San Francisco’s Pier 45 smolders in the baking sun
SAN FRANCISCO - San Francisco firefighters on Monday have been watching for and extinguishing the many hotspots that still plague Pier 45 after Saturday's massive fire.
Pier 45 is the heart and soul of San Francisco Bay's already dwindling fleet of several dozen commerical fishing vessels that used to number in the many hundreds.
With the weekend's conflagration now over, Pier 45 is technically still burning with a lot of smoldering wood and shed contents still smoking, the condition of the support piers that hold the whole thing up remains unknown.
Tuesday afternoon, the San Francisco Fire Department will hold a 1 p.m. press briefing to divulge what it knows regarding the fire and the condition of the pier.
According to the head of the San Francisco Community Fishing Association, some of the greatest damage was to a shed within the pier and its contents.
"Shed C was gear storage for a lot of the fishermen and I'd say 30 fishermen lost everything. You know, they lost their crab gear. They lost their black cod gear, long lines, shrimp gear," said SF Community Fishing Association's Larry Collins.
Captain Larry Krieger, owner of the commercial crab boat "Take Time" said he lost a $100,000 worth of gear that took a decade to amass.
"Even if I had the money to replace all that, there's no way that I could do all of the work before our next crab season," said Captain Krieger.
"You know, a pot is like 250 bucks just for the stuff and the, five hours of work to put it all together. So, if you had 300 or 400 crab traps, you can imagine what these guys lost," said Collins. Add in all the other lost gear, and one estimate is that $3 to $5 million worth of equipment went up in smoke.
Pier 45 houses the West Coast's largest concentration of commercial fish processors and distributors, bring in tens of thousands of tons of salmon, crab, black cod, albacore, rock cod and other species. Fortunately, most of that was either lightly damaged or undamaged at all, small consolation to the overall port.
"With the virus and, you know, everything else, it's like, we sure didn't need this. The port's been having a tough, you know, time because all the restaurants are closed and no "love boats" coming on down at the new pier down there," said Collins.
Also damaged by the fire the historical World War II Navy Liberty-class cargo ship the Jeremiah O'Brien, the last fully orginal ship of its kind.
There's a gofundme dund set up for the fishermen and women and the web site for the Jeremiah O'Brien historical ship.