Brian Murray - Harris County OEM Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
God think Harvey must have felt a lot like that.
Six twenty two is our time here in Houston's War News.
Brian Murray's with this Harris County Office of Emergency Management's
eighth anniversary this week of Hurricane Harvey. So I guess
the first question, Brian, is what do we learn from
Harvey and what have we fixed as a result of that.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
You know, I think that one of the things that
Harris County residents do well as adapt and because we
get hit with so many different types of storms, whether
they're tropical flooding, we're always pulling lessons from them. I
think from Harvey, the biggest things that we learned is
that there's not a place in this area that can't flood.

(00:39):
When you look at the fact that almost eighty percent
of the county was under at least a foot and
a half of water, that's a pretty scary statistic. You know,
trillion gallons gallons of water on our you know, fell
in four days. That's an unthinkable amount of rain. But
here's where I think we've made some differences. I think
we got very realistic about some of the tools and
training that we needed to combat or at least to

(01:00):
face something like that. We've almost doubled the number of
high water vehicles and boats, you know, rescue boats since
that time. I think that our first response teams and
the volunteer and city fire departments around around the county
have done more to train for how to do rescue safer,
for how to handle you know, pulling people out of water,

(01:23):
and we've gotten a little bit better at messaging some
of the things to do. We never thought until Harvey
that we would have a situation we would have so
many people stuck on rooftops, and so there were some
things that we needed to learn to tell people, like
don't go into the attic. So there are things we've learned.
But I think, you know, again, Harris County residents are

(01:43):
pretty darn resilient to begin with, which is which is
really a blessing for us. But it's it's just I
still get goosebumps thinking about that week.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Yeah, I do too. Well, it may sound silly, but
here's one of the things I learned. I learned that
those big ass pickups that are jacked way up with
the huge tires around them, that look so silly most
of the time coming real handy when you've got floodwaters.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Going on, and that's the truth.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
I can't deny that once. That's a good lesson and
I think it brought a great point. I think one
of the lessons that was learned is to be prepared
to have a boat. Even though we don't we don't
live on lakes most of us, we do live near
tributaries that can flood, and having something you can get
into that floats is a pretty handy thing to have,
especially if you are a first responder like police and fire.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
As I said, you know, the first response I just
is basically double the number of vehicles they have to
do rescues, and that's a good thing. I think the
other thing that Harvey should have taught us and should
have reminded us, is that, you know, hurricanes are not
our biggest threat here. It really is flooding. You know,
by the time we got to Harvey in twenty seventeen,
we've seen success of many major floods in fourteen and

(02:55):
twenty fifteen. Harvey was just the the ultimate and it's
a very very unlikely we're going to see something like
that again. But it's retainly not impossible. But it does
speak to the fact that there is no excuse for
not being prepared all the time. We talk about being
prepared for hurricane season because it's kind of like the
Marquee event or the Marquee, you know, the storm. But

(03:16):
really Harvey wasn't a hurricane for us. It was a
flunt event. It was a rain event. So the idea
of being prepared for hurricane season absolutely true. But I
need people to be prepared every day of the year
for whatever.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Comes amen to that. I think the other thing that
we all learned from this is that five hundred year
storms are not necessarily once every five hundred years. They
can happen, They can happen at any time. We also
found out we have some pretty good friends in Louisiana
with the Cage and Navy, and we've been good friends
to them as well. And I think we also found

(03:49):
out we can pretty much survive anything. Think about it.
You just said it. Eighty percent of Harris County was
under a foot of water and it looked like something
that nobody could ever recover from. But we did.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
You know, Jimmy, you m you brought a really good
point with Occajun Navy, and you know, they had brought
up about two hundred boats to the area in the
space of you know, hours to help to help respond.
And I think what that does highlight and something that
people need to be aware of is how big a
role our nonprofit community and just playing all volunteers play
and disaster recovery and response. It's almost bigger than what

(04:23):
the government does. You know, people, you know, wait till
after a disaster, Oh, where's schema. Well, most of the
relief for our residents, whether that comes from something is
you know, basic as distributing food and water to doing mucking,
gutting and rebuilding. A lot of that is managed by
nonprofit communities. Some of them are faith based, some of
them are you know, like the Red Cross, the United

(04:44):
Way and the Salvation Army. But those those agencies are
really who drives our recovery and between that and our residents,
we just couldn't do it without them.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, Neighbors helping neighbors. Brian, thank you, good to talk
to you. Let's hope we don't talk about this again
anytime soon. And Brian Murray with their Arris County Office
of Emergency Management at six twenty seven