♪ announcer: this holiday week, explore the people and events that tell the american story every day on american history tv on c-span three. and watch our featured programs this weekend on c-span2 on saturday at 7:00 p.m. eastern, here the new year's day messages in 1988 from president reagan and gorbachev. reagan addressed the treaty between united states and the soviet union and a possibility of a new meeting between the two countries while gorbachev addressed the citizens of the united states of a new status of relations between the u.s. and soviet union. and offered a bright picture of the future. at 7:15, hh leonard with her book rosa parks, be on the bus, where she recounts conversations with misses parks who was a frequent guest at the author d.c. home exploring the american

story, watch american history tv all this week on c-span three and saturdays on c-span and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org/history. announcer: "washington journal" continues. host: we are pleased to continue with this week's author. this is an annual tradition where we invite authors from all over the political spectrum to talk about their books and we are pleased to have join us today juliette kayyem, a former obama administration and author of this book, "the devil never sleeps: learning to live in an age of disasters." juliette kayyem, is this a follow-up book to security mom, your book from 2016? guest: in some ways it is. security mom was trying to describe how homeland security

was both about the homeland but also about the home and sort of the commonalities between what i did at home as a mother of three the same way i thought about risk and rick's -- and risk reduction and how i worked in the field. fast-forward to the devil never sleeps and what i did in the book is take the commonalities and extend them both in place in time, looking at hundreds of years of disasters across the globe and of all different sorts, climate, cyber, tragedy, terrorism, and of course the pandemic and also wanted to find commonalities. i wanted to basically describe to readers the connective tissue amongst all these seemingly different chaotic we have no control over anything happening and say these things begin to

look familiar over time and maybe that familiarity can give us common tools to as the subtitle says learn to live in an age of disaster -- learning to live in an age of disasters. i wanted to provide readers with the lessons of disasters and disaster management to reframe what success and how we might think of success and provide the common tools that can teach us to ironically fail safer. in other words, once the bad thing is happened, are there ways to minimize the harm? or in my technical terms make things less bad. it's an odd way to think of success but i think that's a helpful way to think how we might manage disasters we are not going to be able to stop every time. host: could you spend a little more time on the fail safer

onset you talk about and then i want to show this from the wall street journal this morning. it is a picture of downtown buffalo's snowstorm turned simple choices deadly. how -- can you talk about the concept and talk about how buffalo in a sense could have failed safer? guest: the concept of failing safer, people are familiar with the term failsafe, which is a mechanism in a complex system that essentially turns off the system so if it starts to show stress, you are basically ensuring the harm does not happen. we think a failsafe system -- i think of a massive generator system or electrical grid where if there is pressure on an electrical grid it would shut off to ensure there is no harm done or catastrophic losses so fail safer is taking it a step further and looking at disaster management differently.

we are a simple people and divide the world into essentially two phases. we either think of things as being right of boom or right of boom or essentially the left of boom aspects are all of the things we due to stop the bad things from happening and the bad thing is the devil, generic. i do not focus on this cyber thing or that pandemic, just think about the disruptive event, the boom. so those are all the things you do to try to stop at things from happening. i will make it simple, lock on the cox door, i simple solution to stop people from getting into a cockpit and causing harm. so that is essentially a way we try to stop the boom but, as we know and as our lived experience shows us, and as the data also shows us we are not going to be successful in a society like ours of stopping all bad things from happening and then you end up on what we call the right

side of the boom, trying to manage the losses. so i'm very much focused on that moment when we know the boom is there and we can either have put into place or managed the disaster in a way in which we are failing of course because the bad thing is already happening but we are minimizing the harm, loss of life, loss of harm, and the other things were seeing in buffalo, so what are the common things because this gets to buffalo? one of the important aspects of studying disasters is you learn from the past ones. in what we now know, especially in terms of climate harm, that there is two important features that can help us to fail safer because you will not stop the bad things from happening. one is early alert systems and we are learning to be better on

pandemic but whether it is earthquakes, there is technology giving citizens eight to 12 seconds that matters in an earthquake, tsunami warnings, think about the alert systems that give you seconds, and those matter. you can fail safer with even those seconds. so you want systems that will basically say the storm is essentially different and communicate out what those differences are, so that is key. i think buffalo was pretty successful in that regard. i became aware of what would happen to buffalo at least 36 to 48 hours before so you are communicating what you want people to do. the other is of course people have to take responsibility as well for their behavior. i'm not blaming anyone. it is because we have learned from past disasters that people often don't die in snow, they do not die because of a hurricane, they do not die for the thing

