Buttigieg: ‘I Was Mayor of My Hometown for Eight Years, We Dealt With a Lot of Disasters’

STEPHANOPOULOS: “The administration has come under some fire for its response. The mayor of East Palestine has said it took nearly two weeks to contact him. There were shouts of ‘Where is Pete Buttigieg?’ at a town hall meeting last week. What’s your response to that? When are you going to go to East Palestine?”
Buttigieg: “Well, I am planning to go, and our folks were on the ground from the first hours. I do want to stress that the NTSB needs to be able to do its work independently. But when I go, the focus is going to be on action. Look, I was mayor of my hometown for eight years. We dealt with a lot of disasters, natural and human. And one of the things I noticed very quickly is that there’s two kinds of people who show up when you have that kind of disaster experience: people who are there because they have a specific job to do and are there to get something done, and people who are there to look good and have their picture taken. When I go, it will be about action on rail safety, like the actions that we are calling on Congress to help us with, that we’re calling on industry to take, and that we are undertaking ourselves as a department to help make sure that these kind of things don’t happen in the future.”