Santa Rosa stumped by hilltop water system overwhelmed in Tubbs fire

At 9:45 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 8, the deadly Tubbs fire roared to life just north of Calistoga and began its wind-whipped rampage west toward Santa Rosa.

The timing of the ignition could not have been worse, coming just as many residents were going to sleep, unaware of the approaching inferno.

The blaze also came at a profoundly inopportune time for the water system meant to safeguard thousands of homes in Santa Rosa's hilltop Fountaingrove neighborhood.

At the moment the fire began, the huge green tanks that supply the area with millions of gallons of drinking water also used for firefighting were likely at their lowest levels of the day, depleted in some cases to just a third of their capacity, awaiting replenishment during off-peak hours when electricity is cheapest.

Two of the 10 tanks were out of commission for seismic safety issues.

As result, after the Tubbs fire reached the upscale neighborhood around 1 a.m., firefighters faced a disturbing discovery: They repeatedly lost pressure in the hoses they'd connected to hydrants served by the Fountaingrove tanks, hampering their efforts to contain the rapidly spreading inferno.

At crucial moments in the battle, firefighters were forced to retreat to the valley floor, where water pressure was stronger, according to fire officials on duty that night. There, they'd fill their engines or water tenders from hydrants, and head back up the hill to continue trying to save lives and homes.

“The bottom line is firefighters need water to fight fires,” said Jack Piccinini, a former Santa Rosa battalion chief who was head of the Rincon Valley and Windsor fire districts during the firestorm. “By the time the cavalry arrived, because so many buildings had been lost and because of the severe decrease in water pressure, we had all these trucks but not the pressure to effectively combat the fire.”

By the time dawn broke Oct. 9, it became clear that while heroic evacuation efforts had saved lives in the neighborhood - only two Fountaingrove residents died in the fires - the effort to save homes had largely failed.

Much of Fountaingrove - 1,420 homes - had been wiped off the map, the hardest-hit area of a city that bore the brunt of the nearly 5,300 homes lost in Sonoma County to the fires.

No match for firestorm

Like so many other public safety departments and systems in Sonoma County, Santa Rosa's water system was overwhelmed by the firestorm. As hundreds of houses and businesses burned at the same time, the pipes in those buildings were compromised, leading to an unrestricted release of water from individual service lines and a systemwide drop in pressure, officials said.

“There is no water system that I know of that can sustain that type of damage and still have water pressure,” Santa Rosa Fire Chief Tony Gossner said.

But the water pressure and supply failures that hampered firefighters' efforts in Fountaingrove have taken much longer to come to light than many other shortfalls in the emergency response.

In the first few months after the disaster, the city's engineers and managers were more focused on understanding and fixing the water contamination issue that arose in Fountaingrove because of the fires. They eventually concluded benzene released by burned plastic pipes and other components was back-siphoned into some water mains when the water pressure dropped.

That conclusion has led to more questions about how and why the water pressure dropped so severely in Fountaingrove and in the smaller parts of the neighborhood hit by water contamination.

Fire and public works officials have only now begun to piece together their understanding of the failure, examining the roles that water storage levels, power outages and damage to water lines played.

But unlike other public agencies, Santa Rosa Water has yet to publicly answer basic questions about how its system performed during the most destructive initial hours of the firestorm. Over several months, The Press Democrat has requested information that would factor in such an assessment, including the actual water levels in the Fountaingrove tanks at the time the Tubbs fire erupted and the levels when it arrived three hours later.

But the city has yet to provide that information and has declined to answer other questions about when it lost power to its pumps, whether the pumps had backup generators, whether they worked and what efforts were taken to restore pressure.

‘Very complex problem'

Ben Horenstein, director of Santa Rosa Water, earlier this month declined to release information about tank levels, pump failures and other data that might shed some light on the pressure problems the area suffered during the fires.

A spokeswoman for Santa Rosa Water said in late June she planned to provide a clearer picture of the system's performance, but Horenstein intervened. He released limited information about the city's water system, but nothing about its performance in the firestorm or afterward.

Horenstein said more analysis was needed to ensure the answers were complete and accurate.

