Bill McKibben Quotes

We've certainly learned a lot of lessons from Katrina, from Rita. Rita was better than Katrina. We're doing a better job planning. We're closer - more closely aligned with the Department of Defense. These things would be positive things if we were to have another attack.

We are taking the steps necessary to be ready to send whatever assistance is requested of us, and we are preparing to receive citizens who seek refuge in our state.

The devastating Hurricane Katrina, which revealed to the entire world the great helplessness in dealing with the destruction caused by this hurricane, because of the tremendous attrition of the American army's resources in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What we found out with Katrina is that the country is still unable to deal with disaster. God forbid this happens in San Francisco.

When you talk about humanitarian, it doesn't only mean to offer the people the help, the food, their necessary needs for their life. The first thing, if you ask the Syrian refugees, for example, the first thing they want is to go back to their country.

Quite clearly this is a human disaster of enormous proportions. We have tens and tens of thousands of displaced people across the United States,.

I think this century more than any other really has seen the phenomenon of people being uprooted in such numbers, such a degree. They even have a word for it: The refugees. It's a new word, a 20th Century word, but refugee is actually a misnomer.

The latest computer modeling I've seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as "environmental refugees."

As Mayor of San Francisco, I will work hard to ensure that, in the event of natural or man-made disasters, San Franciscans are prepared and our City is protected.

I was caught on the freeway for hours when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The entire city had to be evacuated. I observed lives threatened by catastrophes and a whole range of behaviour. What could people do during a crisis?

Guard units in the U.S. are suffering severe equipment shortages which will affect their ability to respond to emergencies in their home States, such as Katrina.

Part of the redesign of FEMA is that they have so many people on standby, whether it is a retired nurse or a doctor who will take time off to go exactly where they are needed.

I think we're in good shape, but the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is in some small way mitigated by the fact that we now have more people talking about it, thinking about it and working on it, so that we will be more vigilant and ready.

If a hurricane strikes, we can blame the president for not being there; we can blame Congress and FEMA; we can blame the state governments; but in the end, it's the mayors and the local city governments that have to be prepared for emergencies and be prepared to act.

When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time.

One of the things government should be around for is to deal with catastrophes. It should do that well. To me, that's a government function, and we shouldn't be playing political games with it.

The best way to get a sense of what kinds of emergencies might present themselves in your community is by contacting local chapters of the American Red Cross or offices of emergency management in the region or state. Most large cities will have their own offices of emergency management.

The fact is that it is reasonable for us to say that there is going to be an emergency that happens in this country that we cannot budget for. Katrina is an example.

Towns and cities throughout the United States have opened their hearts and homes to thousands of families displaced from their homes as a result of this horrific storm.

I think in the wake of Katrina, the Coast Guard may well have been the only entity or agency that came out of that exercise free of fault and free of blame.

If you have a sudden emergency, earthquake, hurricane, you name it, we want to be able to have a National Guard officer able to command federal forces.

It has been decided to evacuate three million mothers and children tomorrow from the menaced areas. It is rather grim…. It is odd to feel that the world as I knew it has only a few hours more to run.

In the global world, we have an unprecedented mobility of peoples, we are aware of the needs of refugees and asylees, and not to speak of the 30 million displaced persons as a result of civil wars within their own countries. And yet the map that we navigate literally is the map of the nation state, and so we have no way as a world community of addressing this problem of border movement and trans-border justice, except through the categories of nation state.

In the pandemonium of the crisis in New Orleans, somehow getting people on busses took priority over keeping them alive.

We have seen levee breaks and flooding in the wake of storms, some of which have caused the loss of life, and USDA is ready to assist in any way we can.