itself, they die after the fact because they are either in harm's way or they have not -- or they are going to die of something different. if i look at the data and it is still preliminary, many people die of carbon monoxide poisoning . that is different than dying of snow. the carbon monoxide poisoning's because you are either in your car in your home and your generator isn't working correctly and you don't know how to use it. in terms of what we can learn from this, that's all we have. we have agency, we are human beings who have agency. the best we can do is sometimes just doing better next time is can we get better about communicating, not the harms of snow which people tend to know or say arcane but the harms that improve because of the after impact which is in this case carbon monoxide poisoning which is what we see in some of these cases so it is -- i do not want

to say it is depressing. i try to be hopeful but in one way the title of the book, it is night -- it is not fatalistic, the devil never sleeps. in some ways i wanted to be empowering. at the beginning of the book, the phrase came to me in discussions with a woman from missouri, a lot of people watching in parts of the country they get tornadoes. missouri was -- had a tornado that killed about over 100 people in a small town and in my world, i get invited back -- i get invited to bad things and then back about a year later celebration to show the community survived and one of the women -- the woman in charge of rethinking this after the devastation of the tornado was optimistic and hopeful.

she is very religious but she viewed her religion as tactical, that god had given human beings agency to do better so i said how are you so optimistic? this horrible thing happened. she said i live in tornado country and the devil never sleeps but he only wins if we don't do better next time. it was that thought that i can't stop all bad things from happening or woe is me and all of the bad things in our society, bad people and bad viruses and bad weather and everything, i can't stop that bum may be my contribution is i can help people to learn to do better next time. host: when you talk about the book, you talk about the event, what can we do to predict it and plan for it and afterwards to recover from it.

is that a fair way of looking at it? guest: yes. that's how we think about it, we think of the boom and the boom is not like anything, it is a crisis, it has a definition, a disruption to the core of a system, and here's the difference -- or here's what makes a crisis a crisis, in which your response time is limited. we throw out the word crisis all the time, climate crisis, the crisis of our economy, the crisis of xyz. people like me are pretty careful about how we use the term because how we define it is you are -- is your response time to minimize harm is limited. it's different than i talk about a hurricane is a climates but crisis -- climate is essentially a public policy problem. it's those features that are the boom and the boom can take -- the devil can take any form.

i think we tend to get focused on how do we get better about cyber and how do we get better about climate and how to get better about all these different things. maybe they have commonalities or i believe our response to them have commonalities, they will not be perfect and that is why i do not talk about failing safe, i talk about failing safer. there will be some harm, some consequences, and your measure of success is, for example, do i have a pandemic that kills one point whatever million americans as compared to one that has a much more manageable and certainly would have been achievable fatality rate, so that is how we think about the boom that as we say your runway is short. either extend your one-way or be ready to act in real time and those are familiar. that is my optimism, that we

actually -- it begins to look the same. host: let's look at a private enterprise crisis and, if you were advising southwest airlines are now -- [laughter] what would you tell them and how would you define their situation? guest: so i want to get out of all of the -- it is horrible, i'm not minimizing it. one of the things is because i look at complex systems, you realize this is a phase in which there will be oversight and payments and horror stories for people who were not able to be together, who lost luggage, or worse. i read a story about a guy who cannot get into his transplant surgery. so southwest tells us things will get back to normal today so this is where people like me can step in and this is how i look at it and these things were no.

so southwest excuses that this was just a really bad storm. first of all, they are all really bad storms now. the idea climate is somehow a surprise to us or catastrophic climate event is ridiculous. we have to begin to prepare for them. there are two things that i know the systems and i knew southwest problems before that i look at in terms of what'll i want to fix quickly for southwest? or begin to fix quickly. the first is it is clear to me that they -- and this is one of the chapters, know where your fire is. fire fighters, their number one focus is what is -- where the fire? it's what we call situational awareness. where is the fire and am i safe? . i talk about do you know what is going on in real time and are you able to respond. these are systems that individuals can put into place

