New fire rating could mean lower rates for Houston homeowners

HOUSTON — The Valley’s smallest city just saw its fire department rating drop three points.

Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if you spend much time around the fire services industry, you’ve likely heard of the Insurance Services Organization. Most major homeowners insurance companies use ISO ratings in calculating premiums. It’s become something like a yardstick by which departments measure themselves.

Houston’s prior rating had been 8b for areas within five miles of a fire station. Effective April 1, it’s a 5. That means insurance rates for affected homeowners are likely going to decrease in the area. And some homes that couldn’t get insurance before might be able to now. With the improvement, Houston Fire Department will have a rating comparable to its nearest neighboring department of West Lakes.

“This is huge,” Houston Mayor Virgie Thompson said Monday. The effort to improve the rating included a lot of elbow grease and help from the state, she said.

“The commitment to the fire department’s survey to improve and expand training and update its equipment, as well as long-term capital improvements to the city’s water supply system, were all critical items in achieving the ISO Class 5 classification,” Thompson says in a city press release.

She said the bulk of the work involved training and documenting that training over the course of eight years to build the case for ISO to re-evaluate the department.

As for improving infrastructure and equipment, the department had a long way to go. When the process started, one of its fire stations didn’t even have a fill-site — a place to get a lot of water into a tanker quickly.

“What fire station doesn’t have a fill site? And that one didn’t,” she said.

In the press release, she says the fire department committed itself also to “alternative water supply.”

That means using lakes as water supplies. Houston does that with a special truck built as a so-called mobile fill site that can fill a tanker with lake water at 1,000 gallons per minute.

Houston Fire Chief Tom Hood expresses pride in the achievement in the city press release.

“What this city has accomplished does not happen overnight,” he says. “It results from consistent and committed leadership.”

Thompson said the work to improve the department continues. Most recently, the city decided to put in a $3.2 million request for funding from the state to replace the fire station on Kenlar Road and also buy a ladder truck that would be housed there. Actually, she said, saying that the money would replace the station is not quite accurate.

“There really is not a station. There’s a building that holds a tanker for response, but it’s quite small; specifically just to hold an apparatus to keep it warm and full,” she said.

Thompson said there also isn’t really a ladder truck in the northern part of the Valley. When Susitna Valley Jr./Sr. High School in Trapper Creek burned down in 2007, a truck had to come from Wasilla.

The mayor said success with lowering the city’s ISO rating will go a long way toward proving the city’s case to legislators in Juneau this year.

“And it’s not about what we want, it’s about what we need to provide to our residents secured public safety,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.