Chilling HFD audit
The fire department’s inspection process is in disarray and in need of urgent reform.
As a horrific inferno engulfed a highrise apartment building in London and claimed the lives of at least 50 people, Houston City Controller Chris Brown was coincidentally preparing to release a damning report on the bureau tasked with ensuring that a similar disaster doesn’t unfold in our own city.
Inspecting buildings for fire hazards is the job of the Houston Fire Department’s Life Safety Bureau, whose duty to protect the community should make it one of the most important branches of our city government. Instead, it’s a notoriously backward bureaucracy plagued by a history of shoddy record-keeping and questionable professional practices.
Now the depths of its inadequacies have been exposed in a searing audit that essentially says our fire department is flat-out failing to perform a core function of city government. It’s one more reason why we believe our mayor needs to appoint a blue-ribbon commission to fundamentally review how the city can best deliver the myriad of public safety services now performed by the Houston Fire Department.
The bureau responsible for inspecting our city’s more than 5,000 apartment buildings performed that task on only 526 buildings in the last two years, nowhere near its goal of 470 inspections a month. Buildings get certificates of occupancy before they’re even inspected, suggesting many Houstonians probably live and work in dangerous structures that don’t meet code. The audit also discovered inspectors often just give checklists to owners of hotels, high-rises and apartments then tell them to do the job themselves.
If you think our airports are safe, think again, because we really aren’t sure. In other cities, airports comparable to Bush Intercontinental are assigned up to 13 inspectors. Houston has only one inspector shared by all three of its municipal airports, and there’s no evidence Bush, Hobby or Ellington have been inspected in the last two years.
Meanwhile, the sloppy record-keeping in this bureau is somewhere between haphazard and nonexistent. Some inspectors don’t use checklists, some keep records in personal notepads, some stuff their reports in desk drawers and file cabinets. Their laptops are unreliable, but 125 tablet computers purchased last year are sitting in a warehouse unused. Meanwhile, the city spent more than $600,000 buying licenses for a fire department software program this bureau isn’t bothering to use.
We’ve saved the worst for last. This incompetence came at an inflated cost. The employees of the bureau racked up $5.6 million in overtime, and they were over budget in the category by an astonishing 75 percent. The city controller’s audit also found this bureau has been fudging its inspection numbers.
What’s especially galling is that a similar audit conducted 12 years ago found many of the same problems. Questioned about the audit, Houston Fire Chief Samuel Peña promised to implement recommended changes. History, however, makes us deeply skeptical.
The trouble in this bureau is one of many subjects that deserve attention from an independent commission studying what sort of fire department Houston needs in the 21st century. We call it a fire department, but 88 percent of HFD’s calls for help are for emergency medical service. Maybe we need to shift our ambulance service to a different department. Maybe we need to do the same thing with fire safety inspections. These are the sort of fundamental questions a blue-ribbon commission can address.
“It’s not a matter of if, it’s when, unfortunately, something happens,” Brown said after delivering his audit.
A fire inspection division that’s essentially not doing its job is utterly unacceptable. We need to figure out how the city can deliver this vital public safety service, before something like the London high-rise inferno erupts in Houston.