Road to Recovery: Japan's Long Journey Ahead

This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," March 14, 2011. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

SEAN HANNITY, HOST: And Japan's road to recovery sure to be a long one. Experts are projecting the damage to cost at least $180 billion and there's no price that can be put on thousands of lives lost. So how does a nation begin to address a crisis of this magnitude?

Joining me now with reaction is former FEMA official, president of Witt Associates Barry Scanlon is with us. Thanks, Barry.

You look at the human toll. You look at the immediate needs of people. Obviously, there's food, there's water, there's energy, there's supplies, there's blackouts, you know, the magnitude of that, 10,000 plus dead, tolls still rising, hundreds of thousands homeless. What is the first thing you have to do at this moment?

BARRY SCANLON, FORMER FEMA OFFICIAL: Well, it is a massive logistical effort. They obviously have American, United States has sent urban search-and- rescue teams. So usually it's the first 72 hours, sometime stretches longer to find as many of the victims as possible and save them, if you can.

But they have, I've seen numbers of 400, 500,000 people that are in shelters and are being evacuated. So you need to get safe and sound surroundings for them, shelter, food and water that's something that's going to require not just their domestic capabilities, but probably the international community as well.

HANNITY: Yes, one of the sad things, as we look at these images right now and the devastation, I mean, not only from the earthquake, but the tsunami and literally, wiping out entire communities. It doesn't seem as we've seen these images that they've had even really had an opportunity to get in there and dig under that rubble in a lot of areas that have been hit.

SCANLON: No, I don't think they have. A lot of the areas are tough to get to because of the infrastructure loss so that is something that is going to exacerbate this problem for days ahead, weeks ahead. But of course, you have to focus on the survivors as well.

This is something that is going on for weeks and months. They obviously are going to have to find shelter for hundreds of thousands of people on at least a temporary or long term basis. The same sort of thing that we saw in the United States with Katrina, it is not something they will solve overnight. They are going to need a lot of help doing it.

HANNITY: Yes, but in the case of these communities that have literally been completely wiped out. We saw the case of this young baby being rescued under the rubble. This guy was two miles out at sea, he was rescued.

You know, what I'm not seeing in a lot of these images is a lot of rescue teams. You've got to wonder if there are people buried in the rubble in some of these shots we are looking at without the personnel to get on the ground and help find them.

SCANLON: I think without question that's probably the case. We saw that in the Indian tsunami where just the wide spread devastation it took them a long time to identify the bodies and find them in the wreckage unfortunately.

So that's something that will go on for some time and then they have to work on long term recovery and making sure that they're building back better and stronger for the next time.

HANNITY: All right, Barry Scanlon, thank you so much for being with us. We appreciate your time.

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