Gene Taylor on Disasters

Forecaster warns hurricane meeting participants: 'Remember our errors'

Recalling the days after Katrina, U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Bay St. Louis, said, "You first-responders did a great job, but you could also see a difference in people's eyes when uniformed military personnel started showing up."

Taylor said the increased U.S. military presence in Afghanistan will create a shortage of everything from generators to temporary morgues.

One positive development since Katrina, he said, is a clear line of command for a military response to a major disaster.

Gene Taylor warns: Another terrorist attack will happen

"The next time it may not be a natural disaster," Taylor said. "I know this is a hurricane conference, but you need to keep this in the back of your mind.

"There are 35 nations in the world that have some form of weapon of mass destruction," the congressman continued. "A lot of those nations, like Pakistan and the former Soviet Union, are very unstable. It is entirely possible that if terrorists get to the right general, the right admiral, they can get hold of one of these weapons."

"It is going to happen. I pray it doesn't happen, but it is just logical with that many loose weapons laying around that, at some point, bad actors are going to get hold of them," he said.

Taylor said he had asked an Arab analyst why terrorists had not used improvised explosive devices on American soil and was told "in the Arab mind anything less damaging than Sept. 11 would be considered a failure."

The attitude may have stopped smaller attacks, Taylor said, but "the flip side of that coin is that means the next will be worse than Sept. 11."

Taylor said there is no guarantee an attack would target New York or Washington, D.C., although it is likely "they would go after something uniquely American, but we can't count on that."

Taylor, who serves as chairman of the Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces, urged the emergency officials to consider what they would do if a biological, chemical or nuclear attack occurred.

Taylor on preparedness

“I don’t want to be gloom and doom,” Taylor said. “I just want people to be aware.”