By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen
The Vallejo Times Herald
VALLEJO, Calif. — The original Mare Island Fire Station sits dark and empty now, evidence of its former horse-drawn equipment days, now visible only to those who look closely and know what they’re looking for.
And though Vallejo Fire Department Interim Chief Paige Meyer said recently that it’s being considered for the site of a public safety dispatch center, the nearby newer M.I.F.D. station is now being used only for storage.
But it wasn’t always so. These structures once housed the island’s own fire department — and, one of California’s first.
Though it disappeared in 1999, the Mare Island Fire Department operated during some significant historical moments for more than a century.
Much of its early recorded history is sketchy, owing, some historians think, to its being a federal instead of local operation.
Some historians believe, however, that as the fire fighting unit for the first West Coast Navy base, the M.I.F.D. — created in 1854 — was California’s first fully paid fire department. Until then, volunteers made up most departments, M.I.F.D. fire inspector Mark Hutchings of Concord said.
Inherent dangers
Considering the dangers inherent in any firefighting operations and the absence of modern equipment, it was remarkable that in its nearly
150 years, the M.I.F.D. lost only one firefighter in the line of duty, on Oct. 4, 1953.
L.A. McIntosh, 48, the captain of one of the department’s two fire boats, fell overboard and drowned fighting one of the island’s worst fires. Several others were injured, according to a published report.
But McIntosh’s death faded from memory in the intervening decades.
“We weren’t aware of it, until one of our members found an article about it when the department was closing and people were going through stuff to save,” Hutchings said.
Although descendants could not be located, four years later McIntosh’s name was added to the federal memorial, Hutchings said.
Getting around
The island’s firefighters didn’t confine themselves to the naval base.
At least one historical website lists the first recorded instance of mutual aid among Solano County fire departments as happening in 1906 when Suisun was burning. At that time, the Vallejo Fire Department’s motorized pumper engine arrived by railroad car and saved the town.
M.I.F.D. historians insist, however, that the first mutual aid occurred in 1859 when the M.I.F.D. responded to Vallejo’s request for help when the State Capitol Building caught fire, Hutchings said.
Pressed into service that day was the department’s first fire engine, which it got in February 1856.
“There was no bridge then, so the fire department had to rely on a barge,” Hutchings said. “So by the time they got there, the foundation was the only thing left standing.”
Although the job of the M.I.F.D. firefighters was to help save buildings, they first operated out of something less than ideal conditions. A published report quotes an 1898 Navy report noting that, “At present the fire engines are kept in building 55. The horses are stabled in the same building, but the quarters are so cramped and the arrangement so bad, that there is a great delay in getting the fire engine started for a fire.
“The horses are taken out of one side of the building and led around to the other side of the building, out of which the fire engines are brought,” the story adds.
The official also complained of a shortage of sleeping space, so men were sleeping “all over the yard,” sometimes as far as a half-mile away.
That 1898 report apparently helped lead to the discovery of $7,000 needed to build a new, two-story station, called simply Building 99, two years later.
Duty calls
When the station was built, of course, firefighters could not have known of several future events that would require their assistance, among them the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.
Lt. Frederick N. Freeman, U.S. Torpedo Boat Destroyer Perry, from Mare Island, reported that from the moment his ship carrying firefighters, nurses doctors and others landed in San Francisco on April 18, 1906, his men “worked without rest until the fire was under control on April 21; and without exaggeration, the saving of a large portion of the waterfront was due to the efforts of these men.”
“During the fire as witnessed by me, the men of this party were always willing, and at times when the firemen of the city department had to stop in order to look out for their own families, the force under my command, who had no kin to look out for, stuck to their posts until they collapsed.”
The Mare Island fire boats were crucial in saving “such establishments as Folger’s Warehouses, Howard and Spear Streets; the Mutual Electric Light Co., Spear and Folsom Streets, one of the few remaining power plants in the city, and the Sailors’ Home,” he reported.
But flames weren’t the only obstacle.
“Throughout this whole day constant trouble had been experienced owing to the large number of drunken people along the waterfront,” Freeman’s report said. “My force was unarmed with the exception of the officers, who carried revolvers; and the police, of whom I only saw two, were absolutely helpless.
“The crowds rushed saloon after saloon and looted the stocks becoming intoxicated early in the day,” he continued. “In my opinion great loss of life resulted from men and women becoming stupefied by liquor and being too tired and exhausted to get out of the way of the fire.”
Other fires involving the M.I.F.D. included a major gasoline blaze in 1909 on the USS Grumpus & Pike, the large pier fire in 1953 in which McIntosh died and the 1991 Oakland Hills fire.
“We lost contact with our people during the Oakland Hills fire because the radios were all on different frequencies — like what happened on 9/11,” Hutchings said. “They were only supposed to be gone for a few days, but they were gone for a week. And a (firefighter) died during that fire and we didn’t know if it was one of ours until they got back.”
But all the dangers didn’t involve flames.
Among the Mare Island firefighters’ duties, were to periodically climb the large Australian Bunya-Bunya tree that still grows near what was once the base commander’s office, and pick the large, heavy cones that constantly threatened to drop from it, Hutchings and retired M.I.F.D. assistant chief Vic Gasser said.
“These things could weigh 20 pounds, and there was a concern that one could crash through the roof and hurt someone,” said Gasser, a Fairfield resident who is now a San Rafael city employee.
Waning days
The cordial relationship between the Vallejo Fire Department and the M.I.F.D. that marked most of its history deteriorated in 1993, with the start of the base closure process, Hutchings said.
“We fought side by side with them for years,” Hutchings said. “But they only (hired) five (of us), and they made us take all the tests like someone off the street.”
This was the beginning of the end, Hutchings and Gasser said.
“By the end, most of our regular firefighters were gone and there were temporary workers from 1996 to 1999,” Hutchings said.
“But, I believe it was Sept. 30, 1999, the last of the M.I.F.D. members walked out and Vallejo walked in.”
Dennis Martin, a Vallejo Fire Department engineer since 1995, spent two years on the M.I.F.D. in the early 1990s. He was stationed in the island’s high security station, he said.
“The building had been moved (from across the street) to where it still stands, on logs, because they didn’t have the same kind of moving equipment then,” Martin said. “The building had a hay loft, because everything was horse-drawn then. That area later became dorms.”
Difficulties in retrofitting the building for earthquake preparedness caused the government to close the station in the early 1990s and build a new one, Martin said.
Gasser said he and his colleagues had fought for 20 years to get the old unreinforced brick building replaced with something safer, but it was completed just months before the department closed.
On the last day of operation at Mare Island, in 1996, the fire department “ran four rounds of seven bells through the gamewell system,” the tradition followed when a firefighter dies, according the website.
The site notes the fire department bells tolled for an entire century-old “culture” at one minute after the colors were struck and retired and the Mare Island Naval Shipyard passed into history.
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