San Francisco Floating Fireboat Station 35 Opens for Operations

More than two years, $50 million and one ocean crossing later, San Francisco has it's newest fire station. And it floats.

The San Francisco Fire Department's two-story Fireboat Station 35 opens for operations Thursday on the Embarcadero at Pier 22 1/2, more than a year after it was floated across the bay at low tide in the predawn dark from Treasure Island, where the superstructure was constructed.

The 173-foot-long-by-96-foot-wide float that allows the station to ride the tides was specially fabricated in China to withstand tides and natural disasters. That could make all the difference during a fire or earthquake that could crumble buildings on land and potentially leave the station as a last bastion from which to dispatch rescuers and life saving equipment.

The battleship-like building is the first and only floating fire station in the Western Hemisphere, according to San Francisco Department of Public Works spokeswoman Rachel Gordon.

The gray structure with its glass front and Bay Bridge backdrop will now take on many of the duties previously handled by the more than 100-year-old fire house on the Embarcadero. That is where the city's fire boats were once dispatched from, including to battle blazes caused by the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake.

The Fire Station 35 historical building will stay standing on the pier where it was originally built, and the fire engine it houses will still operate out of its garage.

"You can fit the current station into about 30 percent of the new station," said SFFD spokesman Jonathan Baxter, speaking ahead of the opening.

The new structure is also designed to be resistant to, instead of at the mercy of, nature's perils. Those include King Tides and expected sea level rise, as well as earthquakes. The gently slapping waves that lick the Embarcadero seawall can morph into fierce tides during a seismic event like the Loma Prieta earthquake, which stirred a tsunami near the shore of Monterey Bay and caused building cave ins and liquefaction of the ground in parts of San Francisco.

Instead of being built onto a dock, the 14,900-square-foot structure is designed to float, anchored to four vertical guide piles that measure 150 feet apiece and are driven into the floor of the bay. The structure is designed to roll with those seismic punches and to render aid, including from a small medical bay aboard a boat.

The station "Will help us to minimize damage during an earthquake," Baxter said, allowing firefighters to respond far better to a large-scale emergency, especially when compared to the previous drill of scuttling down the early 20^th Century spiral staircase in the old firehouse.

The new station's water-borne structure is also fitted with lifts to pull the city's three fireboats — the St. Francis, the Phoenix, and the Guardian — out of the water for repairs, Baxter said.

One of those boats is staffed 24/7 to cover the city's large waterfront and water ways. That round-the-clock capability has allowed the SFFD to respond to large incidents, like the fire that ravaged Pier 45 in 2020, torching fishing equipment and sending flames and smoke 100 feet into the sky.

Baxter said the boats can also respond to water emergencies, like capsized vessels or distressed swimmers from Ocean Beach to Hunters Point and beyond. They can blast fires with bay water that first responders on shore can't get to and act as fire hydrants for firefighters on land.

Having a fire station right on the water will also make it faster and easier for the city's fire department to dispatch its other rescue water craft (the lay person might call them jet skis) directly from the station instead of from their long time home at the St. Francis Yacht Club located near the Marina Green.

The new building also includes a refitted operations center to coordinate communications during emergencies on the water and in the area, along with a ramp that allows ambulances to pick up patients transferred to one of the fireboats.

Baxter said, in the past, water rescues required transferring patients often in critical condition onto a gurney and then to a waiting ambulance on land. "This allows us to drive down to where the boat is docked and transfer patients from boat to ambulance."

Baxter said the complement of 21 personnel assigned to the station, seven of which are on shift at a given time including three people that operate the engine, will stay the same.

The project cost $50.5 million, according to the city's Department of Public Works, which managed the project for the fire department. The funding came from the second phase of the Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response bond approved by San Francisco voters in 2014.

Initial estimates put the cost of the project at $40.5 million, of which $31.8 million was slated for construction. The build was delayed by more than a year from the initial plans, partly due to slowdowns during the pandemic, according to Gordon, the DPW spokeswoman.

Chase DiFeliciantonio is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @ChaseDiFelice

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