before but certainly a company like southwest should have known, so it is clear to me looking at all i have been reading is that southwest had no real-time situational awareness about what was happening to the system in real time so -- i'm part of that is how they are structured in terms of they do not have a hub system and i will get into that next. what i would do is do you have a technology communications is what we call -- situational will awareness capacity, that you are getting real-time data telling you the system is going down. what will that do? you then can then tell your employees stay put and your passengers stay put. to me what became objectionable about -- amongst much objection is they were still having passengers arrive at i courts --

at airports. they know the planes are not going so that is something they can get better on. simply as a management issue and not fair to your customers, also fair to your employees that where we have seen the videos are getting yelled at because passengers are so frustrated and also, don't yell at the flight attendants. it is not their fault. the second, it is clearly a system that was built before southwest grew to the extent it did and could not sustain what we would call sort of band-aid or piecemeal fixes. so southwest is cheaper, people like it, and in the past it was always fixable over time. part of what southwest at in terms of how it is built is it built itself on a point-to-point system, so for viewers, think of you have airplane a in denver,

planning to go to chicago, new york, miami, dallas, back to denver and it is in this point by point system, it will never go to a hub to restock, be replaced or whatever. so it is -- if denver gets disrupted, you've got a line in which there is no capacity to help those people in the other cities. you do not have other planes, you do not have a hub, you do not have surge capacity, you do not have planes on standby. so they have been fine relatively fine with this system. they are not as big as other mystic airlines and because their flights tend to be shorter and particular geographic areas so they could have minor disruptions and get back. the problem is when you have major disruptions. compare that to other airlines, as we know which have various subs and they don't have a single hub, they have multiple places in which basically they have surge capacity.

those airplanes are not going a, b, c, d, e, they are going a comet to see, to see, to be, to d, to be. airlines do this so if jurisdiction a is screwed up and you cannot deal with that, you still have other what we call hub and spokes, you still have other spokes that can survive and keep people moving. that is an airlines job. so business is essentially a structural defect that is -- this is a structural defect that is known and can be fixed. that is what we should take out of a, how are we going to fix this? in my book i talk about the architecture of disaster, that how we are built often impacts whether we can learn to fail safer and southwest knew the way it was built with this system of

which you have no way of helping passengers in city b, c, d, and e because your first city is now down. they knew beforehand, they knew the system could not adapt and there is technology, resources for them to begin to fix their ways because if they want to grow, and other words a smaller airlines can certainly -- kate baer can survive going back and forth the cape or places in new england but southwest grew and it wanted to grow and it has been really successful. their response bill young airport now make the system work for their growth. host: the book is called "the devil never sleeps: learning to live in an age of disasters." the author is former obama administration official juliette kayyem. we will begin taking your calls on this topic that we have been

discussing. (202) 748-8000 in the east and central time zone, (202) 748-8001 if you live in the mountain and pacific time zones. you can also send a text message. please include your first name and city if you would to (202) 748-8003, area code 202. what was your role in the obama administration? what are you doing now? caller: i was a second -- guest: i was a secretary for intergovernmental affairs, the point of contact for the 50 states, cities, tribal nations and territories. the job made a lot of sense for me because i had previously been a stay-at-home land security advisor. i had been one of the people that i coordinated with an federal government. as that type of advisor you oversee strategic planning response of the state agencies

in any crisis disaster or even a mega event so that involves -- i was gone by the time the boston marathon planning which everyone came to understand later and i think was once again relatively successful. we did not stop the bombing from happening but the response, we failed safer. so i did that for a couple years, the big issues in the obama administration at that time from -- remember h1n1 was our first crisis through the bp oil spill, haiti, not fun but all sorts of things in which i was working for janet napolitano. i came back to cambridge and i'm here now and then i went back to cambridge. i'm on the faculty at the kennedy school where i teach in crisis management. i'm the faculty chair of the homeland security program there. my goal is to provide a forum teaching research, all the sort of things reflected in my book

around taking homeland security risk reduction, failing safer, seriously, because it's an important feel as we now know for our nation and world. having gone through a pandemic, i am still on cnn and contribute frequently to the land take and a lot of private consulting as well for companies. not southwest but for similarly situated companies that are in complex logistics, complex supply chain, helping them to be ready for the boom, so that if it happens, they can minimize harm to not just their reputation but obviously to the communities they serve. host: you talked about people having agency over their own lives in responsibility for protecting them but what is the role in your view of government and do you think the homeland

