If you live in San Francisco, you probably saw it. Friday night at around 5 PM, an ominous black plume wafted over downtown. My partner alerted me to it. He saw the smoke from our humble 9th floor TL studio. I knew it was getting worse when the smoke failed to dissipate. Instead the cloud thickened and condensed. The wind drew it inland behind the Transamerica Pyramid, the Salesforce Tower, over the Bay Bridge. I followed it to its source, somewhere behind the blocky Nob Hill skyline.
I waited for a text from AlertSF. Meanwhile, my partner hopped onto Twitter and Reddit. “Here,” he said. “It’s already online.” Meanwhile, SFFD firetrucks screamed impressively over the din of the Tenderloin, audible nearly a mile away. The quick-draw Redditor behind the post my partner showed me located the fire at Vallejo and Montgomery Streets, that Thiebaudian hillscape north of Broadway where many a scenic downtown photo are taken. Ironically, not an hour before, we were having coffee on the north edge of the Financial District not far from that intersection. The media would report it as happening in North Beach. Eventually, some twenty minutes after the blaze began, my phone buzzed with a text from AlertSF.
It read, “Avoid the area of Avoid the area of Vallejo St and Montgomery St due to Fire Activity. Emergency crews are on the scene.”
Thanks, I Thanks, I know.
No injuries; cats saved from fire
First and foremost, nobody sustained injuries during the fire. All residents were accounted for, and the SFFD crew that extinguished the blaze returned from the call unharmed. The fire grew fast, wholly consuming the fourth floor of an apartment building before firefighters wrestled it under control. Rescued from the inferno: two lucky felines who, though down one life each, are safe to begin anew as survivors.
This, along with the fitfully sleeping faults underpinning the Bay Area, is why I should renew my renter’s insurance.
This is one of my worst nightmares as a renter (that, and bedbugs. God I hate bedbugs). A fire claims everything, yes, but it continues to claim long after the embers cease their smoldering. Those irreplaceable notebooks you kept from every year in college. Your photos of loved ones who are no longer with us. Priority documents that are exceedingly difficult to replace, as each application calls for a copy of something that burned. With every effort to recover, your losses appear to redouble. You find yourself hating open flame, wishing you understood the Cloud. In earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes, a marginal chance exists you will recover at least some of your personal belongings. Fire is unforgiving, absolute, irreversible.
Are we ready?
CBS reports that between where the fire originated and the neighboring building, residents from five units were displaced. SFFD spokesperson Sukai Curtis-Contreras told SFGate that it took 66 firefighters to corral the blaze. The job also took “22 pieces of apparatus,” she added, a statistic whose significance escapes me. Regarding the fire, “SFFD Assistant Fire Chief Nicol Juratovac called the firefighting efforts by SFFD firefighters ‘a Herculean feat.’” (KRON4)
Friday, as the sun set despairingly early, the smoke thinned and faded into the oncoming night. It gradually crept up on me how overwhelmed San Francisco will be in a true citywide emergency. I was struck once “Fire officials [said] this was a challenging incident due to the proximity of other buildings and the steep street.” (ABC7) Has our fire department considered the city’s topography in their training exercises, I wondered?
It’s something I seldom do, but the deep-seated catastrophizing part of my gay ole brain did some basic math. 66 firefighters to a single blaze on one floor of a four-story apartment building typical to SF. It took roughly an hour to quench the flames. That averages out to SFFD throwing a man a minute at the problem to resolve it. Now multiply the fire by, say, 400,000 (the city counted 406,628 housing units in 2020). The conflagration would follow an earthquake, stronger than Loma Prieta (1989, M6.9), more akin to 1906 (M7.9). Fire engines fortunate enough to drive out from under intact stations will encounter streets strewn with rubble and walking wounded. If it takes an NFL team to fight one blaze, what are the odds a player gets to you before the flames do?
I often remind myself it does not take a massive catastrophe to threaten one’s life, only a private one. My heart goes out to the San Franciscans whose lives went up in smoke last Friday night. It goes out to those whose lives still haven’t risen from the ashes, literal or otherwise. You account for what’s controllable and plan for what’s not, knowing you’ll never think of everything. That fire caught my attention, making me uncomfortably aware of everything flammable in this life. What else I noticed: the fire extinguisher on my building’s floor hasn’t been serviced since 2019.
