San Francisco Firefighter Whose System Credited with Saving Marina During Quake, Dies

Oct. 30—When the Loma Prieta earthquake sparked a massive fire in San Francisco's Marina District on the afternoon of of Oct. 17, 1989, live images of the blaze transmitted from the Goodyear blimp to the TV monitors at Candlestick Park — where Frank Blackburn, an assistant chief with the city fire department, was attending Game 3 of the World Series while off duty.

Blackburn stayed calm, because he knew exactly how to fight the blaze. The second-generation fireman had studied the horse-drawn wagon response to the city's catastrophic 1906 earthquake when hydrants ran dry. He had devised a plan to pump water from San Francisco Bay through a complex system of fireboats, miles of hose and small portable hydrants that could miraculously maintain high pressure after the water mains failed. He'd even orchestrated a complicated fire drill along the Embarcadero just six days before Loma Prieta.

With phone lines jammed and communications haphazard, Blackburn was still on his way to the scene in his official chief's car when his plan was executed. The fireboat Phoenix had been summoned from its station beneath the Bay Bridge to set up at the foot of Divisadero Street. Its pump was connected through miles of heavy hose dragged by citizens across Marina Boulevard and two blocks up Divisadero to the fire.

When firefighters atop the hose tender engine opened the nozzle, a glorious torrent of bay water sprayed with enough force to reach across half a block. A nervous crowd of onlookers let out a cheer. Blackburn's system had worked. By the time he left the scene, around noon the next day, 5.5 million gallons of bay water had been pumped into the fire for 16 hours straight, turning it into a smoldering ruin. The Marina had been saved.

Blackburn never attached his name to the Portable Water Supply System he had invented, and when the World Series resumed at Candlestick 10 days later, he was not among the 12 heroes invited onto the field for a pregame ceremony.

But 30 years later, Mayor London Breed called the long-retired Blackburn to the podium at an anniversary event on the Marina Green where he made his last public comment, among many others involved in fighting the Marina fire.

"We had a drill with a portable water system a week before, so we knew exactly what to do," Blackburn explained to the crowd. "It was a proud day for the San Francisco Fire Department and also for the people who came in — the off duty guys. We did the best we could under the circumstances and it worked out. So here we are today."

When the 35th anniversary of Loma Prieta came around, in 2024, Blackburn and his wife, Yvonne, were spending half the year at a second home he owned in the Black Forest region of Germany, where he had learned to speak German fluently and spent his time hiking and cross-country skiing. He also owned a family home in San Francisco's Balboa Terrace neighborhood west of Twin Peaks and had traded some rental units for a place in Napa. It was there that he began experiencing shortness of breath and was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, although he had been a nonsmoker all his life.

Given six months to live, he lasted only three. He died Sept. 25 at a skilled nursing facility in Napa, where he had been convalescing following surgery. He was 92.

"He was a rare combination of genius and tenacity," said retired assistant deputy chief Tom Doudiet, who worked with Blackburn for 32 years and recently wrote a document titled "Retired Assistant Chief Frank Blackburn, San Francisco Fire Department, and How a Repeat of the 1906 Disaster Was Averted."

That report ran 10 dense pages, single-spaced, but was summed up in a quote by Assistant Chief Harry Brophy, the incident commander in the Marina during the fire: "Without the fireboat and Frank's hose tenders, we'd have been making our stand down at Fort Mason," meaning the fire on Divisadero and Beach Streets would have burned everything in its path as it moved six blocks east. And if it headed south and jumped Lombard Street on its way to Cow Hollow, it might have been unstoppable due to the fire's propensity for burning uphill, Doudiet told the Chronicle in an interview.

"That (portable water system) was Frank's baby," said Gerry Shannon, a firefighter who earned the department's highest honor for rescuing a woman trapped beneath a collapsing building during the fire. "He invented it, and if it wasn't for it there would have been no water in the Marina."

"Frank's baby" is still in use by the department, as are all four of the hose tender engines he had modified so that each could carry miles of hose and six of his portable cast-iron hydrants. They are scattered in fire stations throughout the city, waiting for an emergency that knocks out the hydrants.

"The technology has never been surpassed," said Doudiet. "If there is another earthquake, Blackburn's system (now 35 years later) will be essential to fighting multiple fires that occur simultaneously."

