In fact, Craig is on record as saying:
The most perishable and precious commodity in disaster response is time, and you never get it back. You want somebody that can synthesize a lot of variables very quickly and know when to push the system to go now versus waiting for a formal request for assistance. You don’t want someone who wants all the information to make the perfect decision because it takes too long.
If I get a scale-7.8 earthquake in California, I’m not going to wait for someone to tell me it’s bad. We’ve already run exercises and models. Why are we waiting? We should be able to generate an immediate response.
My biggest thing to the next administration is: Make sure you have somebody that Trump will empower and trust to make those decisions in the early moments of an event.
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