Henderson's most valuable tour guide

Henderson Fire Capt. Tim Pocock remembers navigating the city's fire engines through town using street maps crews sketched in the breakroom during their spare time.

If Henderson residents only knew.

"We'd drive around and then draw the map the best we could with a pencil and ruler," said Pocock, a 17-year veteran of the department. "We would take curved streets and make them straight just so they would fit into our map."

Rookie firefighters were handed two maps a day to memorize until they had the name and location of each squiggly black line in the 30-page booklet locked in their memories.

"The problem was the pages weren't inter-related," Pocock said. "If you didn't know the streets around town well enough, you couldn't get to that page."

Memorizing street names isn't so easy now that that small town has exploded into the country's fastest growing community.

Pocock said the 30 pages worth of maps he knew so well now make up a quarter of the city at most. The population has erupted, growing from 25,000 in the early 1980s to about 160,000 today.

Now firefighters rely on Tommie Weckesser.

Weckesser, who has taken over map-making duties in the city of Henderson, is assisted by computers that take developers' plans on disk and fit them into the city map like pieces of a puzzle.

Her greatest challenge is keeping up with growth. Every month, Weckesser taps into her computer and tacks on another subdivision, a new business, industrial park or school.

If she adds nine new developments a month, it's been a sluggish month.

"It's incredible," Weckesser said. "It gets harder and harder and harder to keep up."

Weckesser said most developers program street layouts and building positions on computer disks. Once plans have been approved by the City Council, she immediately adds them to the map to prepare crews for emergencies that may happen during construction.

Pocock said even when the town wasn't growing quickly, the fire station struggled to keep up because the turnaround time for the hand-drawn maps was slow.

"We couldn't use the copy machines until the city workers were finished with them," Pocock said. "Then we had to copy all the maps ourselves and put them together. We did it all."

About five years ago, the majority of squares on Weckesser's master map were blank. Now each block, which signifies a square mile, is crammed with little black lines.

There are so many new streets that it's impossible to fit their names on the map, so she resorts to listing the streets on the side and assigning letters to them.

Before the maps are sent to the printer, they are tested by the fire department. The city also double checks the accuracy of the maps by taking aerial photographs every six months, a practice that not long ago was only necessary every two years.

Weckesser said behind the master map are pages of maps that detail each quarter-mile section. Dispatchers direct emergency personnel to the page and section with numbers.

In addition to the detailed street maps, the location of fire hydrants are in the booklet.

Pocock said firefighters still add their touches to the maps. Each map of an apartment complex or cluster of condominiums is enlarged and the unit numbers are listed. The crews also are shown which access is closest to the fire.

"It's significantly easier for us now," Pocock said. "The way we did it was pretty prehistoric, but the town was small enough."

When Pocock started with the department two decades ago, firefighters received maybe two calls per shift. To pass time, firefighters would drive around town and then meet at the station and draw maps for eight hours.

The number of calls have since increased 10-fold. The Henderson Fire Department has five stations and five more in the planning process.

The detailed maps help firefighters reach emergency scenes faster, which in recent years has become more important.

Pocock said the fire department aims for response times no longer than five minutes. People who suffer heart attacks have a much better chance of recovering if they receive medical attention within six minutes.

And, Pocock said, buildings today, constructed with more flammable materials, collapse and burn faster than those built 10 years ago.

While firefighters once were pulled from buildings if fires were not controlled within 20 minutes, emergency crews now only stay in a building for 10 minutes.

"Our mapping portion of the response is so efficient, it allows us to get water on buildings faster," Pocock said.

Pocock said the city meets its response goals in all areas except the new Lake Las Vegas development, which is 15 minutes from town and the nearest fire station.

Weckesser said it's not only Henderson's firefighters who are big fans of her maps. There is another crew of people who respond to their own type of emergencies.

"Basically anyone who needs to get somewhere fast," she said. "We sell a lot of them to pizza deliverers."

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