Frank Thomas Blackburn was born March 4, 1933, in San Francisco and grew up in the Mission Terrace neighborhood. He attended James Denman Middle School and Balboa High School, where he was an offensive lineman on the football team and ran the half-mile in track. After graduating in 1952, he continued his football career at City College and also joined the U.S. Navy Reserve, which led to him being called into active duty at the end of the Korean War. He operated a steam boiler on a fleet tugboat based in Pearl Harbor and was discharged in 1956. After that he got a job firing the steam boilers on the Southern Pacific Railroad.

"My dad had a deep love of all things transportation," said his daughter, Ingrid. He also had a deep love of all things German, having met his first wife, Irmgard Knitt, at Schroeder's, the German beer hall on Front Street. Knitt had grown up behind the Iron Curtain and narrowly escaped, as a teenager, before the Berlin Wall was built. They were married in 1968, and raised their two kids, Ingrid and Matt, in a household that spoke only German, and attended a Lutheran church where the sermon was in German. They divorced in 1977; Knitt died in 2020.

Blackburn had always wanted to join the San Francisco Fire Department, where his father, F.B. Blackburn, was a battalion chief. When Frank made it to the top of the hiring list, he took a substantial pay cut to leave the railroad. He became a probationary fireman in 1956 and a permanent in '57. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1967, the year he received his first commendation, for rescuing a woman trapped in a fire in a building on Golden Gate Avenue. In 1973 he made it to captain and in 1977 was promoted to battalion chief on his way to his highest rank, assistant chief, in 1982. His two younger brothers, Richard and Robert, made it to captain and lieutenant, respectively, in the fire department.

Blackburn started working on a portable hydrant system in the mid-'80s, as an unexpected consequence of the two-year program to rebuild the city's cable car lines instituted by Mayor Dianne Feinstein. Sixty-nine square blocks had to be dug up to repair the cables, and the underground supply of water pipes was disrupted, requiring a vast network of high capacity hoses aboveground to supply water, according to the history compiled by Doudiet.

When the project was finally completed in 1984, hundreds of lengths of 5-inch diameter hose were offered to the fire department. But the largest hose size that would service the hydrants was 3-inch. Fire Chief Emmett Condon assigned Blackburn the task of figuring out a use for these larger hoses.

Because Blackburn had studied the 1906 earthquake and fire, he knew that horse-drawn hose wagons had been crucial in hauling lines so the U.S. Navy could pump bay water and stop the fire at Van Ness. The system he built was patterned after that, using repurposed firetrucks and the 5-inch hoses, which could feed into the existing 3-inch hoses through portable hydrants he designed, made of cast iron and weighing 120 pounds. The system of ever-decreasing hose widths can create high water pressure in outlying areas of the city that have only low pressure hydrants, marked by white tops. It also works in extreme situations when the larger high pressure hydrants — marked by blue, red or black tops — fail altogether.

The system was approved by Feinstein after an intense inner office meeting that was also attended by Chief Condon and Charles Scawthorn, a civil engineer who was a consultant to the city on fire safety. Blackburn persuaded the mayor to find $2 million in city money to pay for the Portable Water Supply System. She also backed a separate $45 million bond issue to improve and extend the high pressure hydrant system west of Twin Peaks.

"That was all due to Frank. He wouldn't let up," said Scawthorn. "It was an uphill battle but the aboveground water system he came up with was funded."

Blackburn retired from the fire department in 1991 after 35 years of service and started a Redwood City firm called Portable Water Supply Systems Co. to manufacture the hydrants he had designed. The Oakland and Vallejo fire departments both put his system into use. Blackburn also took it to Rwanda on a humanitarian mission to use the pumping system to clarify drinking water, to combat an outbreak of cholera.

"Frank saved tens of thousands of lives by providing clean drinking water," said Scawthorn, who was an investor in the firm. It received honors and was recognized in a ceremony by Feinstein, then a U.S. senator — but Blackburn never received the government reimbursement for the mission he said he'd been promised, and it bankrupted the company, Scawthorn said.

In the end, the only name recognition Blackburn got for the water system that saved the Marina was in a children's book, published in 2006, that tells the story of the earthquake and fire of 1989 and the part played by the fireboat Phoenix.

The book is called "Frankie & the Phoenix" — and Frankie is the fire hydrant that saves the day.

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