Houston mayor on trek with new truck

HOUSTON — Where, exactly, is Mayor Roger Purcell this holiday season? Your guess is as good as anyone’s, but wherever he is he won’t be hard to spot — he’s driving a full-size rescue truck.

On Dec. 18, Purcell wrote an e-mail from Washington, D.C., to say he’d finished up his meetings with Alaska’s congressional delegation and would be heading out that day. But while the meetings were productive, the most interesting part of the e-mail concerned his means of transportation.

“Enclosed is a picture of the new Houston rescue truck we are driving back. It drives very well and corners better then I anticipated after taking a wrong turn and ended up driving through downtown D.C. Our goal is to be back in Houston by the 30th of December, pending on road conditions and weather,” he wrote.

That weather, though, might be more of an issue than one would assume at first. Purcell and his wife chose to take a southerly route through the states to get better weather. But in a follow-up e-mail, Purcell said he got caught up in a storm in Arizona.

A snowstorm.

“The mayor is encountering quite a bit of snow and bad weather down there,” said Houston Fire Chief Tom Hood, who stayed in Houston and is eagerly awaiting Purcell’s delivery. “It took him 14 hours to go 200 miles.”

Reached by phone from Arizona, Purcell said that 14 hours of driving was coming out of D.C., which was hit recently with a storm that made national headlines. In Arizona, he said, the mayor was stuck for some time behind a 22-car pileup.

“When I came on as mayor I didn’t think I’d be driving a rescue truck all the way across country, but if that’s what needs to be done, it’s part of the service we do for the community,” he said.

The decision to go came mostly out of necessity, Purcell said. The city didn’t have enough money to ship the truck. The fire department was hoping someone from its ranks could go drive it up.

But none of them had the needed documentation — a commercial’s driver’s license and a passport. Purcell, and his wife, have both. She was once a long-haul trucker. So, Purcell said, Hood came to him and asked if he’d do it.

“It would have been nice if someone from the fire department was able to do it, but since they weren’t, my wife and I were more than willing,” Purcell said.

Hood said the truck is a pretty standard rescue rig: 26 feet long, 11 feet tall. Rescue trucks are used mainly for “vehicle rescue” — cutting people out of smashed up cars at accident scenes. They carry things like saws and cutters and Jaws of Life.

He said the rig is a used one, build in 1991 but refurbished in 2002. Even so, it’s quite a bit better than the truck currently used in Houston, which is older and wasn’t built for rescue.

“What we have right now is a 1983 GMC mini-pumper that we’re using for rescue,” he said. “I was on the rescue unit here back in ‘94, we were working with that same 1983 mini-pumper that sits two people.”

The new truck, he said, also comes with a mobile command unit — a walk-in area containing radios and everything needed to run a command post. That, he said, will come in handy on major incidents.

Hood said Houston is working on building up its own rescue service. The city has about a dozen trained rescue techs, and the fire chief is still hopeful he’ll get his truck by the new year. So is Purcell. But he’s not sure which highway he’ll take going through Canada.

“We’re going to talk to the truckers coming down once we hit that area and then we’ll make a decision,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.