes even at the state level, get diverted to other things besides things that will help us in terms of resiliency. The priorities decline, folks assume that it's going to happen someplace else, or that there will be sufficient warning that they don't need to be prepared now. I don't know if you have any ideas or solutions there; I think this is going to be an ongoing problem.
STEPHEN FLYNN: Yeah, that's a bit of the age old problem for any of us who came out of the emergency preparedness, and you know, my old Coast Guard background was doing search and rescue and, you know, trying to get people to do the most prudent things when they get into harm's way, they would be left in harm's way, and we always were struggling with folks who risked -- took tremendous risk, very foolishly, and you know, you're trying to fight that human nature tendency for that.
I mean, one of the things that I think is going to be very important is -- and I'm trying to get it at a macro level, but -- and also the macro level, I'm making a case that this is the kind of thing that we really need to make, you know, as a national priority, is ongoing resilience for the things that we can't always predict and which are natural events, and the failing of infrastructure, and terrorism and do it around, just as Dwight D. Eisenhower saw, civil society, to a form of civil defense and investment in infrastructure that built our interstate highway systems as key elements of our national defense, that one way in which we have to basically deal with this, in making sure the resources are there on an ongoing level, is to realize that resiliency has to be part of our national character and it's because the nature of the challenge will appear differently in different places. I mean, epidemic risk is clearly going to be everybody's problem and the food supply risk turns into almost everybody's problem, but when you get to obviously earthquakes or hurricanes or so forth, they are going to be geographically located but virtually all of the capacity we need, which is the ability for public heath to provide public health and to do basic epidemiological work, and all these kinds of things. The ability for public safety to play its role, it does and -- and firefighters to be prepared.
These are things that I think have to be seen as a national priority. I know that's something that can't happen at the grass roots level, that's what I am trying to help encourage, but at that level, at the -- a the micro level, I am hoping, in part, this notion that a community that's well prepared is a community that's basically going to be more competitive in keeping people, in drawing people to it, and so forth here, that that realization will happen as it is happening with companies, because when they don't have adequate emphasis in the private sector on continuity of operations, that the pandemic flu also raises risk -- raise that issue to a forefront, now your boards of directors that want to know not just what their company plans are for dealing with, how do we get employees here if we have a pandemic outright? They want to know what the suppliers do, and as those board of directors start putting pressure on the management to say, I want this as an ongoing capacity, not an episodic one, and not just on crisis, and what we haven't had though, is a similar movement of that same kind of questioning and focus happening at the -- at the public sector level.
I was at an event here this past summer where in fact our Secretary of Health and Human Services was talking about basically the focus on how the -- our health-care overall, it's about 8 percent of our GDP, and within about 10 years it will consume about 15 percent of our Gross Domestic Product and how frail the system is basically maintaining it. I had a chance to ask a question, I said, "You're just talking about dealing with the projected needs at a routine basis, what about the surge capability when things go wrong?" and his response was, "Well that's going to be a crisis, we'll have to deal with it in a crisis format." Well we don't have to deal with it in a crisis format, these are foreseeable events, we must make the investment, recognize them as such. Let's do it differently than we've done it in the past, but we must do this.
So I guess in conclusion, as I know we are running out of time on it here, I've been thrilled by the opportunity to address this with all of you and if nothing else, I hope that maybe there's a couple of things you could take away as you go back to your day-to-day challenging jobs of trying to do the very important work you do, and recognize, I guess, you're not alone, I'm sure you knew that already but also that maybe there are a couple of ideas here that might be able to help get us to where we need to be.
Again, I want to applaud all of you for -- as I look through the jobs you have and the cross country -- this is a thing that I time and again come back to in my thoughts, particularly when I have a chance with national audiences or in Washington, our greatest strength as a nation is not our second-to-none military, that's nice to have in the dangerous world we're in; it's the way the people (inaudible), and it's the strength in the patriotism, in many cases, and just good civic-mindedness of a lot of very good people but they can't be basically left alone and with no life-support. We need to make sure there's adequate oxygen for those good works to multiply themselves and be sustainable within our society. The strength is in our nation, its there, we'll roll with the punches when they happen, we just can do it with a lot less pain and with a lot less disruption if we think through about this building resiliency up front, instead of having to react to every event that happens as if it we never expected it, or nobody knew it would happen.
So thank you for all what you're doing and I hope this call today was if nothing else, was a little pep talk or something that is useful as you go about back to your work, and please reach out to me if you weren't able to get through in the call, I can be reached at sflynn@cfr.org by email, that's probably the best way to reach me and -- and of course, obviously you can hook up through Irina A. Faskianos as well.
IRINA A. FASKIANOS: Thank you Steve very much for doing this today and to all of you for being on the call. Steve gave you his email address, and if you want to send ideas and topics to cover in future conference calls, please contact us at outreach@cfr.org. Our next call will be on October 16, again it's 4:00 p.m. Eastern time and it will be with Dan Prieto who is actually the project director of a task force that we have convened on civil liberties, and he's going to talk about where the task force -- the group of members, are in their deliberations, and we would like to solicit your feedback before we go to print with the final report which will probably be in December. So we are really looking at this as a working group session and trying to get your input at the beginning of the process rather than at the end when we have a finished document. So an announcement will be going out shortly, but again, thank you all and thank you Steve.
STEPHEN FLYNN: Thank you.
OPERATOR: This concludes today's presentation.
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