President Obama on Tuesday urged people to prepare for hurricane season, which officially began today, after meeting with disaster relief and weather forecasting officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Washington.
Citizens bear responsibility for their own safety in the face of impending storms, Obama said.
“And that means taking proactive steps, like having an evacuation plan, having a fully stocked disaster supply kit — if your local authorities ask you to evacuate, you have to do it; don’t wait,” he said.
Obama said federal and local officials will stress that successfully waiting out previous storms is not the factor by which people in vulnerable areas should decide whether to comply with evacuation notices or heed warnings.
“If your local authorities say that you need to start evacuating; you need to start evacuating and get it done,” Obama said. “And what we’ve been seeing is some public complacency slipping … a large portion of people not having preparedness kits, not having evacuation plans. We’ve been stagnant a little bit with respect to the number of people, the percentage of people, who respond to an evacuation order.”
“All that has to pick up because we want to make sure that, although it’s hard to prevent property damage, that we are doing everything we can to prevent loss of life,” Obama said.
Obama said that during his presidency, FEMA went from being a dysfunctional agency to a model one.
“When I came into office, I think FEMA was an organization that was still … ‘wrapped around the axel,'” he said, quoting FEMA Director Craig Fugate. “It now exemplifies the extraordinary role that effective government agencies and the people who work there can play in making our lives better, in saving lives, in helping people pick themselves back up after they’ve gotten hit with a tremendous blow.”
Invoking FEMA’s operational breakdown during 2005’s deadly Hurricane Katrina, Obama said society cannot let complacency set in.
“What we’re always worried about are the things we don’t know, things we can’t anticipate, things that we haven’t seen before,” Obama said. “And that is why it’s so important to make sure that every American, every family participate actively in getting prepared.”
