Michael Hopmeier, president of Unconventional Concepts, Inc. (UCI), a Mary Esther, FL, consulting firm, made those remarks in an exclusive interview published in the July 5 edition of GSN as part of what the magazine called "a refreshingly objective and candid judgment" about the deadly serious business of planning for disasters.

The federal government still lacks an "agreed upon set of scenarios or realistic threats" from which to make its disaster preparedness plans, Hopmeier said. Most of the 15 standardized scenarios developed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), he added, are unrealistic, with the few that are not -- "the natural disaster scenarios, the principal problems we deal with -- being small and poorly thought out.

"Even given the scenarios that exist, there is a lack of understanding on the part of the federal government that first responders in state and local communities have real jobs," Hopmeier said. "And because these deal with real incidents, their ability to train and prepare is extremely limited."

"Organizationally, the government has never been well set up or well organized to deal with any type of internal disaster, man-made, natural or accidental," he added. With the exception of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, now part of DHS, "no other government agency was really set up in a response role.

"We need to take a step back and reassess" the federal government role in "how preparedness leads to response, and where the responsibilities are," Hopmeier said. He urged that a new immediate response system be developed to replace the current approach that "pulls together a bunch of random different offices, agencies and organizations and, by giving them all the same name and same business card, try to make them a coherent whole."