. >> narrator: with the outbreak under control, prestige ameritech's orders weren't renewed.pitals went back to buying cheaper masks from their overseas suppliers. reese's business nearly went bankrupt. >> the people that we'd hired, these people thastepped in to save america, they were rewarded by getting in an unemployment line. >> mendoza: when they asked you to ramp up, didn't the government guarantee anything to help support you? >> no. >> mendoza: nothing. >> no. >> narrator: reese showed us letters he and his colleues wrote to the obama administration insisting that "america must re-securits mask supply chain." they said h1n1 was a wake-up call, and warned that in a major pandemic, china could stop shipping maskso the u.s. but in washington, officials had moved on. their fallback would be an emergency stockpile meatockpt to cover medical needs in such a crisis. >> the stockpile fills a gap. if the strategic national stockpile did not exist, we would have very limited or no capability to respond to these types of events. >> narrator: greg burel ran the strategic nationa