>> it gives me great pleasure to introduce the captain of this great ship, captain harnden. [applause] >> well, mr. secretary, admiral sir, generals, it may years, commanding officers, federal, state, local, civic leaders, this really is a senior leader seminar. welcome to bonhomme richard. we're excited to be here in san francisco and honored.

i want to thank you for the fresh water washdown. we do not get enough of it in a san diego. the bonhomme richard is an amphibious assault ship designed to carry a flexible mix of marine and navy units all around the world to accomplish a broad spectrum of missions, from humanitarian and disaster relief, all the way to combat missions. it can operate anywhere and can sustain forces either from the air or from the sea. i think it is appropriate to be this avenue. i cannot think of a better place to accomplish these missions. i was asked to get a little history of bonhomme richard. it is a french name. if you wonder why, it was a ship that was donated to the colonial navy when they were fighting in the revolution. the name is in honor of benjamin franklin. , bonhomme richard good man

richard. in france, it was captain by john paul jones. it went on the campaign off but the british isles to take the word to the british. it ended in a battle against a top of the ship. the bonhomme richard is not. the bottom line is that they had no right to win. there were sinking. half the crew was dead. the crew did what they had no right to do, and they won that battle through climbing in the yard arms, hand-to-hand, and they eventually to the other ship. bonhomme richard sunk next day. it is a great testament to what sailors can do in a testament to defeating diversity. the crew on board today are just as a heroic, when you see the things they do every day, as those heroes were in 1779. again, i want to welcome you

here. i hope you get a chance to see some of the ship as you walk around when you do tours talk to some the sailors and marines who operate it. i am is available for questions about the sheep. i will turn it over to the fleet week folks. thank you again for your hospitality. [applause] >> all right, dave told me to take this, so i am is already breaking the rules. he is our stage manager today. good morning. i am with the san francisco fleet week board of directors. we are very pleased to have the senior leadership seminar taking place this year on the bonhomme richard. just a little quick remark, in may 2010, i got a phone call saying to come on over for lunch, so we can talk about fleet week. i showed up in a room over at the marine memorial, and he had

a big chart laid out and had a bunch of his friends sitting there and said, you are all going to be volunteers. isn't this great? then he proceeded to tell me about a wonderful idea that one of our honor read cochairs that, former secretary of state george shultz. he said since we have all these military folks in san francisco, why don't we use the opportunity to do some training to better prepare ourselves for disaster response, so we took that mission very seriously. we talked about having a tabletop exercise in 2010. but if you know anything but tabletop exercise, and i think a lot of you people do, the back room planning is just an incredible process. hours and hours and hours are put in for every hour of the table top exercise. but what we did decide to do in 2010 is during fleet week, on uss macon island, we held a senior leadership program for

disca and related a briefing on steroids. so we set the foundation for going forward for future fleet weeks, in which we have a common understanding of what the program means. but we promised that in 2011, we would visit the notion of a tabletop exercise. in september, this past september, we did in fact have the table top exercise. and i have to tell you, the folks who did the planning did an incredible job. there are agencies, federal, state, and local agencies, the military folks, but i have to give a special shot up to the san francisco department of emergency management for the incredible job that they did in planning that in for planning and working on this whole program. the sentences the department of emergency management team was just incredible. thank you for that. i also want to thank the port of

san francisco for helping us with all of the birthings, and here we are today on the bonhomme richard. today, we have a rather robust program. look at page 13, and you'll see the agenda. it is right there on the page and will unfold, but we start the program talking about the table top exercise and how that all went, and then we go on to having various assets and various perspectives of disaster response and humanitarian aid -- humanitarian assistance in foreign countries. it will be a wonderful opportunity to learn about each other and what we do. at the end of the day, we will have a recession right here on the hangar deck. in addition to that, i also want to say that there are other parts of the humanitarian assistance to disaster response program. for instance, i will give you some highlights that are also in

the program, but for the second year in a row, the san francisco fire department has done a fabulous job setting is up for an urban search and rescue program for our friends in the military who are visiting. in addition, we have a humanitarian assistance of eligible be set up on the marina green. that will host a medical exchange program. antiwhite to -- and thank you to cal said the medical center for help with that. we have a great program. i should point out some administrative things. if there's any kind of emergency event while we are here, the crew of the bonhomme richard will immediately make themselves present and will help everybody get off the ship. we have to bathrooms to the right over there. from there, i will ask mike, the chairman of the san francisco fleet week board of directors, to come on up.

