All Occupants Safely Evacuated
A FIRE IN A HOUSTON, TEXAS, ASSISTED-LIVING facility brought a 3-alarm response for the difficult evacuation of the residents as the fire raced through the attic.
KPRC-TV
The fire began on the third floor of one of the buildings in the Tremont Retirement Community. The building involved did not have any bed-ridden residents, but most of them needed some sort of assistance to get around. As soon as the alarm bells sounded in the building, all employees including the cafeteria workers sprung into action following evacuation procedures that called for them to respond to assigned areas and assist evacuating residents.
The first-arriving officers immediately upgraded the dispatch brining more than 100 firefighters to the scene where all 249 residents, all with motion handicaps, were successfully evacuated.
The displaced residents were moved to an auditorium and a dining room at the center, where HFD paramedics could tend to them, officials said.
The sprinkler and alarm systems were operational at the time of the fire. Community staffers also regularly conduct evacuation drills, HFD spokesman Patrick Trahan told the Houston Chronicle.
"They know how to handle these type of situations," Trahan said. "All that training came into play here."
KRIV-TV
The fire burned through the upper floor and attic for about an hour before the resources could knock it down. The fire was extinguished at 6 pm.
KRIV-TV has the full story plus additional video reports HERE.
* * * * * * *
Disaster Redefined
Comments OffDo You Know What a Disaster Really Is?
Here in America we largely accept our disasters drawn from the al a carte menu and hunker down to dine. Be it storm, fire, flood, earthquake or terror we generally rise to the occasion, eventually, while eschewing the second helping.
Japan is being force fed from the all-you-can-eat disaster buffet and they didn’t even choose the restaurant. One wonders how we would fare in a similar circumstance.
History is partly a process of re-defining the past as we constantly look back benefiting from life experience. The cataclysm in Japan recasts the American disaster in all of its suffering and loss in a new light. Andrew, Loma Prieta, Red River 97, Mount Saint Helens, Katrina, and even 9/11, while excruciatingly painful events, are somehow seen differently after this Japanese horror.
Associated Press
As firefighters and paramedics we can also see that it curiously redefines the notion of “emergency.” To once again (and for the last time) employ the food analogy, we thought we were the big chefs in the kitchen only to find out that when the restaurant really gets busy, we are peeling potatoes out back. What we do every day, as important as it is, is only made possible by the thankfully (and mostly) manageable scale and pace of mayhem in our world. Nature not so gently reminds us of our relatively meager abilities and the awesome size a disaster can attain.
Japan also teaches us anew the sobering reality that the power of the earth includes a destructive element which renders human life valueless and sweeps it away in seconds without ceremony or mercy. That is terror.
It’s ironic though, that as the nuclear aspect has slowly spiraled out of control with exposed fuel rods threatening a meltdown, that a key part of the stopgap solution has been calling in a series of engine companies in an effort to cool the fuel.
Reuters
That evolution wasn’t taught in probationary school but it’s still nice to be needed, I think.
Our best to the brothers and sisters in Japan as they need all the support they can get.
* * * * * * *