Still Ready to Do Battle : History: The oldest operating fireboat west of the Mississippi, known to its crews as Boat 2, will soon move into its new home, a $12-million station at San Pedro’s Berth 86.

For nearly 70 years, it has been guarding the Port of Los Angeles, ready to fight fire on water.

Officially the fireboat is known as the Ralph J. Scott, but most of the firefighters in the Los Angeles Fire Department simply refer to it as Boat 2, because it replaced the first big fireboat, which was retired. Built in Los Angeles in 1925, Boat 2 is 99 feet, 6 inches of old-time craftsmanship rendered in steel, an official National Historic Landmark that also serves as the oldest operating fireboat west of the Mississippi.

For eight years, Boat 2 has been, in effect, homeless, exposed to the elements while still performing firefighting duties. That will soon change, when Boat 2 moves into its new digs, a $12-million boathouse and fire station at Berth 86 near the Maritime Museum on Harbor Boulevard in San Pedro.

It’s been almost two decades since a catastrophic explosion and fire occurred in the Port of Los Angeles. Port officials say that safety record is partly due to tightened fire safety restrictions, and partly to good luck. But the potential for disaster is always there.

“There’s a lot of weird things coming up and down that channel,” says Edward Stephens, emergency preparedness coordinator for the Port of Los Angeles. “As in any port, you have flammable liquids, gases, all kinds of things. When you think of the quantity of the hazard, it’s testimony to the effectiveness of the port in monitoring the situation, and making sure everybody plays by the rules, that there hasn’t been a major fire in so long. The hazard has been reduced--not completely eliminated, but significantly reduced.”

Because the hazard can never be eliminated, Boat 2--and the other city Fire Department units assigned to the harbor area--are on duty 24 hours a day. If fire erupts on the miles of old wooden wharves that line the port, Boat 2 will be there, shooting 18,000 gallons of water a minute on the blaze. If a fire breaks out on a cruise ship moored at the World Cruise Center, Boat 2 and its eight-man crew will be on hand to help fight it. If a major oil tanker or tank farm explodes in the port area--an event that could equal a small earthquake in its destructive power--Boat 2 will be ready.

Boat 2 is just one of five fireboats stationed in the port. The 33-year-old, 76-foot Boat 4 guards the port’s East Basin, and three 34-foot fireboats are stationed throughout the port. The area also has seven land-based fire companies. (Plans for another large fireboat to supplement the others have been put on hold because of budget considerations.)

But because it’s the oldest and the biggest and the most powerful fireboat in the fleet, Boat 2, to the men who operate it, is more than just another fireboat. From the eat-off-the-deck clean engine room to the gleaming stainless steel water cannons topside, Boat 2 is special.

“She’s unique,” said pilot Mike Corcoran, an ex-Navy diver and 24-year Fire Department veteran, who serves as one of three pilots assigned to Boat 2 on a rotating basis. “The quality was built into her way back when she was built, and it’s still there.”

“It’s like a lot of things that were built a long time ago, there was a lot of craftsmanship that went into it,” agrees Capt. Robert M. Brewis, a 33-year Fire Department veteran and for the past eight years a commander of Boat 2.

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Built at Los Angeles Shipbuilding and Drydock for $214,000 and launched in October, 1925, Boat 2 was the first of the steel fireboats in the harbor, and just part of a vastly expanded port firefighting program devised by Ralph J. Scott, chief engineer and general manager of the city’s Fire Department from 1919 to 1939. (Boat 2 was officially named the Ralph J. Scott in 1965.)

Boat 2 was perhaps the most impressive fireboat of its day, with five water cannon turrets that, initially, could spray 13,500 gallons of seawater per minute onto a blaze.

Shortly after launching, Boat 2 moved into a beautiful, pale-yellow wooden boathouse on Terminal Island--near the current site of the Vincent Thomas Bridge--one of the first such fireboat houses in the country. A barn-sized building constructed over water, it was three stories tall to accommodate Boat 2’s highest water-gun turret.

Boat 2 has a long history of battling tragedy: a wharf fire in 1941 that consumed warehouses and 1,200 feet of wharves; a fish cannery fire in Fish Harbor in 1943; a 1944 flash fire that engulfed two Navy ships and killed 16 men; the explosion of the tanker Markay at Berth 167 in Wilmington in 1947, which killed 11 people and forced Boat 2 to plow through a sea of burning gasoline and butane to fight the blaze. There were countless other, smaller fires.

By the late 1960s Boat 2 was getting old, and plans were made to scrap it and build another. But Fire Department officials decided to refit Boat 2. It emerged from the remodeling with all the latest equipment: hydraulic water cannon turrets, underwater maneuvering jets and large capacity “under-wharf nozzles.”

