On September 13, 2008, Hurricane Ike tore through Harris County, on the gulf coast of Texas. The damage was more severe than expected, and, in spite of a mandatory evacuation order, hundreds of people went missing. Local officials requested help restoring basic services and searching for survivors.

A three-person team from OEM flew to Harris County to help. The team arrived three days after the hurricane, at which time recovery efforts were focused on restoring utilities. Half the county – more than 1.2 million people – was still without power. Officials imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew and encouraged evacuees to remain in shelters until utilities could be restored.

The high voltage cables that carried electricity to the county were intact, but broken limbs and fallen trees had taken down neighborhood lines all across the grid. “Sometimes power was just out on one side of the street. Sometimes it was an entire neighborhood,” Markowski said. “From above, the blackouts made the city looked like an unfinished puzzle.”

Hospitals, police and fire, and municipal service agencies needed generators and fuel to sustain recovery efforts and re-establish services. Markowski, OEM’s logistics director, worked with local officials to prioritize requests and manage resources. The absence of a local disaster assistance center complicated his task, however, as requests from individuals flooded into the Harris County EOC alongside official requests.

To further complicate matters, the organizations that provide residents with water, power, sanitation services, debris removal, and highway maintenance, were highly fractionalized. Each neighborhood relied on different providers. McKinney, OEM’s deputy commissioner for preparedness, helped coordinate recovery efforts across this kaleidoscope of municipal players. “New York City is lucky. We have one police department, one fire department, a simple utility structure, and the City makes all the decisions,” McKinney said.

A lack of basic utilities was not the only thing keeping the public in shelters. Many houses were too damaged to re-occupy. Gair, OEM’s deputy commissioner for operations, helped local responders develop a housing damage estimate plan to determine how much of the local housing stock had been lost.

“We used a combination of aerial photography, windshield surveys, and block-by-block assessments on foot to determine the gap between the available housing stock and the demand,” Gair explained.

Windshield surveys, which are assessments done by car, and foot patrols, those done on foot, are standard damage estimate techniques, but aerial photography is relatively new to emergency management. Digital zoom cameras can provide detailed images of entire neighborhoods or a single house.

“There is lots of technology out there to capture detailed photos, but there is no formal way to interpret the data,” McKinney said. “If we can extract damage estimates from these images, we can reduce the resources we have to put on the ground to find out what we need to know.”

One thing that worked in Harris County’s favor was the recent housing boom. The Houston suburbs contained a large supply of empty houses. As utilities were restored, officials re-located evacuees from shelters into these houses. The system worked well for the locals, but as more and more evacuees arrived from the coast, officials scrambled to find alternatives.

The team praised the resiliency of the Texans and marveled at how quickly local stores and services re-opened. “Texans are resourceful. After the storm, they picked up the pieces and went back to work,” McKinney said.

"We have to be careful in New York City not to heighten the public’s sense of victimization,” McKinney said. “Even though the City will be offering shelters and distributing water and ice, people need to realize that we are going to need everyone’s help to put the city back together again.”