security structure we currently have in the u.s. works? guest: in the book i sort of take the world as it is, not as i wanted to be and try to make it sightly better so it's not a book that will solve climate change but it will help you live through climate change in a sense that i sort of long ago stopped fighting, you know, the department, is it the thing that is going to solve everything? no. the department of homeland security. i think it provides a valuable function. i think it has two diversified -- too diversified in its focus. it is a border and immigration agency as we know and an emergency management agency as we have seen through fema, a lot of other stuff it is involved with i would shed. i think other agencies can be

good at that. and i'm sorry the third piece would the of course cyber and cyber protection, so that is what i would do in terms of its focus, making sure its people know it is focused on sort of three core and important issues for risk minimization in the homeland. in terms of the role of government, of course, it is government's responsibility. it is the primary response. it is why we agree to consent to government is to protect us from safety and harm. so putting into place a sophisticated response, safety and security apparatus is its responsibility so i do not excuse government when it screws up. government is complemented by

all sorts of all other actors. we call them stakeholders, including u.s. citizens who can help government respond better by also, if they can, taking into account their own safety and security. risk minimization is all it is. for example, if you have a gun and you are a responsible gun owner and you have kids, it is as simple as get a safety box. i'm not going to solve the second amendment problem in a day but i can certainly learn to minimize the risk. when i look at numbers and see how kids are getting killed today, it is active shooter's and all the things happening in terms of that but a lot of it is handguns in homes that are not secured. so for parents watching now whose politics may be different than mine, i think we can agree protecting children is a common

goal and take responsible steps to protect our children, so a lot of this empowerment in the book -- here is what major institutions can do, a southwest, abp, any number of the companies i mentioned in the book, here's what the companies can do to minimize risk but here is also what you can do to complement it. i want to make something clear back to the architecture point. i think a lot about how things are built and this is just a reflection of the united states. america, constitutionally, was built on safe. we had to deal with our constitutional structure as we deal with crisis. this became apparent during the pandemic. we are a nation which has obviously a strong federal government but the 10th amendment reserves a lot of

authority to the states, including governors and mayors, and a lot of that authority is in the public safety and public health realm. we know governors and therefore mayors control their police department, they control their public health departments, so i federal government that goes to war so to speak with states and localities will find itself failing as i think the trump administration did because the muscle exists at that more tactical state level. the idea the federal government is the solution is simply the architecturally not true, at the local level, tribal level, territorial, and state level, the tremendous amount of authority and capacity exists there as well. host: julie is our guest.

cindy is our first call. go ahead, cindy. caller: yes, i live in the most densely populated county in florida, which is pinelles county. i have also seen documentaries of how this county will be completely wiped out if we ever get the eye of a cat five hurricane. they continue and continue to build multi-families. we have one million people and counting on this tiny peninsula. there are only four ways out of here going north. each one spilling over into millions also escaping the wrath of the hurricane. what can you do for pinellas county to stop this out-of-control growth and putting people in the path of a category five hurricane? host: thank you, cindy, we got

the point. guest: i wanted to ask her what was the last major hurricane you encountered. i'm guessing what it is but what was the last major incident there? host: you will have to ask rhetorically because she is gone, i apologize. guest: this is important in terms of both good news and bad news. so there are good things happening both in terms of climate change, risk reduction, and we have seen big pieces of news recently about alternatives to fossil fuels and other energy capacity. these are long-term capacity -- long-term solutions. i don't want people to look at what is happening to the world and think all is doomed. we are not a doom to species, we have a capacity to also fix ourselves and learn to manage

better. so the idea that all is lost is completely, simply not true. but there are parts of this country that we have to begin to admit may no longer be inhabitable, at least for the short term, and make our public policy adapt and make it easier for people individually to make those calculations. so to be specific, how are disaster relief system, our zoning system, everything, is based still on a believe disasters are random and rare. in other words they are -- we distribute funds to communities at a bad thing happening, say hurricane. we distribute funds to communities and say let's get back to normal, you build your

home, we feel so bad. you lost your home, we will give you money through disaster relief to rebuild it. democrats and republicans alike act irresponsibly when a disaster hits their community because of course they want money going to their community. so let's take a deep breath and look at the system under something called the stafford act that i described in the book which is we can no longer view disasters as random and rare. how would you want to spend the money after say a community is devastated or as part of a stimulus package or all of this money going to communities now under the important efforts by the biden support infrastructure ? you would want to ensure that people are building in a way that is responsible for the community and climate that they

