KHOU-11’s Jeremy Desel reports that Houston emergency services are being taxed by Katrina evacuees:
In the months since Katrina total EMS Responses are up 10 percent to a yearly total of 234,259 last year.
Total responses had been steady for the last four years.
The impact? About 64 percent of ambulances, 48 percent of medic units and 78 percent of EMS squads are running above the department’s acceptable levels for the amount of time spent responding to calls.
The busiest units spend an average of 14 hours of each day actually on calls.
“Is our unit utilization rates high? Yes they are. But so are the needs of the community,” said Chief Boriskie.
In September the department added what it called at the time the “Katrina Squads”. That included five ambulances, two advanced life support units and a supervisor.
It was all funded by overtime at a cost of $450,000 a month.
More than four months later all of those units are still in service.
“For the most part, fire alone we haven’t recouped anything from this. Because these people don’t have addresses here, they don’t pay taxes here. So we are not recouping a lot of these bills,” said HFD Asst. Chief Tommy Dowdy.
The department is hoping FEMA will come up with some money.
Here’s hoping Mayor White can squeeze FEMA as much as possible, but here’s also hoping that he has a backup plan in place.