“This is a very complex problem to fully understand,” Horenstein said. “The city is working to understand it and is planning to share it with the public and the press and, of course, the council. We are still in the investigative process. We're still navigating and trying to understand what occurred and what the lessons are going forward.”

Until now, Horenstein said, city staff had focused their efforts to document, understand and solve the contamination issue in a part of Fountaingrove around Fir Ridge Drive, where all but 13 of 350 homes burned.

City officials initially suggested a total replacement of the water system in the area might be necessary - a two-year project estimated to cost up to $45 million. But in response to new water quality data and fierce pushback from residents eager to rebuild, officials adopted a phased approach, beginning with a $3 million effort now underway to replace contaminated water service lines. Test results have shown water quality is improving, and officials have pledged to install water filters for any home in the area that needs one, though it has yet to do so.

That work has taken priority over doing the analysis needed to fully explain the challenges the water system faced in the fires, Horenstein said. But that investigation is now underway, he said. He expects the examination of the pressure issues to be completed in early August.

Kathy Hamilton said she'd love to hear the city's explanation. She lost her home on Shillingford Place, but she has no idea if water pressure problems prevented firefighters from saving her home.

“I've heard multiple stories about water pressure up here, including that one of the tanks had been drained for fixing,” she said. “I have no idea how anything gets distributed through the labyrinth of pipes up here.”

A sheriff's deputy was apparently able to use her garden hose to save her neighbor's home, so that would indicate at least some pressure was present in the system shortly before 10 a.m., when alarm system data suggests that her home caught fire.

“I want answers,” Hamilton said.

Tinkering with changes

The water system failure in Fountaingrove is just the latest addition in a growing list of public infrastructure that was overpowered by the historic firestorm.

Many of the shortfalls have already been publicly acknowledged by other agencies. The state Office of Emergency Services found that the county's emergency alert system was inadequate and overseen by officials with an outdated understanding of current technology.

Key government agencies responding to the fires couldn't communicate effectively with each other, according to the county's postfire analysis.

And the state's mutual aid system failed to send all the reinforcements requested by local departments.

Though Santa Rosa's look at its water system drags on, there are already signs the city recognizes it needs to rethink how it manages its water supply to combat future wildfires.

Water officials are working closely with the fire department to increase the storage levels in city water tanks during periods of increased fire danger, Gossner said.

“When there's a red-flag day, they fill them to the top now,” Gossner said of weather conditions that allow fires to grow rapidly.

Gossner said the city also is looking into “hardening” the structures housing the powerful pumps that fill the tanks, an effort to prevent what Gossner said was the failure of two pumps on the night of the fire.

Horenstein downplayed the importance of such changes.

Asked whether the department had adjusted its operations in any way as a result of the fires, including tank filling, he said in an interview “nothing materially has changed.”

He later acknowledged the department was experimenting with increasing the water supply by 5 percent in tanks in certain cases.

He called talk of hardening pump houses “premature,” stressing that more information would be available once the city investigation had been completed.

Limits of hilltop system

City officials likewise have been tight-lipped about any efforts employees took the first night of the fires to address pressure problems.

But restoring power to water pumps appears to have been part of the short-term strategy.

In the days immediately after the fire, Skyfarm Drive resident Loren Dias spotted a truck that appeared to have a large generator on it outside the water tank above his home, a tank that was on restricted duty due to seismic concerns.

And to this day, a temporary generator appears to be parked beside the building that houses the pumps serving two huge tanks just off Fountain Grove Parkway near Nagasawa Community Park.

Horenstein said the investigation will examine the performance of the city's water system during the fires and factors that led to the lack of water pressure.

“We want to understand where there may be relative limitations in the system,” he said.

Some of those limitations to the Fountaingrove water system are becoming clearer.

Unlike most of the city areas on the valley floor, which range from 100 to 200 feet in elevation, the developed areas of Fountaingrove are as high as 870 feet above sea level, with many homes offering commanding views of the Santa Rosa Plain below.

Delivering water to those homes, businesses and hydrants involves a network of 10 steel reservoirs with a total capacity of up to 7.8 million gallons. Large electric pumps push water up the hill from one tank to another. The system is complex, with gravity and water volume maintaining pressure in 16 different zones in the general Fountaingrove area.

