By Thomas K. Pendergast

San Francisco voters will decide on a $535 million bond measure in June, part of which will fund the expansion of the Emergency Firefighting Water Supply System (EFWSS), although two neighborhood groups oppose the current plan.

On Jan. 27, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to put the bond before the voters, despite appeals from the Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods and the Sunset-Parkside Education and Action Committee (SPEAK) to make significant changes to the plan as proposed.

The EFWSS provides a much stronger system of pipelines operating separately from the City’s main water system.

Initially built following the 1906 earthquake after so many water mains and connections in the regular municipal water system were broken – resulting in insufficient water pressure to fight fires immediately after the earthquake – the updated system was completed in 1913 when most of San Francisco was built up in the northern and eastern parts of the City.

After some additions in 1986, the furthest the system goes west is 12th Avenue in the Richmond District and 19th Avenue in the Sunset District. The hydrants for these are identified by red tops in the Richmond and black tops in the Sunset.

According to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), which is overseeing the project, the proposed new Westside Potable Emergency Firefighting Water System would extend from Lake Merced in the south to Lincoln Park and the Presidio in the north, providing coverage out to the Great Highway.

This could include drawing water from Lake Merced should other sources not be available. And after fires are extinguished, these same pipelines would then provide drinking water.

The SFPUC says there are multiple benefits to constructing a potable emergency firefighting system that serves both drinking water and emergency firefighting supply.

“Instead of constructing separate new seismic systems for drinking water and emergency firefighting, we accomplish both goals with this one project,” the SFPUC states. “This makes the most out of ratepayer dollars and bond funds.”

SPEAK’s appeal, however, implies that in trying to save SFPUC money to rebuild existing infrastructure, the commission is perhaps unrealistic.

“Based on the significantly upsized new pipeline proposed, this project is clearly scoped with a dual purpose to serve the water needs of a substantially increased westside population and secondarily function as added redundancy to the currently deficient westside emergency firefighting system,” it said. “The project statement fails to make this dual-purpose explicitly clear with respect to population growth. Furthermore, there has been no CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) review of general plan amendments for growth at the scale of the family-friendly rezoning plan under consideration.”

Lisa Arjes, a community activist, said she attended a panel discussion for the Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods recently, where officials from the fire department and the SFPUC also participated. She says those officials “have given us a lot of reasons to be skeptical.”

“It’s a little bit crazy to use potable water as emergency firefighting (water) when we are basically next to the largest body of water on the planet,” Arjes said. “Using potable water, you have a limited water supply, versus if you were going to install a salt-water pump where you could draw from the Pacific Ocean and the Bay.”

Because the EFWSS is completely separate from the municipal system, critics say, is why it is the better option.

One key factor in all this is the Sunset Reservoir, which serves as the end point terminus for the Hetch-Hetchy water system carrying water across the state to San Francisco.

“The (California) state water code actually dictates that we share the Sunset Reservoir and our (other) reservoirs with the ratepayers up and down the peninsula, and there are 29 entities,” Arjes said. “You have two options to replenish your water: one is Hetch-Hetchy, which is 167 miles away, which traverses three major earthquake faults. It actually runs parallel to the San Andreas for about 27 miles.

“So, not only will it take 24 hours to recharge the reservoir, but you don’t know if those lines will be intact,” she said.

“Your second option is to draw from Lake Merced, which contaminates your potable water. And they estimate that it will take them weeks to months to decontaminate our drinking water,” she said. “And in three days you will have a cholera outbreak of biblical proportions without water for drinking and sanitation. So, I feel like this whole thing has just not been well thought out.”

Of the $535 million in the bond, $130 million is slated specifically for the expansion of the EFWSS. The rest of the bond money would be spent on retrofitting fire and police stations, as well as $200 million to seismically upgrade the Muni bus yard at Potrero Hill.

Since 2010, three bond measures have been passed, totaling $308 million for EFWSS improvements, or 21% of all funds raised by those bonds for improving public safety infrastructure, with most of the rest going to fire or police stations and other emergency facilities.

The 2020 bond measure raised at least $151 million to fund more robust water pipelines in San Francisco’s westside neighborhoods but bad math and inflation burned through that money quickly, leaving large areas more vulnerable to conflagrations following a major earthquake.

In June of 2021, the SFPUC presented a plan showing EFWSS pipelines running north from a pump station at Lake Merced through neighborhoods in the outer Sunset and Richmond districts, listing them as “funded” by that bond money.

At a meeting of the Board of Supervisors’ Government Audit and Oversight Committee in 2023, however, a revised plan showed the proposed pipelines for the entire Richmond District west of 12th Avenue as “unfunded,” as was the Outer Sunset District pipeline running north of Lawton Street.

The original estimate from that bond to build out the system was roughly $15 million per mile, but after a more up-to-date cost estimate taking inflation into account, they learned it is actually about $42 million per mile.

During the Jan. 14 meeting of the Board’s Budget and Finance Committee, District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan brought up the discrepancy and asked what another $130 million from another bond would buy.

The SFPUC’s Senior Project Manager Josh Andresen responded that they think it might get a new pipeline up to 47th Avenue and Cabrillo Street.

“Some of those contracts are in the planning stage and so we’re still refining the scope and there still is a range of possible outcomes,” Andresen said.

City administrator and former District 4 Supervisor Carmen Chu stressed the urgency of getting this project done.

“According to the USGS (United States Geological Survey) there is a 72% chance of a 6.7 magnitude or greater earthquake in the Bay Area in the next 30 years,” Chu said. “That’s a pretty significant and high percentage of likelihood that we will be experiencing seismic activity in the Bay Area.

“Sometimes it’s not the initial shaking that causes the most damage but oftentimes the fire itself that starts to bring much more loss of life and casualties,” she said. “Thinking about some of the recent events that have happened in California … we’ve also seen some pretty significant challenges in many of our urban environments. In the recent Palisades fire in Los Angeles, fire hydrants ran dry as the area’s auxiliary water supply failed.

“By expanding San Francisco’s emergency firefighting water system on the west side, this bond ensures that firefighters will have the water that they need to fight blazes quickly and effectively, and to save lives,” Chu added.