thank you. [applause] >> safety is important, and my instructions from the stage manager is that we were to use the stairs. i do want to thank all of you for being here, and i especially want to thank the folks that have made all this possible in the program, there are the folks that sponsored the senior leader seminar, and hewlett- packard has done an aging -- an amazing job in helping us put this together, along with california pacific medical center, harris corporation. i do not want to offend anybody, but they're all in the program. i want to thank you so much. fleet week is very expensive to put on. we pay for things like the fuel

for the air show. we pay for the transportation. we pay for the restrooms, trash disposal, and all those kinds of things. the sponsors have been terrific in helping us out. i do want to tell you that this is an important event to me personally, because i in my previous life, i was commanding the first marine division in april of 1992. we had been to the gulf war. we had been in all these parades. we were fat, dumb, and happy down at camp pendleton. and then in april of 1992, the results of the rodney king trial were announced. as a result of the result of the trial, we had the largest riot history. we had 300 people killed, 3000 people wounded. and we found ourselves, two days later, with the first win

division in the seventh infantry division in los angeles to quell the riots. and we discovered that all the individual cities had their on police and fire departments, but none of them had communications that they could talk to each other. so we had to provide the interoperable communications. but we also had a huge a language pis when you tell a fireman fire, that is a different meaning than when you tell a marine fire. so the whole exchange of lexicon and working together, the importance of that, i said personally i would never liked this -- never like to see this kind of situation happen again. it really turns out that the military was actually put in charge of that operation. and i think it was not good for the relationships in the count of los angeles or anything else. so i said, never again. well, this kind of drill that

we're going through here, working together with the civilians and the military, i can assure you, at one time in our future, we're going to be glad that we have done this. so that is my personal story gang of whites think this is so important. we are really blessed in the last that is my personal story of why i think this is so important. the mayor has a very busy schedule running the city and county of san francisco. but he is here and it's going to make some opening remarks because the mayor ed lee, if you would please come forward. since the department of emergency management is concerned about safety, i will ask you to come up these stairs and give us some remarks. please help meet welcome mayor ed lee. [applause] >> well, good morning.

welcome to sunny san francisco. thank you again, general, for your work as chair of our fleet regas association but you haven't really done a tremendous job. i wanted to add to your personal story. you know, i was sent over by former mayor gavin newsom to new orleans a few years ago, and we study what had happened there, and we realized that one of the things that had occurred in new orleans was a breakdown between city government and the neighborhoods, and such that when the hurricane hit and the flooding happened, so many people left the city, and then ey did not come back. because there was no relationship between local government and many of the neighborhoods and many of the residence. that lesson burned in my mind for a very long time. so it is that much more important, general, that when you put this fleet we together, that you made a disaster

preparedness a thing -- the inme vision to the celebration of our armed forces. you have not only touch our city government, but you have helped me touch every neighborhood in this city. that is what we need to do in all of our cities. so thank you very much, general, for your leadership on this. thank you. [applause] i also wanted again our honorary chair, former secretary schulz. you have been such a great leader here. i want to thank you for putting this together. i know senator feinstein could not be here, that p is extremell in reminding us that we owe a great debt of gratitude to our armed forces in the city. i'm not to thank our chief protocol officer for welcoming the officials and visitors here as well. i also want to thank captain

harnden again for an impressive ship we have here today. you are occupying the space that in a couple years will hold the ships that will raise at the america's cup 34. it will be right here. some of the team ships will be located right here. for now, this is a great occupancy of this particular pier. i look forward to this afternoon when i can see all the equipment located up the stairs as the sun comes shining up. every year, the fleet week is of course paying tribute to the women and men and are proudly serving in our navy and our coastguard and our marines, and is remarkable that in recent years, this week has developed into a much more than just the sight and sound of the parade of ships and the blue angels. the newly established focus on disaster preparedness is an invaluable in addition to our city. since 2004, our city has

conducted approximately 100 exercises with the leadership of our department of the marjah thing management. additionally, approximately 250 training exercises, workshops city-wide, have been conducted with first responders and other key city officials and many of these training and exercises have gone well beyond our government agencies. they now agree non-government, a eighth-based, and community- based organizations, businesses, and schools. we have revamped our city's outdoor public warning system, using homeland security funding. and today, there are 109 sirens with voice and tone capabilities located throughout the city. as part of our regular exercise on tuesday afternoons in our afternoon testing, we record announcements that are in english, followed by spanish and

chinese in some of the areas that we have also enacted alert, saidsf anaya personal use on a weekly basis, to make sure that things are correctly being sent out to all of our citizens who sign up. that text-based system delivered emergency information to cell phones, pda's, e-mail account, and 16,500 have signed up for a largesf. we had our award winning website, 72hours.org to help create emergency plans, bill disaster kids, and get involved in training before disaster occurred and volunteered to help out afterwards to that information is available in english, spanish, chinese, russian, and vietnamese. in addition, we also have