Major deficiencies in S.F.'s emergency water system
Jaxon Van Derbeken | San Francisco Chronicle
Updated 8:17 pm, Wednesday, April 2, 2014
San Francisco's emergency water supply system - key to fighting the recent Mission Bay blaze and the Marina quake-caused conflagration in 1989 - has large gaps and lacks the equipment needed to douse the multiple fires likely to break out after a major earthquake, a Chronicle investigation has found.
City voters have approved hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds over the decades to build an elaborate system of above-ground and subterranean reservoirs, giant pumping stations and seismically hardened pipes - all to ensure there's plenty of water to extinguish fires if an earthquake shatters the main water supply system.
But the city has shortchanged spending in key areas. It did not extend the backup water mains to many neighborhoods built since the system was put in place after the 1906 earthquake and fire. And it has not invested enough money in portable equipment that would allow firefighters to attack simultaneous major blazes throughout San Francisco.
The Fire Department has enough emergency resources to battle three big fires like the one this month that destroyed a Mission Bay apartment building under construction. But if more fires than that break out in areas with no access to the backup water supply system - a fearsome likelihood in the aftermath of a major earthquake - there probably won't be enough emergency equipment to put them all out.
"We have an unlimited water supply, but no way to get it to the fires in half of the city," said Thomas Doudiet, a retired assistant deputy fire chief who spent seven years trying to upgrade the emergency water supply system before leaving the department in 2011. "All the money we have spent on everything won't matter if we don't have the system in place to get the water to the fires."
Portable hoses, hydrants
Frank Blackburn, a retired assistant fire chief, pioneered a portable system capable of delivering high-pressure water anywhere in the city in an emergency, even to neighborhoods such as the Richmond, Sunset, Ingleside and Excelsior that aren't hooked up to the post-1906 backup water lines.
His portable system of hoses and hydrants helped save the Marina after the Loma Prieta earthquake, and if enough firefighters have access to the equipment in a disaster, they could keep San Francisco from burning.
But the city hasn't spent the money needed to ensure there will be enough of the portable equipment to go around if fires start raging through western and southern neighborhoods densely packed with wood-frame houses.
"We need to protect those families in the areas where most of the people live, the outer residential districts of the city," Blackburn said.
The city created its emergency water system after the 1906 earthquake destroyed the mains that normally delivered water to fire hydrants. With no water pressure, firefighters were helpless to battle the blazes that eventually destroyed 27,000 buildings.
To try to ensure San Francisco would never again be leveled by fire, city engineer Michael O'Shaughnessy designed an infrastructure marvel that relied not on pressure to get water to hydrants, but gravity.
Three large reservoirs were built on hills above the center of the city, and in time were augmented by two giant, diesel-powered pumps that can draw water from the bay. In an emergency, firefighters hook their hoses onto hydrants with distinctive black, red or blue caps that are connected to the backup system, distinguishing them from the smaller, all-white hydrants that dispense water from the everyday pipeline network.
Underground storage tanks
But that emergency system is largely limited to the areas where people lived when it was built in 1913. Rather than extend it, the city planned for a fire emergency in newer neighborhoods by building underground storage tanks - almost 200 of them in all, each holding 75,000 gallons.
Oddly, for years, the Fire Department didn't have an efficient way of hooking up more than one rig apiece to these cisterns. Then, in the 1980s, Blackburn cobbled together spare parts he got from the department's maintenance shop to create portable hydrants that could run off 5-inch-diameter hoses that the city had used as water lines during a two-year cable-car line renovation.
This system enabled firefighters to draw water from the cisterns and deliver it at high pressure across large distances.
"We could now use one pumper to deliver high pressure, high volume across a half mile much more efficiently, and deliver the water exactly where it is needed to stop a square-block fire," Blackburn said.
Fire Department officials showed the prototype to then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who found $2.3 million so the department could expand the portable system. Part of the money went to convert four rigs to handle the 5-inch hose.
