Visiting with Huell Howser: Fireboat

Visiting with Hewell Hauser is made possible through a generous grant from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. Well, it's about 10.30 on a Monday morning and we're standing here in front of fire station number 112. There are a lot of fire stations all over our city, but this one is just a little bit different. Because you see we're down here in San Pedro and we're on the docks. There's a big old tanker, the NYK Seabreeze, going by right now. And here, this is one of the most beautiful, one of the newest fire stations in our city. It's the home of fire boat number two. And we're here to spend the day with Captain Wigert and his crew. You have invited us to come down and spend the day on good old fire boat number two. Now, what is the history, what is the distinction that this fire boat holds? Well, this fire boat was built during the Roaring Twenties when the Coliseum and the City Hall and the Federal Building and everything was under construction downtown. It's the oldest continuous in-service fire boat in the United States. In the entire country? Yes, sir. So this is a historical landmark? It is a registered historical landmark with both the State of California and the Federal Government. All right, let's take a look at it. Boy, look at the size of that ship going by. I guess you get used to seeing things like that. Yes, sir, and they're going to get bigger. Really? Yes, they are. This is right out your front door, too. Yes, it is. Now, what are these little tugboats right here? Just out of curiosity. This is Wilmington tug. These tugs, we can see one up here. We've got a container ship going out. He will have a tug on either side of him to assist him in coming in. There's one right there behind him. And then there's another container ship coming in the port, and he will have these tugs with him. These tugs are busy 24 hours a day. They have crews that live aboard, and they're our neighbors. They have some firefighting capability on them also. So this is a busy place. It is the most dynamic area in the United States today because of not only the shipping that's going on, the growth of Worldport, as we call it now, San Pedro Harbor, Los Angeles Harbor, but we're extending and building Pier 300 and 400, which we will show you when we go out on our testing this afternoon. And there is one of my favorite museums in the entire state of California, the Maritime Museum, Los Angeles Maritime Museum, right down here. Yes. So you're all just kind of in here together. Right. And you've got this set up here with all of these wonderful old pictures and the windows here for tourists to actually come up here when they're visiting, I guess, the Maritime Museum or just want to come down here. Look at the history of the fireboat and then look in at the fireboat itself. Yes, indeed. This is a pictorial history from the beginning of the fireboat up to the most modern day. Some of the old photographs of some of the historical fires, explosions, and incidents that we've had in the harbor. And you can kind of peek in and get an idea. There's the fireboat right there. Yes, indeed. The architect designed this knowing the interest that's created worldwide. He's got these windows just at the proper angle so that the glare is reduced and people can come in any time and see the fireboat. But you've got a special door you're going to take us in to give us a real good view of the fireboat. Well, we're going to take you in and show you one of the most magnificent pieces of firefighting apparatus in the United States today. So you mean even though it was built in 1925, it's still one of the most spectacular fireboats anywhere? Well, not only spectacular but functional. Over the years with budgets, constraints, and reductions, we have managed as a city, as a harbor, as a fire department to keep this piece of apparatus in service because it's invaluable. Let's get inside and take a look. Oh, boy, look at this. Look at this, Louie. Boy, it makes a good first impression, doesn't it? Well, I'm impressed every morning I come to work. It's, if you will, a love affair with a piece of equipment. But we maintain it. Over the years, it's been maintained. We've upgraded it from gasoline engines to diesel engines. We've upgraded the power that it has to perform its design function, and that's to give us copious amounts of water for any emergency that we may encounter in L.A. Harbor. Wow, it is a big boat, too, isn't it? Yes, it's a 100-footer, 18-foot wide beam, and it draws about 9 foot of water. And we have the tower on top where we can elevate up to dock level and on deck aboard ship if we have a fire or have to supply water up there. Wow. And this is its home. Now, this is a new structure. I've seen pictures of the old structure, and it was a beaut. Yes, it was marvelous. But due to harbor expansion, that particular building was replaced by this