Collins Directs Planning Summit Communication Key in Disasters

Summary

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AUGUSTA - Quoting a sadistic prison guard in the classic film "Cool Hand Luke," Maine's U.S. Sen. Susan Collins told a gathering of emergency preparedness planners that the failed response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last fall boiled down to one basic problem.

"What we have here is a failure to communicate," she drawled, the words sounding foreign in her twangy Aroostook County accent. Collins, who chairs the Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee, was in Augusta on Wednesday to speak at a special daylong conference on disaster response planning. She used the results of her committee's recently concluded investigation into the response to the Gulf Coast hurricanes to illustrate the many individual failures that together made for one of the worst natural disasters in the country's history, and exhorted planners in Maine to solve the problems as they prepare for whatever crises the future may bring.

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Extract

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Collins Directs Planning Summit Communication Key in Disasters

"We've got to communicate like never before, because the stakes are so high," she said. Collins said the next disaster could be a terrorist attack, a major hurricane or some other large-scale event.

Collins told the audienc...

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