The system got its first big test in the October 1989 earthquake, when a ruptured gas main fueled a huge fire at Divisadero and Beach streets in the Marina. One of the three emergency reservoirs the city had banked on to deliver water was quickly drained when pipes leading from it broke, leaving a 40-block area with no main water supply and no backup.
Saving the Marina
Desperate firefighters rushed two of the newly converted rigs, each carrying a mile of high-pressure hose, and enlisted the Phoenix fireboat to pump bay water at 9,000 gallons a minute directly into one of the 5-inch lines.
The hose, in essence, acted like a water main connecting to access valves that were placed where firefighters needed them. Within an hour, crews got the upper hand.
"That saved the Marina district," Blackburn said. "Had the fireboat and the water system not been available, the fire would have burned to Van Ness Avenue."
Two years later, the Oakland Fire Department borrowed San Francisco's portable equipment to help battle the Oakland hills fire, which destroyed 3,000 homes and killed 25 people. When the main hydrants failed, firefighters drew on water from far-away hydrants to supply the portable system.
"That is what really stopped the fire in the Rockridge area," said Donald Parker, who was Oakland's deputy fire chief at the time. "It can deliver a large amount of water in a very quick amount of time to an area that has lost its water supply."
Afterward, Oakland floated a bond measure and used the money to buy four hose-tending trucks, each with portable supply systems, and distributed them around the city. Vallejo created a similar but smaller system.
Mission Bay blaze
San Francisco got a reminder of the portable system's value on March 11, when 150 firefighters struggled for more than an hour to put water on a blaze that destroyed an apartment building under construction at Fourth and China Basin streets in Mission Bay.
It wasn't until crews dragged hoses and other portable equipment to distant high-pressure hydrants that firefighters were able to go on the offensive against the fire. In the end, 7 million gallons of water was unleashed to battle the blaze.
Assistant Deputy Chief Ken Lombardi, who now oversees the city's emergency water supply, acknowledged that the system would be overtaxed should there be several large fires at once.
"If we had four major fires like we had (at Mission Bay), we would have an issue," he said.
"We clearly need this system in place," Lombardi said. "San Francisco would be much safer with it. There is no doubt the (portable) system works - we need more of it to make it work for the whole city."
San Francisco, however, has not been able to equip its portable system much beyond the level it was in 1989. In fact, one of the original hose-carrying rigs has since been stationed at Treasure Island, leaving only three rigs for the mainland.
Expansion dies
Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White came up with a $9 million plan in 2010 that would have placed 18 shipping containers, each 40 feet long, throughout the city to store pieces of the portable system, including long hoses, pumps, water cannons, valves and hydrants.
The plan also would have doubled the number of rigs capable of dispensing the high-pressure hoses to eight. It was never funded.
"Here you have something that is apolitical, perfectly logical and to the benefit to the entire city, and it's something that was proven to work in 1989," Doudiet said. "And yet, it went nowhere."
Doudiet - who was in charge of the system when he retired in 2011 - said the price of the envisioned expansion now is far greater. The upgrade that Hayes-White wanted in 2010 could cost as much as $18 million now, he said.
The only money the city has been able to come up with is a $400,000 federal grant, enough to buy more portable hydrants, hoses and other equipment, but no rigs.
'A matter of funding'
Supervisor Katy Tang said more cisterns are being built in her Sunset-area district without the portable system needed to take full advantage of them. She acknowledged that the Fire Department must weigh the needs of a portable system against other budget demands - given that a single class of firefighter recruits costs $1 million.
"It's a matter of funding right now," she said. "To me it is crucially important that we get all the things in place now, before an emergency. We just have to find that money."
Doudiet agreed that City Hall leaders need to act now.
"We know the system works because we've used it," he said. "We've got to have the full system in place before the earthquake hits, and we don't know when that is going to happen.
"We don't have the luxury of time."
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