22 Quotes by Joe Becker

We need to change who we are. We can have the most robust system possible, but what we need to have are the right volunteers in the right places doing the right work.

We will put in place in warehouses throughout the affected areas and around the country supplies needed to shelter 500,000 people. We will pre-position meals prepared to eat for a million a day.

We are building an IT (information technology) infrastructure to be able to support 2 million families that have need of financial assistance and we will have that in place by July 1.

We had some areas that we couldn't get to as quick as we would want to.

We could wait until we built a system that was big enough to handle the demand or we could launch what we had and build it as we went along. Did we frustrate people? Yes. ... But we were out there and we were providing all that we could do with what we had.

At the end of the day, what really matters is people are serving me (the catastrophe victim) who understand me and who know me and who can help me. The rural congregation down the country lane should know that it can be part of the community's disaster response, and the Red Cross can help them become part of that response.

The scope of this is just so huge. If you took New Orleans out of the equation, Mississippi and Alabama would be a bigger job than we tackled in all four of the storms that hit Florida last year.

They said they thought he might be a burglary suspect.

This is the largest response to a single natural disaster in the 125 years of the American Red Cross, and there's no doubt it will set many records in terms of the length and expanse of the operation.