live in. unfortunately we do not do that. we pass out checks still in disaster management. we are getting better about it. if i were to do anything to help communities like st. petersburg and others that use these funds after say flooding or whatever else in anticipation of a major storm, let's use that money not to build the same get your house back to normal but to build it in a way that maybe you go to another home, called managed retreat. maybe you move your home back, maybe you lift it up, maybe you move your -- if you are a hospital, maybe you move things so they are elevated. we can learn to adapt, we just need to put the resources behind it and we are still stuck as i described in the book and a mindframe that still acts surprised at these disasters. this is the one thing i cannot

sort of fathom say from southwest or even communities that live in hurricane zones. these should no longer surprising. we need to anticipate the disruption and figure out how do we respond in a way that can communicate clearly, provide resources, safe human lives. host: from your book you write so much of our discourse about disasters focuses on the past and why we did not prevent them or on the future and how to stop them from happening again but we live in an age of disasters, they are here and not going away. there will be tragedies but they will be tragedies made less tragic if we commit to sustain preparedness to minimize their conflict. john in virginia, please go ahead with your question or comment. caller: thank you, good morning. guest: good morning. caller: is there any chapters in your book referring to the way

the united states culture or government seems to be thumbing their nose at god recently? all we hear is about transgender, drag shows, gay marriage, mutilation of children, asking first-graders what gender they want to be. even the fact that there is more than three genders. host: i think we got the point. i think it is a little off topic. let's move on to tony in upper marlboro maryland. tony, please go ahead with your question or comment for juliette kayyem, """ the devil never sleeps" is the name of the book. caller: good morning. i think this is relevant. around 2009 to 2010, i believe it was the homeland security director put out a report about

the attempts by far right domestic extremist for veterans and things with military screens and that sort of things. it was politicized by right wing media and other publicans associate backtracked or had to apologize on some of it, which was to bed, but here we are, however many elite -- many years later and the current fbi director in the former trump homeland security director both said the number one threat to the homeland is that. so sort of going through your point about situational awareness, where do you think -- what are your thoughts on that and how can we begin to correct or address it host: host: thank you, sir. caller: that's great and -- host: thank you, sir. guest: that's great and i do address it. in the first days of the obama administration, there was an

effort to begin to focus our efforts, not to disrupt bad thought or political thought but simply on the rise of what -- i want to be clear, violent right-wing extremism. i've been very clear over the last couple years in my writings, you can have the worst thoughts in the world, i could care less. it is the violence piece that then becomes a threat to americans let alone american democracy. that -- first of all it was the early days of anyone really talking about this but it was real. obama was the first -- president obama was the first african-american president. we thought a threat stream focus on him and his family, there was this rising hatred.

fast forward and this does not go away over the course of the obama administration and trump administration. it then takes off and why is that? to be clear, these thoughts are finding comfort, collusion, cooperation, and support online. in other words, i do not believe in lone wolf's and i have written a piece called there are no more lone wolves. the idea these guys are sitting alone in becoming radicalized and walking into a supermarket in buffalo to shoot people, this is not how it happens. they are finding a culture of hate that is supported amongst like-minded people, a don, and that is why responsible social media platforms have been focused on what we call content

control. this is the big debate, it is not because you want to silence right-wing thought or left-wing thought, it is because the data is clear that a certain kind of violent extremism is finding a safe haven on lined and will become radicalized. that is one piece of it. the other is the nature of a political discourse today. i will not deny there are left-wing elements that promote violence. what i can tell you is to compare that to a former and at that time sitting president, what we would call nurturing violent extremism, and maybe even directing as a january 6 report certainly comes to the conclusion of, of violent extremism. you cannot compare those things and it is that nurturing of the hate, whether both sides, and nazi-ism, or asking people to

be violent that we have never seen before. it has fostered and grown. you cannot deny it. there is no comparison to it. i do not to both sides. there is a left-wing violence problem, but it pales in comparison to an apparatus led by former president that is supporting and nurturing violence. let me do the good news. this is solvable. once again, i was in the twitter world and lived, people know my college take -- my politics. if you take successes only if the world all got along or all americans got along, you will be waiting a long time. we are a noisy, messy, dysfunctional country with lots of opinions and some of them are horrific. we survived lots of horrific thoughts. what we need to focus on is the

