City water officials bristle at criticism over handling pressure woes during last year’s Tubbs fire

Santa Rosa water officials pushed back Friday on the suggestion their efforts to quickly restore water pressure to the fire-ravaged, hilly Fountaingrove neighborhood a year ago were anything less than heroic.

An outside consultant’s ?90-page report commissioned to assess the performance of the city’s water system said it was designed well and capable in most circumstances of providing plenty of water for drinking and firefighting. However, it was overwhelmed when the Tubbs fire decimated the neighborhood and other areas of the city in the early morning hours of Oct. 9.

Nonetheless, earlier this week the former water department director said workers should have moved more quickly to stop water lines from gushing water that severely limited the pressure.

The report, presented to the City Council Friday, concluded nothing could have kept water pressure strong enough to battle the ferocious blaze that destroyed 3,100 homes and businesses in the city in a matter of hours, and no structures were built with automatic shut-off valves.

“There were 3,000 properties where the water was turned all the way on because there wasn’t anything to stop it,” Mayor Chris Coursey said.

The report recommended the city explore a number of possible system upgrades, including finding ways to remotely shut off water lines, which poured a high volume of water into the streets in the hours and days after the historic fire swept through the city.

Many of the 10 massive water tanks serving Fountaingrove - one of which was empty and another of which was on limited duty because of seismic concerns - were drained completely on Oct. 9, about three hours after the fire started in Calistoga.

Fire Chief Tony Gossner said the early hours of the firefighting were so focused on evacuations, that the low water pressure had little effect on the efforts.

“When a fire comes into a city like this, it’s get people out of the way and deal with the fire as an afterthought,” Gosser said.

Later, water tenders were brought in to provide ?firefighters water to try to battle individual fires, but by then the damage was done and the pressure drop was insurmountable, he said.

City water officials were able to turn off enough open service lines - some of which supplied water to large commercial buildings that burned to the ground - and restore water pumping capacity that allowed many tanks to began refilling on Oct. 11.

The water officials, meanwhile, strongly rebuked the critique this week by previous water department director, Joe Romano, that workers hadn’t immediately gone into the burn zone to turn off gushing water lines and they needed to “add a little urgency to their efforts.”

“The reality and facts are completely opposite of that suggestion,” Santa Rosa Water Director Ben Horenstein said.

He said the efforts of department staff, some of whom reported to work after being evacuated or after their own homes burned, were “heroic.”

They went into the area “through the flames, through the smoke and did everything humanly possible - and even beyond that - to bring the (water) system back up,” he said.

In one instance, the consultant’s report recounts how employees raced into the Fountaingrove area, after the power went out around 1 a.m., to hook up a portable generator to keep the water pumps running before they were overwhelmed by smoke and workers had to retreat an hour later.

“Prior to this incident, I had not thought of the water department as a first responder,” Council member Julie Combs said. “I really want to thank the brave souls who kept a pumping station going for an extra hour. That moves me.”

According to the report, Santa Rosa’s water department workers were limited in their ability to enter the area of the fire to turn off water services manually because of the danger of going without fire department escorts. And those escorts were committed elsewhere as the blaze raged in Sonoma County.

“We were not going to put people back in harm’s way,” City Manager Sean McGlynn said.

The city hired Kansas-?based global engineering consulting firm Black & Veatch in January to perform the analysis of the water system performance during the fire and ways it could be improved. The contract is for up to $98,000.

For the first time, city officials acknowledged Friday that legal concerns also were the reason for the water system inquiry.

Santa Rosa City Attorney Sue Gallagher confirmed the analysis and report were commissioned by the city’s legal department in an effort to assess the city’s exposure to potential litigation stemming from the damage to the water system.

She said Friday there had been no overt legal threat at the time the report was commissioned several months ago, but her department thought it was prudent to do the analysis.

That made the report effectively an attorney-client privileged document until the council last month agreed privately to make the report public, Gallagher said.

Vice Mayor Chris Rogers, who chairs a subcommittee looking into making city officials more transparent to the public, said he had concerns about that process. He wondered aloud whether the council would have made the report public if it had been a negative one.

While the report was largely welcomed by the council, there were several signs of how sensitive the city remains to criticism that its employees responded to last year’s wildfire in anything but the most effective manner.

Rogers said his recent tour of areas in San Diego torched by wildfires drove home the “importance of having interconnected departments.”

That may have been a veiled reference to sections of the report that noted communication between the fire department and the water department in the early hours of the fire may not have been stellar. The report said, while the city opened an emergency operations center at ?12:30 a.m. on Oct. 9 shortly before the fire raced into Fountaingrove, “Santa Rosa Water wasn’t formally notified of the EOC opening.”

The report also noted the water department later opened its own separate disaster operations center and there was “difficulty communicating with the fire department.” When power went out at 1 a.m., and water workers scurried the portable generator up the hill in Fountaingrove, “Santa Rosa Water was unaware of the severity of the fire at that time,” the report said.

But City Manager Sean McGlynn was quick to rebut the suggestion that interdepartmental city communication had anything to do with the challenges of responding to the Tubbs fire.

“This is a fire that started outside of our city limits, and we need regional solutions and regional monitoring and regional information flows and a regional approach to managing this problem,” McGlynn said. “Otherwise, we’re going to be susceptible like we were last October without that regional approach.”

Other recommendations in the report included: replacing backup generators that run on propane which can be challenging to fuel during an emergency; performing a similar study of the Coffey Park neighborhood; examining ways to increase pumping capacity; increasing the connections between the various pressure zones; and considering a water supply dedicated to firefighting.

City water officials also updated the council on the related efforts to resolve the contamination issue in sections of the water system. Progress on resolving the problem, which has cost the city about $8 million to date, is going so well the city expects to be able to lift the water advisory in the area around Fir Ridge Drive by the end of the month.

Council members commended city water staff for engineering a solution to the contamination, caused mostly from burned plastic water pipes, that costs far less than the $43 million estimate to replace the water system. Multiple tests show a full system replacement is not necessary. The city plans to have a community meeting on Sept. 19 at 6 p.m. at 35 Stony Point Road to share new information about that effort.