Houston & Southeast Texas. Record rainfall, catastrophic flooding. For the first time, all 28 federal task forces were activated at once, alongside state and local teams.
Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas in late August 2017 as the first Category 4 hurricane to hit the United States since 2004, then stalled and dropped torrential rain. The Cedar Bayou area outside Houston recorded 51.88 inches, a record for a single storm in the continental United States. Catastrophic flooding forced 780,000 Texans from their homes.
Harvey produced one of the largest urban search and rescue responses in U.S. history. All 28 FEMA task forces were activated. Six were staged forward in San Antonio with swift-water capability, and a FEMA Incident Support Team coordinated from College Station. Across the federal effort, more than 400 task force personnel were committed early, growing as the flooding spread.
Individual teams took on distinct missions. Texas Task Force 1, the closest, deployed with search, water rescue, and helicopter resources and conducted thousands of evacuations. Ohio Task Force 1 worked water rescue in Katy, including the evacuation of more than 80 seniors from a flooded nursing home. Missouri Task Force 1 trained roughly 50 Houston firefighters on wide-area GPS search procedures. Nebraska Task Force 1 ran canine search teams. Florida Task Forces 3 and 4, paired with a Marine Corps amphibious unit to reach Lumberton, rescued more than 900 people and 150 animals between them.
Harvey is the scale argument. When a storm overwhelms an entire metro region, the system needs every cache it has, and it needs them self-sufficient for the first 72 hours, because resupply could not reach them. The equipment is what lets a team work the day the water is highest, not the week after.
Every deployment on this page ran on equipment that had to be owned, maintained, and ready before the call. Project Cache exists to make that equipment understandable, and to put it in the field. Explore the Mission Ready Packages →