NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 31

HURRICANE
HARVEY

CHIEF SAM PEÑA
Houston Fire Department
Houston, Texas

In late August, Hurricane Harvey
dropped between 40 and 50 inches of
rain on Houston over the span of just
a few days, inundating even neighborhoods where flooding has been rare
or nonexistent. Though the Houston
Fire Department is one of the largest
in the country, with 100 stations and
roughly 4,000 firefighters, the storm's
impact exposed problems with department resources, which included just
10 evacuation boats, six rescue boats,
and a single high-water rescue vehicle,
tools Peña described as "inadequate" in
Harvey's aftermath. Peña had been on
the job in Houston for just eight months
when Harvey hit.
CHIEF PEÑA

We have a lot of experience with hurricanes-we went through Ike, Rita,
Allison-but this storm fell into the
black swan category for us. It was
something really unexpected. You
would expect the operational period
during a hurricane to be one to two

HURRICANE
IRMA

CHIEF DAVID DOWNEY
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue
Miami, Florida

CHIEF OTTO DROZD III
Orange County Fire Rescue
Orange County, Florida

days maybe, but this thing lasted over
a week.
This storm highlighted something
that we are dealing with on a day-to-day
basis: the demand [on our department] is continuously higher than
our capacity. As big as the Houston
Fire Department is, our assets are not
adequate enough to even address the
expected floods. The biggest gap was the
amount of equipment that we were able
to muster. We needed boats, high-water
vehicles, those types of things.
Do you know how many people fit
in a dump truck? Thirty-five. We found
that out because we were using dump
trucks as high-water vehicles.
You can't budget for the extraordinary, which is what Harvey presented,
but we certainly should be budgeting
for the expected risk in the community.
We find ourselves really outmatched
right now in regards to resources, professional development, and training to
efficiently respond to these high-risk,
low-frequency events. But even those

low-frequency events are happening
more often. The conversation now has
really got to be about how much risk
the community wants to buy down.
What investment does it want to make,
and how much security do we want
to have within the community to be
able to respond to these things that
are happening at least once a year? At
this moment, my assessment is that
we're not prepared. If we had more
resources, we'd be better prepared to
respond to what we experienced.
Despite the challenges, Houston's
firefighters made more than 7,000
documented rescues of flood victims
throughout the city, "using every piece
of equipment we had," Peña said. About
1,000 of Houston's 4,000 firefighters
were on duty during Harvey. During the
height of the storm, the department
sent an email to the remaining 3,000
firefighters telling them not to come to
their stations unless specifically asked-
most self-deployed anyway as private

N F PA . O R G / J O U R N A L * NFPA JOURNAL

| 31


http://nfpa.org/journal

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - November/December 2017

Contents
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - Cover1
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - Cover2
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 1
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - Contents
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 3
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 4
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 5
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 6
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 7
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 8
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 9
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NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 18
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 19
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NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 31
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 32
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 33
NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 34
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