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Amid all the excitement and fun of Houston being in the World Series there is a serious side to this big event.

Emergency preparations are part of the game plan for security and the ever-present threat of terrorism that all of us have been living with since September 11th.

KHOU-TV

Dr. David Persse, Houston EMS Director.

"For Houston, its not unlike when it hosted the Super Bowl or the All-Star Game, huge national events that put local emergency teams on heightened alert," says Dr. David Persse, Houston EMS Director.

If something bad did happen, and a lot of people were injured, would Houston be ready? If we'd asked that question just a few months ago, any answer would be speculation. But two big storms came along and now here's what we're hearing.

"It was so widespread, it lasted for so long and so many things occurred nobody dreamt could go wrong," says Dr. Persse.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were the real thing, not a drill.

Katrina drove thousands of sick or injured out of Louisiana, arriving in Houston by bus, ambulance, and chopper. It mimicked the sort of mass causalities disaster drills envisioned.

"You do the drill and they say somebody blows up a building, you got this collapse, and you're not sure there was radioactive material in it. By comparison, that would almost be easy compared to what we really dealt with in September," Dr. Persse says.

Getting the evacuees to the right hospitals quickly overwhelmed Houston's ambulances, which are routinely spread thin just covering day-to-day emergencies.

So help was needed and it came from a much smaller neighbor to the north, which had practiced for just such a situation.

"The plan was actually put in place for the Super Bowl," says Allen Johnson, who head Montgomery County's EMS/

"But no one's ever really called and said, 'I need 50 ambulances and I need them now.' That's what happened during Katrina," Johnson says.

Montgomery County has a new, high-tech 911 center.

Its dispatchers were able to line up ambulances from outlying suburbs and send them Houston.

"So they did a lot of the detail work and we did a lot of the steering but they made sure the rubber met the road," says Dr. Persse.

Then came Rita. The evacuation routes choked, threatening ambulance response to people succumbing to heat and illness.

Officials are now trying to come up with a better way, maybe designated "emergency only lanes."

Even then, planning for every contingency is impossible, as Rita made clear after it had passed.

"And then, a barge breaks loose and slams into the 59 support," says Dr. Persse

That actually happened.

But he says, that's his point, the real thing defied the best drills.

Now, when Houston hosts big events or prepares for next hurricane season, what it learned last month may have left the city better able to deal with the worst than ever before.

One continuing problem, though, is communications.

The Houston Fire Department still uses radios that can't communicate with other departments. A fix for that is many months, possibly even years away.