one. Howdy, fellas. Hi, Hugh. How you doing? Good. We're ready for a big day on the harbor. How you doing? Good to see you. Hi, how are you? Oh, they're getting to work now. Oh, yeah. Get on down there and get ready. We're ready. We've been looking forward to this for a long time. Howdy. Can we just go on down, Captain? Okay, come on, Louie. They're getting it all revved up and ready for us. What do we do, just jump on board? Yep, just watch your step. We take our turnout gear with us whenever we go aboard. We are available for response with you with us, so maybe we'll pick up something. So you've got to be ready. And look over there, Louie. Look at this huge tanker coming in. Wow. This is exciting. Okay, we are moving. We're off. Yes, sir, we're underway. As you can see, the traffic out here, we've got a bow watch up there, which we require whenever we come in. This guy's the bow watch? Yes, sir. Now, what are you looking for out here? Well, for traffic coming up and down the channel, if it's too close for us to be able to maneuver into the channel, we have to wait until the traffic clears. Well, do you have like a siren? What if it was an emergency and you had to, do you get preference over another ship that's already coming down the harbor? Well, it depends on the size of the ship. If it's a tanker or if it's like a container ship like this one's just coming through, of course, they can't give way for us. Yeah, they can't stop in time. If it's small traffic like we've got coming up here, this little bass boat, then, of course, we can sound our siren. We've got our lights to go with it. So this is a pretty important thing you're doing right out here. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, we also use a stern watch under certain conditions, along with a bow watch in foggy conditions. We use our radar, but we also use bow watches and stern watches just because traffic is so heavy up and down the channel. So there's something for everybody to do at different stages of being, well, there's the firehouse over there. This thing moves pretty quickly, too. Yes, sir. This boat will move at 19 knots if we have to. What are we going now? We're required to stay under 5 miles an hour in the inner channel of the harbor. We're just barely moving right now. The idea, of course, is we don't want to throw up a wake. Notice the tug over here, he's not throwing up a wake, and the big ships coming in aren't throwing up a wake, and you can see why. Obviously, we don't want to disturb the private craft as well as the loading and offloading operations of container vessels. Look over here, Louie. There's the Maritime Museum. We're going right by it now. I've never seen it from the water before. You really do get an interesting view of what's going on from being out here. It's the old ferry building. It used to terminate where that gantry is right over there. We had the ferry going across the Terminal Island Ferry for the cannery workers, and I've used it many, many times. Now what are we doing? What's next? We're going out. We're ready for some excitement. We're going out right now. We've just had some welding work done on the main system from our fire pumps to our turrets. We had a leaker down there that we call it, and we've just done some welding below decks, and so what we're going to do is go out, and turret by turret, we're going to go ahead and test these and make sure that it's watertight. We're going to get to see some water spurting out. Yes, sir, you sure will. Good. Can we go talk to some of these guys back here? We've got a pilot up here. Why don't you talk to Paul Hillary? He's the pilot in charge of Boat 2 today. Okay, now we're standing here with the first mate, and explain all of this to us, what you're doing here today. Well, we're just going down the main channel heading south, which would be towards Catalina at this point, and all this here is we have three drive engines on this boat. There's a center screw that has the rudder behind it and two wing engines, and the rest of this we have thrusters, underwater thrusters, 2,000 GPM that we can use to direct the boat in a situation where we need that much power, and also up here we've got our underwarp nozzles that we use for warp fires. If we have to put on a large amount of water, we have the ability to put 3,000 GPM out from these as well as our reservoir. So do you control the nozzles from here as well as the boat itself? I control the underwarp nozzles up here. The rest of our other nozzles are controlled from the deck. Now is this, this isn't original to the boat. It's been modernized a lot over the years. Oh, yeah, definitely. It was outfitted in 1969, went through a total conversion, and we used to have a real pilot's wheel. We used to have a big wooden wheel up here. Really? At one time there were 22 members on the boat because everything was operated by hand, and now we're down to eight guys and everything's on hydraulic