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$40 Million Warehouse Fire in Houston

3 comments

A LARGE, OPEN FIRE IN A HARRIS COUNTY, TEXAS, warehouse Friday morning destroyed the county’s entire inventory of 10,000 electronic voting machines.

KTRK-TV

The 3-alarm fire in the 27,000 sq. ft. building started sometime around 4 am and when the first units arrived about 1/3 of the building was already involved.  The chief officer in charge immediately went to outside operations since there was nobody working in there at that time of day and the construction of the building of sheet metal walls was conducive to early collapse.

KRIV-TV Ch. 7 was at the fire scene and filed this video report:

Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman said that the fire destroyed $30 million worth of equipment and caused another $10 million in damage to the building.  She believes that the county will be able to borrow enough machines from other jurisdictions along with their vendor, and press a “vote early” campaign, that they will be able to handle the upcoming election in just over 70 days from now.

KTRK-TV relates:

The slightly better news is that the management system into the county’s voting system is still housed in downtown Houston. Even though the machines are broken, the system and the software used to implement the system is still up and running.

The question is, where do you get the replacement machines? The vendor for the county is at work and they will be meeting with election officials. They are also looking at other counties throughout the state of Texas for help. No matter what, Beverly Kaufman says she’s devastated, but wants to ensure that the elections will go on.

“We are going to continue to A, try to get to the bottom of what happened out there and B, to assess what our needs are going to be for the general election. I’m gratified that I have heard from every member from commissioners’ court this morning, assuring me of their support to supply the resources that we need, to pull this election off,” said Kaufman. “I’m very optimistic, in spite of this great challenge and the reason why I’m optimistic is I know the caliber of my people.”

KTRK-TV

The Houston FD had the fire out in about four hours and arson investigators are working the scene.  But no apparent cause has been found yet.

The Houston Chronicle has the STORY.
The Houston Press has MORE.

Posted by on August 27, 2010 • Filed under: fire, Fires, Videos
  • mofiretech1

    Government technology building — probably self-insured — so obviously there was no need for a simple low tech fire sprinkler system to protect the tax payers property. Of course If it had been a privately owned structure the fire prevention code would have most likely required automatic sprinklers.

    Oh well the tax payers will pay again.

  • Anonymous

    That was my first thought exactly.

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  • mofiretech1

    Someone in Houston should send the link to this Firegeezer story to Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman and reporters Chris Moran of the Houston Chronicle and Chris Vogel of the Houston Press – maybe someone will ask why there were no sprinklers and God Forbid learn how valuable and really inexpensive they are — even in government buildings!!