Chertoff vows feds won't supersede local responders

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Monday that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that front-line responders have the necessary vaccines to defend against biological threats, but added that he has no intention of superseding state and local emergency responders in handling a wide range of future disasters.

"One of the things we're very sensitive to is you can't ask people to go out and save lives if you don't give them the tools to make sure [they can] conduct these activities without putting their own lives unnecessarily at risk," Chertoff said during a keynote speech at the International Association of Fire Fighters legislative conference in Washington. He challenged state and local responders to extend their training and exercises to cover nontraditional threats.

"We will continue, of course, to deal with fires and chemical spills and hurricanes and natural disasters which have been around since time immemorial. But we now face, of course, additional threats which could be manmade threats, whether they are biological attacks, whether they are chemical attacks, whether they are even radiological attacks," he said.

Chertoff cited a potential avian flu outbreak in the United States as one example of a nontraditional threat but also acknowledged that the government does not yet have a vaccine to fight it. Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said during a cross-country tour to promote local preparedness for a potential pandemic that a vaccine could take at least six months to develop once the virus is transmitted from human to human.

Until then, "we'll be dependent upon traditional public health measures to contain and limit it," Leavitt said of the virus. He also urged Americans to stockpile emergency supplies to deal with a bird flu pandemic.

In his remarks, Chertoff emphasized that the federal government would not supplant state and local emergency responders on the front lines of a disaster. "The idea is to carefully understand your requirements, assess your capabilities, work with you to figure out what additional capabilities you need, and then draw upon the capabilities we have at the federal government to support you," he said.

Chertoff also said the National Response Plan "had a very rough test" with hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma last year. But he did not call for the plan to be scrapped, saying instead that the department is going to strengthen its unified incident management command system.

Although Chertoff said the relationship between the federal government and state and local emergency responders still needs to be strengthened, he did not mention the ongoing debate in Congress over changing the funding formula for first-responder grants to state and local governments.