Note to Reader: After reviewing the DHS posted transcript, I have made very minor edits to the posted DHS transcript where this text was taken. Additionally, links to the various programs mentioned are also provided for additional details. No actual content was changed.

QUESTION: Okay. I’m going to throw one more if I can. You mentioned about with the shelters, and providing the IPAWS capabilities and the things that are being done with pets, etcetera. One of the things I know during my deployment that became an issue was — this was one of the things that you were shocked at because it was something you forgot was dealing with persons when you have a mass shelter that may be sexual predators. People that have been convicted of those types of things. That was a real hot button issue. How has that issue been defused or been dealt with when we’re dealing with shelters and you’re creating emergency shelters literally almost at a moments notice as far as screening people and addressing those issues?

MR. PAULISON: Working with — doing agreements with DOJ of how we allow — we have privacy issues obviously we have to deal with. And those are federal laws that we have to deal with. But allowing DOJ to have access to certain parts of that where they can check for people who are sexual predators or felons or things like that without violating the privacy laws of everybody in the whole group. So it’s — I don’t want to get into a lot of the details of how we’re doing that, but the fact is we’re much more comfortable that we can give law enforcements the information they need than what happened in Katrina. It was a big issue. No question about it. A big issue. And we were trying to make sure we could give everything we could to law enforcement without violating the federal laws for privacy that we all hold near and dear to our hearts. And we’ve been able to do some of that, so I’m comfortable we’re not going to have those types of people in the shelters.

It’s also providing the right type of security in shelters. Planning ahead. Now we know where the shelters are. We know where you’re going to go if you’re evacuated, if we evacuate you — we as an emergency management system. We know how you’re going to get there and what shelter you’re going to go to and we know that that shelter is going to have security and it’s going to have the food and water and all the things to take care of you.

So it’s a much different system. We didn’t even have a registry of all the shelters before. And now, working with the Red Cross, we have that. And so we have some 35,000 shelters that are identified. Now, we can’t keep up with every little church and stuff like that who opens to doors up, but for the most part we have a much better handle on the sheltering system in the country than we did in the past. And make sure that they’re going to be — the Red Cross has gone out and actually inspected them, making sure the structures are sound, they meet all the requirements for evacuation shelter so you’re not putting people in harms way after taking them out of harms way. And again, having the right amount of security there is a big issue to stop — if you did have a bad person in there, having the right security to stop anything from happening.