to meet expected needs and material resources have been prepossession and 23 warehouses across the country for easy access and mobilization, we have completed a detailed assessment of our communications equipment inventory and verify their readiness of our nation wide disaster fleet. the national shelter system is ready and now contains shelter locations in capacity information for over 55,000 buildings that could be potentially used as shelters across this country. the national shelter system is used for both planning and operational decisions and records all shelter openings and closings and overnight populations on a daily basis. we have made the national shelter system available to fema and the states free of charge. and it's also currently being used by 12 other national non-government partners. it is also a critical function that requires advance planning. while we focus on the use of local volunteers and when possible also have a bank chondria people trained and available to leave their communities to go to disasters, the number is now 90,000 which is a substantial increase from the

active duty forces to back them up at the request of the federal emergency management agency and we prepossession six aircraft. >> pardon me, you said your requests came from fema to you? does that have to originate at the state level? >> senator, the process by which we would activate north comm. would be at the request of the state and we wouldn't have assets within either the national guard or other federal assets and was appropriate. we would mission to ask the folks at north comm. to provide assistance. one thing we have done that goes back to the issues the chairwoman raised previously a lot of times these would be requested we haven't planned ahead of time. what we've done is after katrina and then after the hurricanes last year, we had developed what we call a pre-scripted mission which is essentially we put together the type of things we would be likely asking for from north comm.. we write these missions clearly what we are trying to accomplish and then north comm. trains those resources and has that ready to go so that rather than try to describe or call pieces to do something we can a