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.
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