When the City closed down the fireboat house at the port, the fireflighters put up a good fight but City Council couldn’t have cared less. It still doesn’t.

It’s sheer lunacy that Oakland used 2 million bucks from the DD bond measure to add more fire hydrants around Fairyland because Fairyland built a puppet theater and an outdoor seating area udneath a shade trellis, both just a stone’s throw from the largest fire hydrant in Oakland — Lake Merritt.

When the big one hits, you bet there will be fires. The water delivery infrastructure will be dangerously compromised. Afterwards, the folks at City Hall will beat their chests, post mortem, bemoaning the fact that the City didn’t have a fireboat, alas.

Ah, but it will have the best protected puppet theater this side of the Mississippi.

In 1989 the SFFD Boat pumped for almost 2 days without stop, as it took the place of the entire water grid, which was severed due to the liquefaction of the Marina District.

CORE is a good thing. However, it is made up of civilians with about 25-30 hours of training, many of which will not be able to physically help their neighbors.

You MUST keep 3 days worth of food and water. That is the best disaster planning you can do.

We must get the funding, and more importantly, the SUPPORT of the city in order to be at the HIGHEST level of preparation. Not just for earthquakes, but for every situation, from day to day operations, to Hazardous Materials spills, to hill fires to terrorist attacks.

Our building was given a retrofit quote and basically the seismic engineers said all they could do was “provide life saving at 6.0 magnitude or below” so the building may be written off but hopefully people walk away. Having people walk away with their lives is important of course – when it comes down to it that’s what is most importnat to me. But a 6.9 quake is almost 10 times as powerful as 6.0 and a 6.9 quake centered right here in Oakland is an altogether different matter from 6.9 at over 60 miles away. Really I don’t want to be here for a 6.9 or even 6.0 on one of our local fault lines – it is going to be a huge mess and hundreds if not thousands of people will die for sure.

I just attended a townhall discussing city sponsured deployment of broadband wireless within Oakland – I was the only one to suggest it might be a benefit to provide Oakland residents with information during or after such an emergency. This would be a real opportunity to deploy a fault tolerant (no pun intended) source of information – I hope someone can follow through with that!

An Oakland fireboat would be a very good thing.

I was up in the hills this morning, on Woodrow Drive to be exact, and a fire truck had to labor up there to tend to a residential alarm. It was tinder-dry, and dirt mixed with eucalyptus leaves was trickling onto the road. The hills give me the creeps; if they’re dry they’re ready to burn and if they’re wet they’re ready to slop down in mudslides. Pick your tragedy, because a major earthquake would set off both fires and slides up there and the roads would be blocked.

The only thing that saved San Francisco’s Marina District and other areas was the water from their Fireboat. You can see independent proof of this in the History Channel look at what would happen if a 1906 earthquake happened here now.

The reality is..the public at large does not really want to hear this..but there really is no way for a local government to TRULY prepare for a major disaster.

What we do have going for us are dedicated Firefighters that will do their best when the “big one” happens.

We need the Fireboat back, staffed and ready to protect all of us. We need a city Government that supports the efforts of the Fire Department to prepare itself for these disasters.

What people also may not realize, is that the Police Department gets the lions share of the funds. The FD gets the scraps….

If anyone has questions they can reach me at concernedoakff@hotmail.com

It was actually 6.8-7.0. A 7.0 quake 50 miles away is not the same as a 7.0 quake a mile or two from your back yard.

Part of this is because the Japanese on a cultural level have an almost para-military sense of unity. But there’s another interesting difference between the SFbay and the Kanto Plain: In Tokyo, the earthquakes are more frequent, and the little ones are stronger. I remember feeling a significant tremmors about once a semester when I was in school there. I’ve been in Oakland for 5 years and it’s nowhere near as frequent.

Their preparedness is truly impressive though. So are their public-private partnerships. My dad was running Mobil Oil Japan during the Kobe quake in ’95, and it was just a given that he retasked refinery based helicopters to help out civil defense teams. I’ll bet that if we had a quake like Kobe’s on the Hayward fault, our lack of organization would kill twice as many people in a metroplex half the size of Kobe-Osaka.