Initially believing that the city survived a hit from Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Fire Department Superintendent Charles Parent awoke the next morning to find that a break in the levee flooded the city and paralyzed the department’s emergency response plans. With heavily taxed resources and amid heavy criticisms, the department maintained its focus. Now, it looks to rebuilding.

What is the single most important area you have to deal with right now?
Housing for my firefighters. Before the hurricane, we had a residency restriction; our guys had to live inside the city limits or in the parish. I’ve now come out publicly that it’s unenforceable right now. My people need to get housing wherever they can find it.

How are your firefighters holding up?
They are recovering.… Most of my guys lost everything. They want to rebuild, but we don’t know if we have to elevate our houses or if we’re even insured. A lot of people are confused and waiting for some definitive answers.

There are a number of areas that can’t be rebuilt. Initially they talked about not rebuilding New Orleans east, but that’s 60% of the landmass in New Orleans. I don’t see how it would be economically feasible to leave that much area desolate.

Did you lose many administrative staff?
The staff we have has been working longer hours and doing a good job. Most of the younger guys have found opportunities out of town. We’ve had about 16 resignations since the storm started; they got jobs elsewhere and their families had housing.

Some of the older guys, between 10 and 18, are in various forms of retirement, either going or contemplating retirement. We’ll probably lose a lot of people to attrition.

A lot of support came from across the country to the Gulf Coast, but particularly to New Orleans.
A lot of people and especially the national media. Many times [the media] didn’t want to talk to me because I wouldn’t bash on any one. They wanted stories about how FEMA deserted us. Frankly, I thought FEMA was just overwhelmed by the magnitude of this situation, and as we looked internally we weren’t able to help ourselves.

The fire community from around the country truly pitched in to help us. We had firefighters from New York, Illinois and Maryland. All of them picked up our spirits and helped guys with their houses.… If anyone came down here, they saw that the Emergency Operations Center was pretty much dominated by fire people from around the country.

I think this disaster has had quite an impact on the importance of NIMS.
We’ve taken the lead and some of our fire captains have been instructors for NIMS in city agencies. We have large hazmat incidents and now, if everybody is on the same page, it’s much more organized and better run. This was a great example that NIMS and ICS works.

Didn’t you go through a TopOff drill?
We try to run as many drills as possible. We did have one earlier this year and it went well. A lot of people didn’t understand the Incident Command System and set up their own ICS; it’s a good thing it happened then, before this incident, so we could show them that all the decision makers had to be in one place.

I was surprised to hear that you called for CISM teams as soon as you did. How effective has that been?
In the first week, two of our police officers committed suicide; one of them was at our complex. Even before that, the men and women were under a terrific amount of stress after all they’d gone through, realizing that their families were displaced and looking for them, essentially losing everything they owned.

Immediately after the storm, we contacted our chaplain Rev. Peter Weiss. He and another priest stayed at the complex with our people and were available just to talk. We also used our Union Local 632. They made contact with the IAFF and brought in some more people to help us. We contacted Louisiana State University, and they’ve been on the ship to assist our guys in finding trailers and assistance with the Red Cross.

I hope people realize that this isn’t going to end any time soon. These people’s houses aren’t going to just reappear. The families — well-established, solid families — are going to feel tremendous stress. The children are also going to need some type of counseling because of being separated from their parents.

I understand that Shreveport Fire Department responded immediately.
Shreveport’s Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran was one of the first people I could contact. Speaking with him was helpful and he sent many of his people down here to help with the rescue in our ICS team. Other fire departments like that have been helpful.

We were half way through a recruit training class and I didn’t’ feel comfortable putting them out there in this, so Kelvin took our recruits and combined them with his recruits in Shreveport. They finished training and graduated in late November. Without his help, I don’t know what I would have done with these recruits. They are now a useful part of our department.

How are you doing?
Personally, I’m doing very well. My wife is a very organized woman. I worried about her when the storm first came through. She’s a nurse and an essential employee in the city. I was worried about her and my 15-year-old daughter because they were at the hospital. There were so many rumors, I was worried.

During the incident, the communications were so poor. We knew that when the winds reached a certain speed it would be devastating. We sent all of our companies to places of last resort, so we could protect them. Now it’s one thing to have a plan and one thing choosing these locations, but with a storm of this magnitude, you worry about your personnel. You know how firefighters are; as soon as the winds died down to gale force, a lot of them went out to help people. My biggest fear was that we’d lose firefighters.

We did have an accident where we lost a young fire captain. Most of our stoplights were down in the city.… A debris truck ran a stop sign and our fire truck was responding to a gas leak, tried to avoid the truck and hit a van, went into a gully and flipped we lost a captain and two firefighters were severely injured.

Could anyone have really planned for this kind of disaster?
We did have a plan. The plan worked, it’s just that it strained our assets to the point where it didn’t break, which was a great fear of mine. But I think any fire department, any city, any state should have plans for the ultimate disaster. We had plans for the ultimate disaster it’s just that when it strikes, it seems so overwhelming. A year before, we ran a model of Hurricane Pam. The model predicted 20,000 deaths, so if we didn’t do our plan, didn’t do our job, we could have had a much worse situation.

There’s nothing we can do to defeat Mother Nature, but at least now people will listen to us when we tell them it’s essential that they evacuate. I know I wasn’t a popular guy, but when you stay in unprotected areas like Venetian Isles or Lake Catherine, you place my people in jeopardy because they’re going to go out there and try and save you. They had 25-foot storm surge, and you’re putting my people at risk because you want to stay at your house? There’s nothing you can do to protect that house. Why are you in that house?

What other preplanning helped with this disaster?
We had meetings with the hotel association this year. Last year when Hurricane Ivan was coming a lot of people chose to evacuate vertically to hotels. This year, we weren’t struck by the hurricane, but I saw people walking the streets looking for food because hotels allowed people in but let the majority of their staff go and the people were hungry. If we had the same 90% occupancy this year, the flooding, no food, it would have been devastating. They listened this time.

We warned the hotel managers that they would have windows go out, so they needed to keep the people low, [needed] lights. Not candles, lights. We had some major fires, but we had nothing in the standpipes and the only way to fight a high-rise fire is with sprinklers. If you don’t have any water in the sprinkler system, you’ll lose hotels and people.

Last comment?
I hate to be a doomsayer, but it’s going to happen again. We were probably the worst place in America for a hurricane — we live in a bowl. We told people we’d have water throughout the city. No matter how many scenarios you run when the waters starts coming up Canal Street, it’s just mind-boggling