Photo by Greta Mart. The Mission District appears to be one neighborhood that does have enough water for an emergency.

In a new investigation on the city’s emergency water supply, the Chronicle has found that the city’s many  parts of the city will be unable to deal with multiple fires like the one earlier this month at China Basin.

The Fire Department has enough emergency resources to battle three big fires like the one this month that destroyed a Mission Bay apartment building under construction. But if more fires than that break out in areas with no access to the backup water supply system – a fearsome likelihood in the aftermath of a major earthquake – there probably won’t be enough emergency equipment to put them all out. READ MORE

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Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still there.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.

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2 Comments

  1. We’re surrounded by water. Just pump in water from the Bay or the Ocean. Salt water is fine for putting out fires.

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    1. Read the article. The problem is not quantity of water; it’s the ability to get it to the right place after an earthquake.

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