Frank T. Blackburn, Division Chief
San Francisco Fire Department, Retired
February 25, 2018

As a student of San Francisco History, and a 35 year veteran of the SFFD, I have long been aware that some 15 residential neighborhoods in the City, with their hundreds of blocks of wood frame buildings, will be highly vulnerable to fire in the immediate aftermath of the next big earthquake.

The reason: there will be almost no emergency water supplies for the SFFD to use in these neighborhoods to fight post-earthquake fires.

Why is this so? There are two kinds of fire hydrants in San Francisco: the 9,000 small white low-pressure hydrants supplied by the same potable water mains that supply water to every building in the City; and the 1,600 larger seismically robust hydrants with red, blue or black tops, supplied by the high-pressure, high-volume mains of the Auxiliary Water Supply System (AWSS).

City engineers wisely designed and installed this system in the years immediately following the 1906 earthquake and fire.

They wisely chose the Pacific Ocean as its inexhaustible supply of water, because they had learned the bitter lesson that the domestic water system was too fragile to withstand the effects of a major earthquake and thus would be unavailable to fight fires following a major earthquake. This is still true of our domestic water system today. Unfortunately, the AWSS has never been expanded into many of the residential neighborhoods of the City.

In 2010, 97 years after its installation, the AWSS was taken away from the SFFD and placed under the supervision of the Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC). Also in 2010, and again in 2014, the voters passed the Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response (ESER) Capital Bonds, after they were told that this would lead to an expansion of the AWSS into all neighborhoods of the City.

However, by 2016, it became apparent that the SFPUC was not going to expand the AWSS into all neighborhoods after all.

Then, there followed a bizarre series of alternate schemes by the SFPUC, none of which would enable firefighters to successfully combat post-earthquake conflagrations in the 15 unprotected neighborhoods.

The most recent of these inadequate proposals, which they call “Option 12”, would use our limited supply of drinking water in Sunset Reservoir to post earthquake fires for two neighborhoods, even though the water mains supplying the reservoir cross three major earthquake faults and run for 25 miles along a fourth, the San Andreas Fault.

As a career firefighter, having followed the ESER Bonds story over the last eight years and thoroughly understanding the requirements of post-earthquake firefighting, it is now obvious to me that the actual agenda of the SFPUC is not to provide San Francisco neighborhoods with the best possible means of fighting the post-earthquake firestorms that we must anticipate, but instead to use the ESER Bond funds to build municipal water mains (which should be funded by the water rate payers) and call them “potable AWSS” on the false premise that the limited water supply of domestic water in the City’s reservoirs will be as adequate as the unlimited supply of seawater that surrounds the City. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

If the SFPUC is allowed to go forward with its scheme of relying on the inadequate domestic water mains for post-earthquake firefighting, instead of expanding the actual unlimited seawater AWSS into all neighborhoods, the result will be catastrophic.

Not only will much of the City again be destroyed by fires, but countless citizens, particularly the elderly or the disabled, who may be trapped in partially collapsed wood frame residences, will be consumed by the flames before they can be rescued.

The Civil Grand Jury has the power to investigate the impending gross violation of the public trust that will take place if the SFPUC is allowed to go forward with the current proposal to use domestic water mains for post-earthquake firefighting instead of actually expanding the seawater-supplied Auxiliary Water Supply System into all of the City’s neighborhoods, as the voters twice were led to believe would take place.

I submit that this investigation will benefit public safety in the most fundamental way and may save the City from once again being destroyed by fire following the next major Bay Area earthquake.

Respectfully submitted,

Frank T. Blackburn