violent element. what i have seen in my research in the work i do and writings i do is there is a lot of good news out there as well, the terror groups like the oath keepers or proud boys are completely disrupted, they are turning on each other, their leadership has been convicted of pretty serious crimes, they will spend time in jail, they find it hard to recruit, hard to raise money. trump is semi-isolated, he is still wildly popular but to say he has the strength to move people like you once did, he cannot fill a room anymore in terms of his support, so i think it is important for people who worry about the violent element to know that a strategy to put into jail people who showed up january 6 horta fine them, a lot of people found them at the

wrong place at the wrong moment to convict and prosecute the leader of terror organizations, to minimize the harm of its leadership, in this case the radicalism that has given comfort i think by elements of trumpism and also finally to provide an offering for those whose political viewpoints you may not agree with. i certainly do not, of people who voted for trunk, but i think we have a common belief that violence cannot be part of our democratic dialogue, so if you focus on the violence rather than making everyone agree with you, we are seeing lots of offramp paying, opportunities for republican leadership as the january 6 committee showed to average voters who has we saw were unwilling to vote for

people who were election deniers. i am much more optimistic than say i would've even been an early 2021 that we can minimize the strength of violence as an extension of politics that became favored within the right-wing movement and also within elements of trumpism. host: we talked about the government's role in planning for and reacting to crises, catastrophes, disasters. we have talked about private enterprise role on each side but i want to bring in one more element for you and this is the gallup poll saying for the seventh year in the past decade, americans named dissatisfaction with the government as the nation's top problem in 2022, an

average of 19% of u.s. adults mentioned some aspect of the government as a most important problem facing the country and edges ouch inflation, high cost of living, and the economy and immigration it's a tried such row. guest: that's right. i looked at that polling. a couple things, people don't like chaos. they like stability, and most people do not live in the world you and i live then, they just went to live their lives and raise kids and be happy and commit to their communities and their faith and literally, so that chaos that comes from politics, why wasn't there a red wave? the data i looked at in the last election shows a lot of people were voting not about democracy,

they were voting about ending chaos and stability. governments have a response ability to behave in a certain way. people look at d.c. and say things like we are worried about the government. they like their parish president, they tend to have dinner with their mayor. the tribal governments are saying local government, where the boom happens, boone being the disruption, actually people feel a lot better about in terms of its capacity to function because it is not part of this horrible noise. that is not always true. school districts, some school district have become radicalized but if we can focus on supporting local capacity in a disaster or harm, managed by the

state and -- stay and helped by the federal government, this is how disasters work. the locals respond, the state coordinates, and federal government supports. that is how our government works, how our government functions. so that is what i have focused on now, that our local capacity to assert control over how we build, how we respond, how we communicate, is still doable. one of the challenges of the world i live in is, when it works, nobody cares ear as we call it, the preparedness paradox. every day communities are facing disruptions, crisis ease, disasters, maybe not as big as buffalo, and because of the ingenuity of local governments and communities in private sector and ngos in churches and

mosques and synagogues, communities come together and respond. when that happens, because there is not a major disruption, people tend not to focus on it. they do not think this is a good thing, right? the more we prepare the better we do, the less our preparations seem necessary and that is why we call it the preparedness paradox so you are never going to get a good news story out of a disaster or -- disaster management system that worked. my book focuses on the good news stories because we never tell them. maybe rightfully so but our eyes are always focused on for example fukushima, a nuclear facility that had a radiation leak after there was an earthquake and tsunami and disrupts and has radiation leak, massive evacuation, people are not allowed to be near the facility for some period of time. we never talk about a similar

facility and i want to make sure i get my dates right, in owning, in 2011, a similar facility, about 30 kilometers from fukushima, that was prepared to fail safer, it did see the waters rushing in after the earthquake and tsunami in japan. it knew how to fail safer, it it would suffer a catastrophic disruption and, because of preparation and planning, they were able to shut the nuclear facility down. so fukushima, they lived in delusion that there would never be harm to nuclear facilities. fukushima does not fail safer, radiation leak, we never hear about on a gala. so i do a lot on only gala -- what did they do right so that we can do better next time? what they did right was a plan for a disruption, they had the power of their people in the

