City fires HEC employees who fled Rita
Fourteen Houston Emergency Center employees who did not report to work during the run-up to Hurricane Rita have been fired:
More than a dozen employees with the 911 Houston Emergency Center were fired for not reporting to work during Hurricane Rita, KPRC Local 2 reported Friday.
Fourteen call-takers were terminated. Four others resigned.
Frank Bernal was one of those fired. He said he was faced with a tough dilemma when Rita headed toward Houston.
"My kids were asking me, 'Dad, you're going to leave us here? Are you going to go to work and leave us here?'" he said.
He skipped work in order to stay with his family the night before Rita's landfall. That decision cost him his job.
"I regret the way things turned out, but I stand by my decision," Bernal said.
"These people, some of these people, like one, had a child with asthma. They had to make sure that machine was working so that the electricity would be on," said Richard Cobb, a union attorney.
But the city said the call-takers should have made their emergency preparations earlier. Instead, they made a decision with serious consequences.
"The city of Houston deserves to have dedicated emergency service personnel report to duty," said Joe Laud, a HEC spokesman.
The headline for this KPRC-2 story says: 911 Employees Fired For Evacuating Rita. When I first read it, I thought 911 employees were fired! As in, that's how many employees were terminated! Gotta watch those headlines.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 11/20/05 06:05 AM | Houston Miscellany | Print | Comments (2)
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