Houston Recovery

In Control

The biggest storm in Houston’s history proved no match for a well-rehearsed response — and a resilient business community

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett — who is in charge of disaster response in his hometown of Houston — was at the White House on September 8 receiving a commendation on behalf of the Harris County Citizens Corps for its role in providing food and shelter to refugees fleeing Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Unfortunately, Judge Emmett couldn’t enjoy the adulation. His thoughts were focused more than 2,000 miles away, in the Gulf of Mexico, where Hurricane Ike was traveling east and would soon turn north. Destination: Houston. Emmett left the White House and caught the first plane home.

“The storm had put a bull’s-eye on us for Saturday the 13th,” Emmett says. “But I saw what happened during Rita — the evacuation from Houston turned into a nightmare because it started too late, too many people fled at once, and the highways were jammed.”

Emmett and Houston Mayor Bill White weren’t going to let that happen again. Drawing from lessons learned while the city responded to Rita and the devastating 2001 storm Allison, the two men had drawn up a simple but effective plan to protect Houstonians and minimize the impact on the city’s businesses: If you’re in danger of the storm surge, you need to evacuate — otherwise, stay put.

“Mayor White and I appeared together on TV and radio and gave the rightful impression that we like each other and were working together,” Emmett says. “People listened. They trusted us.”

Zip code by zip code, Houstonians were selectively advised to leave the city. At intersections they saw police officers and other emergency volunteers — members of the Harris County Citizens Corps — directing traffic. On the way out of town, they passed trucks laden with water, ice, fuel, food, and gas-powered electrical generators, evidence that post-storm recovery planning was under way even before Ike was done beating up Houston the afternoon of September 13. As soon as the winds — which had gusted at more than 100 mph — dropped below 40 mph, crews of workers equipped with chainsaws began clearing the roads of fallen trees. Downed power lines were muscled out of the way.

It would be too pat, too tidy, to say the rest is history. But Houston’s response to Ike serves as an example to all cities facing a disaster. “Things went very well, indeed,” says Hugh Gladwin, director of the Institute for Public Opinion Research at Miami’s Florida International University, where he’s been studying the effects of hurricanes since Andrew struck Florida in 1992.

Many of Houston’s business leaders agree. “The whole thing couldn’t have been more orderly,” says Chip Carlisle, Wells Fargo’s regional president for Texas. Wells Fargo, which has 124 branches in the city, had a well-rehearsed plan for closing down and reopening its branches and providing for the welfare of its 2,100 Houston-area employees.

“Security is a core value of our company,” says Carlisle. “What we do is step through a disaster scenario.”

A week after Ike hit, 113 Wells Fargo locations were back up and running in Houston. And by October 2, the bank was back to business as usual.

One business in which speed is of the utmost importance — and time of the essence — is groceries. H-E-B is Houston’s largest operator in this category, with 67 stores and 11,000 employees, or “partners,” as the company calls them. Facing the prospect of massive food spoilage due to power loss, H-E-B prepared for Ike by prearranging for the delivery of diesel-powered generators to keep its stores up and running.

H-E-B also addressed its staffing needs by calling in 1,500 partners from outside the Houston area, in the event that local workers were unable to clock in due to personal losses from the storm. “All our partners realize that people rely on us for the most basic commodities,” says Winell Herron, H-E-B’s group vice president of public affairs and diversity. “We have a strong can-do spirit among the partners in our organization. We knew that the community would need us.” Within six days, every H-E-B store was open for business again.

While the disaster planning and response of every business in Houston seem to have been exemplary, the Texas Medical Center (TMC) may have stood out most of all. With 6,500 beds and 73,600 employees at eight Houston-area facilities, the TMC kept functioning throughout the storm, due largely to infrastructure changes made after tropical storm Allison. That June 2001 storm caused more than $1.5 billion in damage to TMC facilities. Rebuilding after Allison, the TMC relocated almost all its power lines underground and equipped a tunnel connecting its facilities with waterproof doors, like those on a submarine. The $150 million expenditure helped the TMC to keep all its hospitals open during and after Ike.

The TMC was especially in tune with Mayor White’s and Judge Emmett’s efforts, closely following the NIMS — National Incident Management System — prescribed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and advocated by the city. “We had some broken windows and some roof damage,” says Bob Stott, executive vice president of facilities operation and security for the TMC. “And each of our institutions had some water leakage problems. But we were open for business right away. Following and drilling the NIMS made a real difference for us.”

