Back when the world was normal, Fire Station 11 got busy on Friday and Saturday nights, around the time that the Washington Avenue clubs emptied their drunks onto the streets. That’s when you got the car accidents, says firefighter Jason Griggs, and the alcohol-poisoned kids. Sometimes the kids’ friends stuck with them all the way, riding along in the ambulance. Other times the paramedics found the kids alone, abandoned in their vomit.
Otherwise, life at the station was relatively laid-back. The firefighters all ate together, and nobody thought anything of it. Heights-area parents would stop by so their kids could admire the fire engines.
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It was rare to work back-to-back 24-hour shifts. Hurricane Harvey, of course, was legendary: Griggs remembers working four days straight. Four days was unheard-of, a badge of honor, the stuff of legends. What kind of disaster lasts four days?
Then came COVID-19: a slo-mo disaster, complete with crests and troughs.
Sleep wearing a mask
At first, after Harris County shut down in late March, things were quiet at Houston’s fire stations: People weren’t out and about, the bars were closed and COVID-19 patients were still relatively rare. Fire chief Sam Peña says that overall, the department was getting around 800 calls a week then.
When the pandemic heated up, firefighters were at the front of the frontlines. By June, the department was receiving 1,100 weekly calls. The majority of the new calls were from people in respiratory distress. Hospital emergency rooms began to overflow — so much so that ambulances were frequently forced to wait for more than an hour outside a hospital. Those waits tied up both firefighters and ambulances.
On HoustonChronicle.com: TMC hospitals, hit by COVID surge, exceed base ICU capacity for first time since summer
Peña particularly worried about the firefighters. He’d started the year understaffed — a budget squeeze had forced him to shut down the academy classes for a year — and now, on top of the pandemic demand, firefighters began to catch COVID themselves, or had to quarantine because they’d been exposed. Three died of the disease.
Houston’s surge peaked in July, and after that, though the respiratory-distress calls didn’t pour in as often as before, they never went entirely away. The firefighters settled in to new routines. The days when little kids would stop by were a distant memory.
Now they’re supposed to wear masks almost constantly during their 24-hour shifts. At Fire Station 11, Griggs said, some firefighters even sleep wearing one.
The vehicles and equipment require extra decontamination. Firefighters’ temperatures are checked twice a day, and even inside the station, they have to maintain social distancing. Instead of eating together, now they eat in shifts.
That kind of rigor isn’t reflected in the outside world. Once again, Station 11 is busy on Friday and Saturday nights. Since Labor Day, Griggs says, Washington Avenue nightlife has been running “full throttle, with not a mask in sight.”
‘Forget 2020’
This week, Houston’s COVID hospitalizations once again crossed an alarming threshold. Texas Medical Center Hospitals exceeded their base ICU capacity, and hospital executives said they were in a “race against time,” trying to keep COVID-19 at bay until new vaccines could make a dent in Houston’s rates.
On HoustonChronicle.com: Everything you need to know about Pfizer, Moderna COVID-19 vaccines
Peña keeps a nervous eye on Houston’s climbing COVID stats, worried about how high they’ll go and what that’ll mean to his department. That growing number of COVID calls, he notes, comes during the winter flu season — a busy period for ambulance crews even in a normal year.
And at the same time, he said, the number of firefighters sidelined by quarantine or a COVID infection is climbing fast: Around 170 now, up from around 100 three weeks ago. At that level, Peña said, “it’s tough to keep every unit in service.”
That means that crews are stretched thin, and overtime is more the rule than the exception. Griggs is single, so he tries to take extra shifts, so his colleagues with families can go home to their kids. Three 24-hour shifts in a row is common for him, he says, and four isn’t unusual — a Harvey level of overtime, now hardly worth noticing.
The fire chief sounded resigned. “I’m hoping for a better 2021,” Peña said. “Forget 2020.”
lisa.gray@chron.com, twitter.com/LisaGray_HouTX
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