Lessons From Los Angeles & the 2025 Palisades Fire

Are We Capable of Learning from L.A.’s Lack of Planning?

Overview

Frank Blackburn (1933–2025) is the assistant fire chief who saved the city of San Francisco and its Marina District from burning after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

His ingenuity and fire preparedness allowed him to immediately deploy a system of high-pressure fire hydrants and hose attachments, and connect them to a fireboat stationed nearby in San Francisco Bay. Using Blackburn’s system, the Fire Department was able to pull as much seawater from the Pacific Ocean as they needed to put out the firestorm in the Marina.

Here, Blackburn explains:

  • The fatal flaws that occurred during Los Angeles’ Palisades Fire in 2025.

  • Why Mayor Daniel Lurie and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) are about to put even more lives at risk in San Francisco.

Key Points

  • San Francisco’s current water situation is worse than the city of Los Angeles.

  • The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is only interested in its own goals—at the expense of San Francisco residents’ lives.

  • Since 2010, the PUC’s planning skills have been “incoherent” and even “farcical”.

  • The PUC has grossly overstated the cost and engineering difficulty of building additional saltwater pump stations.

August 2025

By Frank T. Blackburn, Assistant Chief, San Francisco Fire Department, Retired

There has been a persistent conflict of interest since the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) first acquired the Auxiliary Water Supply System (AWSS) high-pressure hydrant system from the San Francisco Fire Department in 2010.

The PUC’s primary agenda is, and always has been, to use the Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response (ESER) bond money to build drinking water mains, instead of extending the dedicated high-pressure hydrant system to all parts of the City.

The reason: the PUC has roughly 1,200 miles of old and fragile water mains to maintain and only has the resources to replace 15 miles a year.

In the fifteen years since the passage of the first ESER capital bond, and despite the passage of two subsequent bonds in 2014 and 2020, with a total of $312.5 million allotted for the purpose, the PUC has been unable to provide a rational and comprehensive plan for extending the high-pressure hydrant system into the fifteen unprotected western and southern neighborhoods. In these neighborhoods there are approximately 400,000 San Francisco residents and some 138,000 buildings, 90% of which are of wood-frame construction.

In contrast to the incoherent and sometimes farcical proposals by the PUC from 2010 to the present, between 1908 and 1913 the Department of Public Works built the 10.5 million gallon Twin Peaks Reservoir, two pressure regulating tanks (Ashbury and Jones Street Tanks), two 20,000 gallon per minute saltwater pump stations, and installed 72 miles of seismically robust pipelines and 887 high-pressure hydrants, all without the modern technology that is at the disposal of today’s engineers.

When the next “Big One” hits the Bay Area, thousands of these building water services will break, along with numerous domestic water mains. The result will be little to no water available in the low-pressure hydrant system.

The engineers of that day, who had been eye-witnesses to the 1906 conflagration, realized that the drinking water system had (and it still has) a fatal flaw that rendered it completely unreliable for fighting post-earthquake fires: every one of the (now) approximately 260,000 individual water services that provide water to the City’s buildings come from the same fragile mains that serve our 9,000 low-pressure hydrants.

When the next “Big One” hits the Bay Area, thousands of these building water services will break, along with numerous domestic water mains. The result will be little to no water available in the low-pressure hydrant system.

The dreadful effects of the recent fires in Los Angeles vividly underscore the absolute nonsense of depending on drinking water to fight conflagrations, but our situation will be worse – they at least had some useable low-pressure water in their system, whereas we will have none.

The premise that we should depend on our drinking water supply to fight post-earthquake conflagrations in San Francisco is absurd.

As San Franciscans realized in 1906, and were reminded in 1989, the premise that we should depend on our drinking water supply to fight post-earthquake conflagrations in San Francisco is absurd:

(a) the source of our fires will be a major earthquake, and the magnitude, epicenter and duration of that earthquake is unknowable, and therefore the degree of damage to infrastructure cannot be predetermined;

(b) the Hetch-Hetchy transmission mains run 167 miles from the Sierras, crosses three major Bay Area earthquake faults and then closely parallels the San Andreas fault for 25 miles before reaching the City’s reservoirs, which means that there is no assurance that, following the fires, this system will remain completely functional or that we will be able to refill the City’s reservoirs in time to avoid a public health emergency – that we may be able to do so is mere speculation;

(c) an unlimited water source (the Pacific Ocean) borders the City on three sides;

(d) the City has had an extremely effective high-pressure saltwater hydrant system in place in almost half the City since 1913, and it is still functional after 112 years.It would be difficult to find a better investment in the future of the City than to “AGGRESSIVELY EXPAND AND ENHANCE OUR HIGH-PRESSURE EMERGENCY FIREFIGHTING WATER SYSTEM”, as the Civil Grand Jury report made clear in its 114-page 2019 report by that title.

The PUC does not want to maintain a separate hydrant system, particularly one that uses saltwater.

To this end, the PUC has grossly overstated the cost and engineering difficulty of building additional saltwater pump stations.

From the moment in 2010 that the high-pressure hydrant system was taken from the SFFD by then Mayor Newsom and given to the PUC, that entity has made its agenda quite obvious. The PUC does not want to maintain a separate hydrant system, particularly one that uses saltwater. To this end, the PUC has grossly overstated the cost and engineering difficulty of building additional saltwater pump stations.

It is quite clear that the City’s ability to save itself from post-earthquake conflagrations has not, to this point, been the highest priority of either recent City Hall administrations or the PUC.

Should San Francisco spend several billion dollars to build an adequate, unlimited water, citywide high-pressure hydrant system now, or face hundreds of billions of dollars in losses when post-earthquake conflagrations rage out of control?

The absolute folly of the situation is this: in the absence of a comprehensive expansion of the existing saltwater system, once the City has been destroyed by post-earthquake fires, nothing else that may be accomplished between now and then will have mattered.

If we doubt this, we need only ask the following question of the residents of Los Angeles:

“Should San Francisco spend several billion dollars to build an adequate, unlimited water, citywide high-pressure hydrant system now, or face hundreds of billions of dollars in losses when post-earthquake conflagrations rage out of control?”

When, as is now the case in Los Angeles, lives have been lost, entire neighborhoods have been destroyed and the tax base has been decimated, how long will it take for the City to recover?

Here is the bottom line: is San Francisco “The City That Knows How”, or the City that knew how, but forgot?