The energy company Conoco-Phillips has more than 4,000 employees in the Houston area, and with many of them working on offshore drilling platforms, their safety in the face of a storm is a vital concern. In fact, the company started evacuating and “shutting in” one of its platforms in the Gulf while Ike was still over Cuba.

“Coming out of Ike, the biggest lesson for us was that although you may have very good plans in place, they have to be drilled and drilled and drilled,” says Bob Ridge, ConocoPhillips’ vice president of health, safety, and environment.

Ridge adds that communication among top managers during Ike also proved essential to the company’s ability to weather the storm. Many employees were provided with satellite phones, which work independently of local networks. They proved to be key to the company’s swift, organized response to Ike.

“We were back at full strength a little more than a week after the storm,” says Ridge. “We owe a lot of that to good communication, both within our company and with what we think is great community leadership.”

Indeed, the way a big city like Houston prepares for a big storm like Ike says a lot about the quality of its leadership and the responsibility of its businesses. But even more impressive is the collective response in the storm’s aftermath. Disaster-relief funds were set up by Mayor White and other organizations, and the donations poured in. ConocoPhillips gave $5 million, and that was on top of the thousands of gallons of gas it distributed for free following the storm. ExxonMobil and Hess, which also drill and refine in the Houston area, gave $5 million and $3 million, respectively. Reliant Energy and the Houston Astros gave $1 million apiece, and a fund drive by the NFL’s Houston Texans netted $2.4 million.

The monetary relief has gone on, chipping away at damage Mayor White estimates between $25 billion and $40 billion. But one of the more touching grassroots relief efforts was H-E-B’s massive mobile kitchen at the George R. Brown Convention Center, which fed more than 15,000 hot meals to Houston citizens and emergency workers. “And when we felt that the situation in Houston was stabilizing, we moved the kitchen to areas outside the city where we knew we were needed,” Herron says.

Today, recovery from Ike continues in Houston, led by remarkable cooperation between the public and private sectors. “The business community is not only the backbone of Houston’s economy, but, working hand-in-hand with state and local government, is the key to getting the city back on its feet,” says Jeff Moseley, president and CEO of the Greater Houston Partnership, which represents 2,000 local businesses.

“Houston is a can-do city,” White says. “People here got back to business fast after the storm. We are and always will be a hardworking community.”

Bunker Mentality: Business Continuity

Just as Houston had an emergency plan in place long before Hurricane Ike struck, Continental has been prepared for emergencies with a plan the airline developed in 2006, prompted by Houston’s near-miss with Hurricane Rita in 2005. “The key to our emergency preparedness is getting ready for events you pray will never occur,” says Pete Fahrenthold, managing director of risk management for Continental. “We knew Houston is in a hurricane corridor, so we felt — particularly when we digested Katrina’s impact on New Orleans — we had to develop a business continuity plan that would let us operate no matter what the weather brought us.”

Continental had a representative at the TranStar Building’s emergency operations center every day so he could keep tabs on the decisions that community leaders were making about evacuation routes, transportation, and other city and county services, and help the airline know what to tell customers and employees about its timeline for winding down and reinstating operations.

Central to Continental’s emergency plan is an underground bunker in Conroe, Texas, roughly 50 miles from Houston. This emergency control center allows Continental to safely conduct airline operations in any regions where airports are operational. “We honestly hoped we’d never have to use this facility. But we knew that if disaster struck, we’d be ready,” says Fahrenthold.

On Friday, September 12, Houston ’s George W. Bush International Airport closed, and when Ike was 100 miles from Houston, Continental made the call to move its headquarters staff to the bunker and evacuate planes from Houston to Abilene, El Paso, and other cities. Continental’s Cleveland and Newark hubs operated normally; the airline succeeded in operating globally throughout the storm and had an 89 percent on-time rate for flights operating that weekend.

The Houston headquarters building was unscathed, and on Sunday the 14th, senior management regrouped there to make plans for returning operations from the temporary remote facility back to Houston. “The storm forced us to suspend our operations at George Bush Intercontinental Airport for more than two days,” says Larry Kellner, Continental’s CEO, “but thanks to effective preparations and everybody’s hard work, we were able to do a stellar job running the remainder of our operation.” — Gail Harrington