How TX Firefighters Survived a Late Winter Snow-pocalypse

Hailing from the Midwest, Fort Worth Fire Chief Jim Davis is accustomed to winter's fury, whether it's a snowstorm, icy conditions or bone-chilling temperatures.

"I don't mean to be sarcastic about it, but it was just another Tuesday in a cold weather state," the Columbus, OH, native said about the severe winter weather that tore through much of his adopted home state in February. "It was really just another day in Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania where departments deal with subzero temperatures throughout the winter."

But the Texas snowstorm, which brought snow, ice and frigid cold over a sustained period, was anything but "another Tuesday." The winter weather overwhelmed the state's infrastructure, knocking out power for thousands of residents and leaving many without running water.

"I'm very versed with 120 degrees and have also dealt with the sweltering humidity of Texas, but none of us in this generation of firefighters in San Antonio and probably the state of Texas has ever experienced something like we did between the 14th and 19th of February," San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood told Firehouse.com.

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"We haven't had a lot of events like this," Chief Hood added. "It gets cold, and we deal with the icy roads and salting the roads, but never had we had an incident where snow stayed on the ground for several days. We just haven't had it."

In one day, the San Antonio Fire Department received 2,600 calls, something that severely hampered response times. Hood said the city has a cold weather plan, but it couldn't prepare his department for what they were experiencing.

"It was like a tabletop exercise, and it kept throwing injects at you," he said. "We had 4 or 5 inches of snow and hard freezes. The plan kept changing because the weather conditions kept getting worse. And then we started having water issues and power issues simultaneously."

"We had 38 structure fires in a couple days," he added. "We average about one or two a day. These are 38 with active fire showing and some of those were multiple alarm, second-alarm fires."

Davis saw a similar situation in Fort Worth. An average day for that department might include between 300 to 350 runs. During February's severe weather, the department was averaging between 2,100 to 2,200 runs.

And those runs were increasingly complicated by the weather's devastating effect on the state's power grid and water supply.

Icy roads during February's severe winter weather contributed to the rollover accident of a San Antonio fire apparatus.

"The blackouts became sustained blackouts, not rolling," Davis said. "And then the water system beginning to fail because the pumping stations were freezing. And we had 30 percent of our community without stable water and electricity for a week.

"So the Fort Worth Fire Department got in the water distribution business, the water supply business, evacuating hospitals and nursing homes because they didn't have sanitation without water."

In San Antonio, Hood mobilized his firefighters—as well as 70 cadets—to help deliver not only water but also oxygen. The department received a flood of calls from homebound residents who couldn't get their oxygen from the companies that normally serviced them.

"We took several of our EMS units that were in reserve and turned them into oxygen tenders and went out and ordered a significant amount of small cylinders to where we were dropping those off," he said. "In a matter of four days, we dropped off almost 300 oxygen bottles, and these were people who were desperate because they had no power, no heat. … I know this alone saved lives and took out a lot of hardship for people that are O2 dependent. We easily could've had hundreds of people perish if we hadn't put those oxygen units in service.

"And the people who were working on those oxygen units, it was like they were spreading liquid gold," he added.

Challenges faced

It's no secret that Texas and cold weather usually aren't on speaking terms; unlike the intimate relationship the state has with sweltering temperatures.

"A lot of the stuff here is built for the heat, not the cold," said Davis, adding that the department's apparatus are built to survive triple-digit heat. "(Power) grids are built around sustaining air-conditioning in high heat, not the other way around."

"They prepare in a different way than other cold weather cities plan," he added.

While Fort Worth had cold weather recommendations, it didn't have sustained cold weather policy, according to Davis.

"A lot of what we were doing was built upon, 'Let me tell you what they do in cold weather cities,' which I had been fortunate enough to have the experience to do," he said. "What I was trying to do personally as the fire chief was a lot of teaching through this, to make sure people understood that you had to keep water moving through the trucks, you should drain the pumps when they're not in use."

Davis tried to make the idea of keeping water moving to prevent it from freezing a mantra for his firefighters. But sometimes, an object lesson can be the best teacher.

"We had to freeze a truck up before we got the attention of our people to understand what they were experiencing," he said. "I think guys were surprised how quickly water froze in a hose. In Fort Worth, we had double digit structure fires every day for four days in a row, and guys would come out and they'd put the hose down and then they'd find ice accumulating in their hose. Well, that's what happens in cold weather if you don't keep water moving."

Another area of cold weather planning that differs between Texas and areas that experience more pronounced winters involved roads. Because it's plentiful in the state, sand is used on icy highways to allow for better traction, Davis said. But unlike road salt, sand does nothing to reduce icing, and that made traveling to calls treacherous.

"We have an ice plan. We've dealt with ice before, but with this particular storm, once the storm hit, it made it very difficult for us to maneuver around," Hood said.

"Our fires always go up when it gets cold, but it was much more than that because some of these fires we couldn't get to," he added. "We had a fire that was above grade, and our trucks couldn't get up the frozen road, and there's fire coming up the third floor and there are people jumping. The challenges that we faced ... just large spectacular fires, and for some of those we still haven't determined a cause just because of the volume of fire. But we're fortunate that we only had one loss of life from fire and a few injuries to civilians."

