Fireboats: few & far between

Boat/US Magazine, Nov, 2002 by Ryck Lydecker

New York City's firefighters rank at the top of the heroes list for their part in the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Who will ever forget the photo of three firefighters amid the rubble using a makeshift standard to raise the country's hopes in the form of an American flag taken from a nearby yacht?

Another photo, which has not had nearly as much exposure, shows a firefighter manning a hose in front of a burning car. A high rise building blazes behind him but instead of a high-pressure stream, only a trickle of water comes out of the nozzle.

When the Twin Towers fell that morning, the collapse severed water mains in the area, depriving firefighters of their most important tool to battle the many blazes for the first few hours.

With no water in the hydrants, firefighters on land were basically helpless so the department quickly shifted to pumping water from the Hudson River to the crews at Ground Zero.

For several days after the attacks two New York City fireboats, the John McKean and Firefighter, plus the retired fireboat John J. Harvey, tied to the seawall pumped non-stop, providing the only water to the disaster site. But with the city's fireboats fully engaged in lower Manhattan, the rest of New York Harbor, including the New Jersey side of the port with its world class recreational marinas in addition to vast cargo terminals, had virtually no on-water fire protection for days.

According to Tom Guldner who heads the Marine Firefighting Institute in Pearl River, NY, not one of the other half-dozen major municipalities that comprise the Port of New York and New Jersey has its own designated fireboat. Even a year after the tragedy that rocked New York and its harbor, marine firefighting is right where it's always been on the priority ladder--on the bottom rung.

"The nation's ports are getting billions of dollars in federal money to beef up security but none of it will be spent on marine fire fighting," Guldner says. "You've got major ports that are protected by volunteers working from shore. Don't get me wrong, they may be dedicated firefighters but they don't have the equipment much less the training to fight a shipboard fire or a major marina fire."

Already, the U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded $92.3 million in seaport security grants to 51 ports around the nation. But it's highly unlikely any of that money will go to pay for the boats, equipment and training that Guldner and others say is woefully lacking since the U.S. Coast Guard began getting out of the firefight business over 25 years ago.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

"Most people think that if a fire breaks out on a ship or in a marina, the Coast Guard will respond but they don't have the assets or even the mandate to fight marine fires," says Charles Aughenbaugh, Jr, president of the New Jersey Deputy Fire Chiefs Association. "The Coast Guard has been replacing fire nozzles with 50-cal. machine guns for years now," he points out.

In 1974 Congress took the federal government out of the firefighting business--principally the Coast Guard and the Navy--and effectively turned the job over to local municipalities and port authorities. Official Coast Guard policy, in fact, states that "personnel shall not directly engage in fire fighting activities on other than Coast Guard units except ... to save a life."

Aughenhaugh and a coalition of New Jersey ports and waterfront towns think it's high time to train both professional and volunteer fire companies to fight waterfront fires and give them the tools--fireboats, in particular--to do it.

"But we're in a 'Catch-22' situation," Aughenbaugh says. "We have waterfront municipalities that will commit to supporting the regular operating costs and annual maintenance of a fireboat but they can't put up the $400,000 to $500,000 that it takes to buy the vessel."

An attempt by Aughenbaugh's group to obtain two surplus Navy tugboats for municipal fireboat duty was scuttled when the Dept. of Defense sold the mothballed vessels to a foreign government earlier this year.

The estimated $850,000 refit and conversion cost per tug would also put that plan out of reach for most towns, but Aughenbaugh says new boats in the 32 to 44foot class designed for firefighting would be cheaper. And they should qualify for federal port security funding.

"By preparing firefighters and other responders to combat fires on our waterways and seaports, we will also bolster homeland security," Aughenbaugh maintains.

But Aughenbaugh says fire services in general are strapped for funds nationwide and even in this year's $109 million U.S. Fire Administration grants to over 500 local fire departments, only one funded a vessel and that was a small, trailerable rescue boat with some firefighting capability.

Now a dozen New Jersey communities, from Newark, Elizabeth and Jersey City on New York Harbor to rural Beach Haven on the Atlantic and Port Norris on Delaware Bay, have joined forces under the aegis of Aughenbaugh's organization. They've drafted a proposal to convince Congress that port security must extend to marine fire fighting readiness. The $8 million plan has drawn the attention of fire chiefs from as far away as Seattle--the site of three large marina fires in the last year--and it may be a model for other jurisdictions that face similar problems.