In the wake of Memorial Day weekend flooding in Fort Bend County and the start of hurricane season June 1, the city of Katy is launching its first emergency operations center. In a conference room of the police station, the city had its first EOC simulated emergency practice session in May. The room will be outfitted with new computers by July and ready for use in a large-scale emergency, officials said.
“We’re trying to keep up with the times and manage the growth,” Katy Emergency Management Coordinator Maria Galvez said.
Harris and Fort Bend counties have long had emergency operations centers to coordinate emergency response efforts. After the Memorial Day weekend flooding in and around Simonton in District No. 3, Fort Bend County came close to activating its emergency response system, Precinct 3 Constable Rob Cook said.
Cook and county constables assisted with a voluntary evacuation in the southern part of the precinct.
“If we had gone into full emergency mode, our emergency response coordinator would have stepped in to take over,” Cook said.
Need for emergency coordination
Galvez was an emergency medical services first responder during hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. At that time the city of Katy had a volunteer fire department and no centralized emergency command center.
“We were boots on the ground, running everything from the field. But we were much smaller then. We could do that. Now, with all the new construction, we need a central place to coordinate response,” Galvez said.
In planning the new operations center, Galvez took into account the number of city workers who would be running operations from the command center. Individual workstations were designed to accommodate representatives from the police and fire departments, EMS and city administration offices. Each department has a representative that will coordinate the field response from the control room.
“[In a state of emergency], this room will be packed with people from all departments coordinating the emergency response. Pretty much everyone [will work from here] except the mayor and City Council, who have their own meeting space at City Hall,” Galvez said.
After hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ike, Galvez said the emergency management industry evolved to become more efficient in large-scale responses. She and other first responders regularly attend workshops through the Texas Department of Public Safety and TEEX, a cooperative learning center through Texas A&M University that provides emergency response and homeland security training to more than 160,000 people from 79 countries each year.[polldaddy poll=8948847]
“It has become much more important to follow protocol and have everyone on the same page to get the proper chain of command in motion,” Galvez said. “Once you push that button and activate the emergency operations command, there’s a set of procedures that must be followed in order to set in motion the qualifications for [Federal Emergency Management Agency] reimbursement.”
Galvez said she and an emergency management committee made up of city administration and first response personnel toured several command centers in similar-sized cities such as League City.
“We didn’t tour [the command centers for] Harris or Fort Bend counties because they serve a much larger area, and we’ll never be that big,” Galvez said.
The committee approved a design with three large monitors and a projection screen that enable the team to monitor multiple situations simultaneously and connect with state and federal response teams via video conference.
Fire department response
The Greater Katy region is served by four fire departments, some of which are staffed by volunteers. The largest, West I-10 Volunteer Fire Department, serves a majority of the unincorporated Harris County area.
In emergency situations, fire departments are first on the scene and the first to come to each other’s assistance, Cook said.
“We’ve had incidents where there may be a major fire out in Fulshear, for example, and maybe Firethorne [Fulshear Fire Department] goes out to assist,” Cook said. “We’ve had Willow Fork [Fire Department] send in one of [its] trucks to sit at Firethorne so that community doesn’t go without [a truck] if there’s another fire.”
In 2012 the city of Katy shifted from a volunteer fire department to a full-time staff. That’s also when Galvez became the city’s first dedicated emergency operations coordinator. She runs her office out of the fire station at 1417 Avenue D and works closely with first responders on everything from car accidents on I-10 to flooding and emergency preparedness drills.
As the need for emergency services has grown, Katy Fire Chief Rufus Summers has coordinated a new hiring and promotion process over the last two years. The city is in the process of finding land to build a new fire station that will add an additional 12 employees to the department’s 36 members, Summers said.
When it comes to emergency response, most people think of large-scale disasters, but smaller ones are just as taxing on the system, Summers said.
“I-10 is our biggest threat all the way around,” he said.
With the increased lanes and commercial property along I-10, the potential for a major hazardous materials incident means the city has to prepare for hazmat containment and mitigation, he said.
“We have [interlocal] agreements with all the other agencies in the area,” Summers said.
Still, Summers said the clean-up cost to Katy taxpayers is something that has to be factored in. The city has implemented a cost recovery system to bill non-residents for the cost of wreck cleanup within city limits, he said.
Along the Grand Parkway, Cook said the county responds to wrecks, but they have not implemented a similar cost recovery system for non-residents.
“We took infrastructure into account [with all the new development occurring in the region],” Galvez said. “[When it comes to emergency response], you have to know what resources you have and plan accordingly.”