Wharf fires are almost impossible to fight from above, so the nozzles spray water from the boat’s waterline up through the wooden pilings that support the wharf. At the same time, Fire Department divers in scuba gear, operating off the smaller fireboats, swim under the wharf to set up spraying hoses to keep the fire from spreading.

The refit also beefed up Boat 2’s water pumping capabilities, giving it the biggest gallon-per-minute pumping capacity of any fireboat in the nation: 18,000 gallons per minute, which means it could fill an average swimming pool in one minute. Big Bertha, Boat 2’s most powerful water cannon, can send a stream of water 470 feet, about 1 1/2 football fields.

It needed that kind of fire power--or water power--in 1976, when the 810-foot Liberian-registered oil tanker Sansinena exploded at Berth 46 with such force that it broke windows in Costa Mesa, 21 miles away, and rattled buildings in Glendale. The explosion killed nine men and caused $22 million in damage.

Shortly thereafter, the Fire Department instituted new fire inspection regulations for tanker ships. There have been no major tanker explosions in the port since then.

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Firefighters say tougher fire regulations and inspections have made the port safer, even though the tonnage of flammable materials passing through the port has increased dramatically over the past two decades.

“We’ve been very fortunate,” Brewis says. “But you have to be ready. You do everything you can to prevent it, but accidents can happen. An earthquake could split the tanks at a tank farm open, or lightning could strike. Things happen.”

Things do happen, and if the fires Boat 2 has fought in recent years aren’t as dramatic as the tanker explosions of years past, they were plenty dramatic enough for the people caught up in them, and the firefighters who put them out. Although no fireboat crew member has ever been killed while fighting a fire in the port, at times the job can get a little hairy.

Six years ago, for example, a fire charred 300 feet of wharf and destroyed or damaged six commercial fishing boats at Berth 73. Boat 2 put it out.

“In a wharf fire, you have to bring the boat in right next to the wharf,” said Brewis, “so you’re right in the center of the fire, with the smoke all around you. You can imagine, it’s a little difficult. It takes a lot of skill on the pilot’s part. On everyone’s part. . . . When we have something happen, there’s a potential for it to be very big.”

Boat 2 handles about 10 emergencies a month, less than it was handling 20 or 30 years ago. In addition to fires, Boat 2 is also called out for search and rescue, environmental problems such as oil spills, and more routine assignments, such as pumping water out of sinking boats. Occasionally it has been called out to look for people who were thought to have jumped off the Vincent Thomas Bridge; once the crew helped recover the bodies of a woman and her four children after she drove her van off a wharf and into the channel.

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It’s a varied life for Boat 2’s 24 crew members. There are three platoons--A, B and C--assigned to the boat. Each platoon has a captain, a pilot, a mate, two engineers to run the engines and three firefighters. All are men, although there have been female crew members in the past. Each platoon works about 56 hours a week.

Crew members say they wouldn’t want to do anything else.

“It’s the best job in the department,” said Corcoran. “When I first joined the department I never dreamed I’d ever get to be a pilot. There are only six of them”--that is, three assigned to each of the department’s two large boats--”and once people get on the boats they don’t want to leave. It’s a great job.”

“I’ve been here 10 years, and I’ll stay as long as I can,” said B Platoon Engineer John Rasmussen, a 32-year department veteran.

For eight years, ever since the old boathouse was torn down in 1986 to make way for port expansion, Boat 2 crew members have had to make do with a temporary station and living quarters in some modular buildings near Boat 2’s slip. During that time, the boat has had to be left in the open, exposed to the elements.

And as every boat owner knows, boats equal maintenance. In the past year, Boat 2 has had its decks scraped and repainted three times by crew members.

As Capt. David Jones, a platoon commander on Boat 4, the 76-foot Bethel F. Gifford, puts it, “When you’re assigned to the fireboats you spend a lot of time chasing rust.”

Firehouse living conditions and on-board maintenance schedules should improve dramatically in August or September, when Boat 2’s new boathouse is completed. The 18,000-square-foot boathouse and fire station will offer more spacious living quarters for the crew, and a viewing area so visitors can see the historic fireboat--it was named a National Historic Landmark in 1990--when it’s berthed. The covered slip will protect the boat from the elements.

Still, at age 69, Boat 2 is no young whippersnapper. How much longer can it last?

“I think this boat can operate for another 50 years,” Brewis said confidently. “Maybe even more.”

On the Cover

For nearly 70 years, the fireboat Ralph J. Scott has been standing guard against conflagrations in the Port of Los Angeles. Better known to firefighters as simply Boat 2, it is the oldest operating fireboat west of the Mississippi River. The Fire Department is building a new home for Boat 2, a $12-million boathouse and station at Berth 86 near the Maritime Museum on Harbor Boulevard in San Pedro.