All Hands Off Deck

Tears will fall in San Pedro next week when the old salts gather to bid farewell to a gallant survivor of the days when sailing ships lined the Port of Los Angeles. City Fire Boat No. 2, a.k.a. the Ralph J. Scott, will be decommissioned April 12 after 77 years of service to the Los Angeles Fire Department and will be replaced.

The Scott was built in San Pedro and officially launched Oct. 20, 1925. It was renamed in 1965 to honor the chief who commissioned the boat. “It’s a fantastic piece of machinery,” says Bill Dahlquist, a retired LAFD pilot who served on the Scott from 1976 to 1992. “Its history, its service and dependability [are] beyond belief. The only problem is, it’s aching with age.”

Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989 as part of the National Park Service’s Maritime Heritage Program, the 100-foot boat faces an uncertain future, though preservation efforts are underway, Dahlquist says. “The Los Angeles Fire Department Historical Society, L.A. Rec and Parks and the Maritime Museum are of a mind to incorporate it into [a planned waterfront promenade] and make it a museum piece in San Pedro,” he says. For the short term, the Scott will remain on standby as a reserve boat.

The LAFD protects the port of Los Angeles with a fleet of five fireboats for wharf and ship fires. Two fireboats are housed at Wilmington Fire Station 49, another at the Cabrillo Beach station and a fourth at Fish Harbor on the east side of Terminal Island; the Scott is at Fire Station 112 in San Pedro.

The Scott is a 150-ton-plus floating pump station with a total capacity of 18,600 gallons per minute. The “Big Bertha” monitor atop the pilothouse can throw a stream of seawater 400 feet.

Dahlquist, 72, a board member with the LAFD Historical Society and a 38-year fire department veteran, can reel off the Scott’s harrowing history, including the explosion of the tanker SS Markay in Slip One of the port on June 22, 1947. Dahlquist himself piloted the Scott in response to a massive explosion aboard the Sansinena, an 810-foot oil supertanker on Dec. 17, 1976. “The whole center section blew out, like a five-story steel building blew up and landed upside down on the wharf. It killed nine people and injured 22. There was fire everywhere, on the water, on the wharf. The wharf took three days to extinguish, [but] we had the ship fire out before morning.”

In its day, the Scott fielded conflagrations and rescues involving tuna boats, tankers, cargo carriers and passenger ships. “There were vehicles over the side, people falling off boats, suicides, helicopters and airplanes that went down.”

Dahlquist says the Scott’s motto was “Rust Never Sleeps.” “A piece of iron in saltwater for 75 years? It’s a miracle there’s anything there.” Miracles notwithstanding, decommission day is looming. “It’s unimaginable. Us old-timers, we’ll just tighten our belts and wish it wasn’t happening.”