On the first day of the storm, seven pieces of apparatus were in accidents, mostly from civilians sliding into them. The department tried to limit vehicles' exposure on the icy roads, and Hood deployed five squads loaded with sand and gravel to provide traction for units.

"We flipped a foam tanker, one of our hazmat units responding to a rollover, and thank God no one was hurt," he said.

And iced roads didn't just increase the risk of accidents for San Antonio firefighters. They also hampered response time, and in some cases, eliminated responses completely.

"There was one night, the weather was so bad that there were a dozen dispatches we couldn't make it to," Hood said. "And we had to tell people we couldn't make it, we can't do it, and I've never seen that. Even if it's a water situation, we'll put a Zodiac in the water and come and get you, but there were a dozen incidents that we could not make it to, and so we followed up the next morning and sent bodies and resources and everything worked out fine there, everyone survived.

"All of those dynamics as far as us being able to drive and not slipping, having water, having crews that are close, all of those things were extreme challenges at a lot of these fires."

Handling the weather

February's extreme weather wasn't just taxing on the state's residents and infrastructure. It also created a strain for firefighters, some working over 120 hours out of stations that experienced power outages and burst pipes.

Hood said he would have twice-a-day calls with all the divisions in order to keep everyone on the same page and evaluate what was needed where. During those four days, he couldn't "overestimate how amazing" department morale was.

"It was just like a big chessboard at times to make sure we had proper staffing at stations," Hood said. "The troops went out and performed heroically. I can't imagine sleeping in a station in a sleeping bag and it's 45 degrees, sleeping in a La-Z-Boy because it's too cold upstairs, you're eating peanut butter and jelly and tortilla because there's no place to eat and the grocery stores are closed. Some of these are challenges I've never seen before."

And while they were responding to a record-breaking number of calls, first responders also were concerned for the safety of their own families and loved ones.

"We had stood up teams to help our own people, because our own people were having issues at home, and yet we were asking them to come to work," Davis said. "We had a member who had a fire in his home. We had members who were without water in their homes. We were trying to send response teams to take care of our own people's problems so we could ask them to stay at work and take care of other people's problems."

Fort Worth, TX, Fire Chief Jim Davis was impressed with the inventiveness of his firefighters with finding a way to reach water on a call during February's snowstorm.

The Fort Worth fire chief also was particularly proud of his firefighters' creative solutions to the challenges they faced, something that was especially true when it came to dealing with water emergencies.

"The cold weather guys would be like, 'Oh yeah, we do that all the time," he said of the work-arounds. "Warm weather guys are like learning on the fly, and these guys really did some good stuff," he said.

In fact, one particular case of inventive, outside-the-box thinking stood out to to Davis.

"One crew could hear water running behind the wall ... so what they did is cut a hole in the wall to find the pipe that was ruptured, re-routed the pipe to the point where they could get an inch-and-a-half or inch-and-three-quarters hose on it and then stretched a section of inch-and-three-quarter hose down the hallway and out the door," he said.

Lessons learned

Going forward, both fire chiefs said their departments would revisit their cold weather plans and tailor them to the more extreme conditions they experienced last month.

"There's a multitude of things we've learned about our response," Hood said. "Not having water turned structural firefighters into wildland firefighters, and so tactics had to be tweaked a little bit, and some of the things we'd do normally, as far as staying in buildings and being offensive, we may not have been able to do that. We had to go in and get an all-clear and then sometimes back out and figure out a cutoff point because I'm not sure whether I'm going to have water or not."

Hood and Davis both look forward to talking with fire chiefs from around the state to share their thoughts on what worked and what didn't, what can be improved, and what should be discarded.

"We've been talking to Dallas and to Houston and to Plano and Fort Worth, and we're going to get together ... and do a big after-action because I guarantee that there are things that they did that made their responses more successful and the same for us," Hood said. "We've got a lot of information we want to share with people because it was a lot of things created by the conditions on the fly."

One thing Davis would eventually like to see is an exchange program with departments in northern states. This would allow firefighters to cross-train in conditions they're unfamiliar with but with crews knowledgeable in how to handle them.

"I think a lesson to be learned and something I'd like to see happen is there should be an opportunity for me to send six guys to a cold weather city in February and that cold weather city and that cold weather city turns around sends six people to me in August, because dealing with sustained temperatures of 103, 104, 105 degrees is a little bit different than what these guys are accustomed to dealing with zero degree temperatures for a sustained period of time," he said.

Although such a severe winter storm is a rarity in Texas—it's been nearly a decade since the state has seen such snow, cold and ice, according to both chiefs—Davis and Hood believe the chances are good that they will see a repeat of last month's devastating weather. In fact, the occurrences could even increase.

"I've been in this business over 30 years and the weather that we see now is much more violent than the weather that I saw coming up," Hood said. "The cold is going to be back, so how we figure out after this event what to do next time and building out those plans to be more comprehensive, that's going to help all of us."