front line to make decisions, even if sometimes the decisions were wrong, so the guys at the nuclear facility, as they see the waters rush in, they knew they were losing control of the facility and shut it down. there was no radiation leak. in the world i live in, earthquake bad, tsunami bad, but if i choose between a nuclear facility that has radiation leaks and one that merely cannot function anymore, still closed but no radiation leak, i'm choosing the less bad option. that is how you judge success. host: eight minutes left with our guest, juliette kayyem. doreen in baton rouge, think you for holding, you are on the air. caller: hi, how are you? guest: i'm very good, thank you. caller: it is kind of a two-part question for you. i believe the proof is in the pudding and i wanted to know if you agree.

the recent disaster in buffalo, all those poor people, and i hear you saying the local governor or mayor is responsible for their area and they did not do a good job. they were warned for many days that this would be something that never happened and people lost their lives and to me they were not prepared, and recently, the florida situation with the horrific hurricane, the governor did an excellent job and everyone is saying that, that he saved lives, it was amazing, he knew it was a storm, was going to be a record storm, and all the states that our democratic have disasters. host: i think we have -- what i thing we get the point. compare contrast a flow and the hurricane in and compare them.

guest: i want to talk about hurricane ian because we are starting to get the interesting data out of it. it was a catastrophe. when you look at disasters over time, americans have become pretty good at hurricane management. it is of course that is not always true, hurricane maria is an exception about what happened to puerto rico but on the continental united states, as i looked at the last 10 to 12 years, because of our sophistication and local state and federal capacity,, we were good at notifying communities, telling them what they needed to do, communities became familiar with what they need to do so you call evacuation's or have people stay inside and things like that. so that is what is important to remember. when i look at fatality rates of hurricanes over the last decade, most people were not dying because of what we call the hurricane, people tend not to

die in hurricanes. they are dying of what is happening after, and the terminology in my field and it can sound crude and i don't mean it to it is called stupid death and it is not about the people. stupid death or death that could have been avoided because it did not happen in the moment of the hurricane, it happened after. these deaths as we have come to explain them are those that in hurricanes, most of them were happening because of carbon monoxide poisoning. that is just clear, the data was clear. so emergency managers then began to adapt to this reality, people were not dying in the hurricane, they were dying because their generators were not set up well, educating people and carbon monoxide. we can learn over time about how to do better. what we are seeing about hurricane ian is that plans actually were pretty good. and where leaders did not follow

their plans is when people die. how do i know this? in the counties that delayed their own evacuation orders, their plans told them to evacuate their community for whatever reason they second-guessed it. those communities had higher fatality rates of elderly who were dying by drowning, so what does that mean to me? why are people dying from drowning? we know how to deal with this, we know how to evacuate people. it is because those plans were second-guessed, they were not utilized. this is lee county in particular so i don't think the story about ian is everything went well. there are some communities in which we know based on the data, people would have survived had the plans been followed. part of this is learning from these past mistakes and getting better next time. when are we evacuating communities and are we telling

communities most at risk, the elderly at this case hurricane, because they were drowning in their apartments, could we get them out more quickly? then there's a little tough love. i will tell a story that really does work. we talk in terms of freedom in america and i love freedom and it is great and if you do not want to evacuate we cannot force you to evacuate but what we have found in emergency management, if you put the fear of god and people, maybe they will evacuate. one of the tactics and this is not to scare people, it is useful, that people on islands say do not evacuate. what we now do is we ask them to put their name and social security number with a sharpie pen on their arm. why is that? because you cannot deploy safety, you cannot deploy emergency managers to areas that are in the midst of a hurricane.

your sim plea not going to risk your emergency managers to say people who refuse to evacuate. what we have found is once that reality is put in people's face, that that is what it means to assert your freedom and not evacuate, a lot of people are willing to and i think that is good. i think a little tough love by government is good, it tells people the stakes to themselves and to their children are real and whatever ideology keeps them put or tells them not to do something, they should really think about the safety and security of their community. as a parent, i do not find the most successful conversations being one in which i tell my kids that it is right or wrong, they have different standards. it is telling them about their own safety and how something they are doing can cause harm to themselves or their friends. host: juliette kayyem has been our guest, the former obama