controls. I wonder what it was like back in the old days. Do you ever hear stories from old firefighters who come back? All the visitors we get, we have a lot of people that worked on this boat years ago through the war, and they tell what it was like operating on the boat then, and they heard stories before they showed up too. So there's quite a long history that goes back with some of the people we have visit. So do you really get a sense of being part of a very proud fireboat tradition? I personally am very proud. I loved working on this boat, the fact that it was built in 25, and we keep it up fairly well and hopefully get a full century out of it, and I thoroughly enjoy it. And someday you'll be coming back as an old-timer. I hope so. Telling all the young firefighters your story of working in the 90s. Yeah, it would be great. Back in the 90s. I hope I can work that out. This is part of our potential down here. We've got the fishing fleet down here. We've got the fishing boats that they travel all over the world, South America, and they come back in here and they refueling. There's potential here that we have for fuel leaks, and we've been on board. We've had pump-outs and we've had injuries on board. So when you look at these fishing boats or any other boat in the harbor, you're always looking for potential problems that you might have to be a part of the solution of. One leaker in that fishing boat dock back there can destroy the whole fishing fleet that's tied up in there, so we've got to jump right on it. What do you mean one leaker? Well, that means if he has a fuel leak of some sort, then we have a fuel dock right there that if we get fuel into the water and it ignites and so forth, you can see. Most of them, many of them are wooden hull, still wooden hull. Look at all this. This is gas and oil. These are what we call our exotics here at the Gatex location because they have commodities and product in there. This is where we had a tremendous fire back here where we had the tank that exploded and skyrocketed into the air. This was part of the Gatex. And look, it goes all the way down here, too. I mean, there's a lot of potential for disaster. We deal in potential here, and any one of these, we could have a problem with it. You can see what happens. We're right at the mouth of Los Angeles Harbor right now, and if something were to happen here, we'd have to close the harbor down, and then commerce would be interrupted. So it's on our best behavior to get out here as quickly as we can and try to curtail the emergency. All right, we're going down into the engine room. You're going to stay up here, and I'm going to go down and meet the guy down there. Yes, indeed. Well, these are our four main pumps out of the six up here. It's not quite as noisy here because they're not running right now. The thing we have running are the three drive engines that operate all the propellers, and that's the only thing running other than one generator right now. So it's a little quieter up here, but when we really get going and start pumping, it's unbearable down here. So these engines are all for the pumps themselves, the firefighting pump. Correct. Each engine goes to one pump. That's a dedicated engine to a dedicated pump. Boy, look at this. You've got this thing cleaned and shined up too, don't you? The brass gets cleaned every month for our inspection, yes. Really? These pumps were made for this fireboat for our specifications and the cast. You can see that happens to be pump number four. Each pump has a number on it, cast in the top. They're a bronze casting with a bronze impeller. They've been put in when the boat was built, and they haven't been taken apart. They're still operating, full of salt water. Since when? 1925. You mean these are the original pumps? These are the original pumps. Wow. Built to last. Good, right? And when the pumps are going, we wouldn't even be able to hear each other. No, not at all. Not at all. It's unbearable. Well, this is the cleanest engine room I have ever been in in my life. Well, thank you. We do a little bit of maintenance here. And who is this fellow down here? This is the other engineer, Bobby Webb. We have two engineers on duty all the time. If we're pumping, one of us has to stay in the control room. And maybe when we go through there, you'll see how we control it. Let's take a look. So he's actually come on through here. You actually run the pumps, control the pumps from down here? All of them are controlled from in here. With this quiet room, we can talk back and forth to each other. You can imagine all the noise. You can't hear anything otherwise. They put this in in 69. It makes it much easier to communicate with the pilot house and with each other while we're down here. So each one of these is for one of the nozzles, one of the pump engines here. Yeah. There's four main pumps there and two back here. These are the four for the forward, and