By contrast, the vast majority of Santa Rosa is served by a single pressure zone, which gets its pressure from the Sonoma County Water Agency's massive Santa Rosa aqueduct.

“There are two fundamental but separate things you need in an effective water system - water volume and water pressure - and we need both,” Piccinini said.

On the first night of the Tubbs fire, both were problems for firefighters in Fountaingrove.

Because of the way the tanks were being managed, there was not 7.8 million gallons of capacity on hand at the time the fire swept though. The supply issues arose from several factors.

Two of the 10 tanks were not fully operational on the first night of the fire. One of those tanks, a 500,000-gallon reservoir located near the top of Fountaingrove Parkway, was undergoing seismic repairs at the time.

A second tank, a 300,000- gallon vessel on Skyfarm Drive also has seismic issues, and is limited to holding 20 to 30 percent of its capacity.

Even when fully operational, the tanks were never actually filled to capacity in order to comply with strict health regulations. By city protocol, the operational tanks were only filled to between 65 percent and 95 percent of capacity during the summer of 2017, according to pumping guidelines.

That's done to ensure the water - which is used for both drinking and firefighting - remains clean and safe to drink. The Sonoma County Water Agency adds a small amount of chlorine to the water supply to disinfect it, but the chemical dissipates with time. To keep the chlorine levels in a required range, the city has to both refresh the water in each tank regularly and manage tank levels to synch up with area usage to ensure the water doesn't sit in the tank for too long, explained Jennifer Burke, the city's deputy director of water resources.

To ensure water stays fresh for drinking, the pumps that fill Fountaingrove's tanks turn off after levels reach 65 to 95 percent.

Pumps' performance unclear

The timing of the Tubbs fire may also have factored into the shortage of water to battle the flames in Fountaingrove.

At 9:45 p.m., when the fire ignited, the city tanks are generally at their lowest levels of the day. That's when the pumps are programmed to begin refilling - when electricity rates are lowest. Tanks in the area are generally allowed to fall to half or even 30 percent of capacity before replenishment.

“That's to make sure you are filling your reservoirs in the most efficient way possible,” said Joe Schivone, deputy director of water operations.

It's not clear how long it took for the city's pumps to refill the tanks, nor whether that timing was a factor in the water pressure loss. The pumps would have had a least a few hours - from ignition to the arrival of flames in Fountaingrove - to begin refilling the tanks, Schivone said, though the city provided no data to illustrate what happened during that key period.

An evacuation order affecting Fountaingrove and nearby areas wasn't issued through Nixle until 1:41 a.m., when flames were already burning through the greater Mark West area and Larkfield. By about 2 a.m., the Tubbs fire had jumped Highway 101 and was moving into Coffey Park, where it would claim another 1,200 homes.

The city has provided no information about what happened to its pumps during those terrifying hours. Officials have declined to say when they lost power to the pumps, whether the pumps had backup generators, whether they worked or not - or for how long - and what efforts were taken to restore pressure.

Power outages made such data difficult to come by during and after the fires, Horenstein said. The water system relies on communication equipment for such metrics and it was also affected by the loss of electricity, he said.

City water systems must balance the need to provide safe drinking water with the requirement to provide sufficient water to fight fires, Horenstein said, and the study will seek to gather the facts needed to have an informed discussion about those competing demands, he said.

“The intent and the design of this investigation is to have a rigorous analysis of the question so that we get it right, because we are talking about two life-safety issues that need to be thought about in balance.”

Battling future fires

Water pressure problems are profoundly frustrating for firefighters. To ensure they have enough water to battle future fires, Piccinini said the fire department should work more closely with the water department to turn off water in selected areas during a major blaze.

Firefighters struggling to save homes in Fountaingrove were exasperated to see water pouring out of broken pipes in buildings that had already been destroyed, wasting a precious resource.

“When you're driving by commercial buildings and you see water streaming out of a foundation and just running down the street, you have to ask the question,” Piccinini said.

The city should also explore ways to design the water system with features that would allow water to be trucked in an emergency to repressurize the system, Piccinini said. Such ideas may prove logistically infeasible, but they should at least be entertained, he said.

“Those are the kinds of potential solutions that managers need to be brainstorming and holding conversations about and working it though,” Piccinini said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 707-521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.