then the other two are these here. So you spend all your time down here. You don't ever get to see the fire. That's right. We never get to see the displays or anything like that. We're down below. We're sort of stuck. Well, you're doing a good job even if you don't get to get up on deck very often. That's what we like to say anyway. We're probably the most important part of this thing. Without us, there wouldn't be any fire put out, would there? We'll be sure and get that word out to everybody. The most important guys on the whole fire boat right here. That's it. Without a doubt. Okay, you'll now be brought out on deck as part of our testing procedure, and we'll be running through each one of our nozzles here one at a time. And Dan McElhinney is our on-deck mate today. You're the head guy out here. Yes, I am. All right. Explain to us, can we get the thing fired up? Paul, go ahead. Go ahead, guys. You guys can open up. So what's happening here? Let me explain to you. This is the bow turd. Puts out about 3,000 GPMs, this one here. Most put out about 750 GPM. Oh, look. There's water everywhere. There's 3,000 here on this one I'm at. And those are hydraulic operated valves. The direction, you can watch the direction of it now. I'll move it to the port side. Oh, look. And then we have your vertical. And you're controlling that right here. That's correct. That's it, and we have the valve to open and close. It's right down here. And then you've got three on each side. Right. We're only operating two on each side right now. And then down here, you might want to take a look at this. This is an under wharf nozzle, and they use that for fighting wharf fires underneath. And Paul, the operator today, he can maneuver that from inside the wheelhouse. He might have showed that to you earlier. So you go up next to a wharf that's on fire, and it gets up underneath it. Exactly. And he can make that in a spray pattern or in a straight stream like it is now. Now, how does this compare with what a regular fire truck can do? This, a regular fire truck, puts out about 1,500 gallons a minute. And this last test last year, it was 18,500 GPMs last year it was tested at. Wait a minute. A fire truck puts out 1,500 gallons a minute. Yeah, it's about 15. This puts out 18,000. 18,600, right. Yeah, that's a lot. Also, we carry a complement of hoses right down here in the hose reels. And this is all water just coming up out of the ocean right now. Exactly. We've got engineers down below pumping the pressures, what Paul calls for. And that's it. We have other tourists throughout the boat. Can you move this around a little bit more for us? Sure. I'll bring it up right now. Paul, go on up. There you go. That's amazing. Yeah, that's a lot of water. That's 3,000 gallons a minute at 150 psi. And also, underneath the water, about a foot below the water line, we have thrusters. It's a 1,000 GPM tip, and that's used for keeping the boat in position while we're pumping large quantities of water. They're called thrusters. So he might be using them now on this stern to keep the boat in position. Okay, we're cranking it up. What are you doing? You're opening up the nozzle? Yeah, the hydraulic shutoff for this one isn't working properly right now. Whoa! Boy, that sounded like it was going to. Yeah, there's a lot of pressure on there. It has to fill the system, come up through the barrel. These are specially designed to kind of rifle the water. It brings it around and makes it so you get the best trajectory out of the nozzle, and that makes a good firefighting hose or firefighting hose. This is kind of a puny squirt here. We haven't raised the pressure yet. This is just at an idle. Are we going to pump at 150? We're going to pump at 100 pounds only on this. This kind of shows you what we can do. Can you put it up a little so we can see it? Yes, there again, just like the forward turrets, we're pumping about 3,000 gallons per minute with this one, and I'm operating it here with this little knurled knob in my left hand. I can put it wherever you want, left, right, real high, real low. How many fireboats do we have in Los Angeles? We've got five. Wow. Yes, we do. But this is the premier fireboat. This is the big daddy of the fleet. Yes, it is, and it was the first one built of this size and all steel construction. If you noticed the rivets on the side of the boat, there isn't anything welded on this hull. It's all put together with wrought iron and rivets. Now, what are you doing? You're telling old fireboat stories over here. Just coming up to get some fresh air. That's right. You're supposed to be down there. I've been down there the whole time. You're up here looking around the fireboat. Back down in there. Do you all switch around? Do you all switch around so that sometimes you're down in the engine room too? No, the engineer's domain is down there. They maintain the engines. They do the oil changes. They do the startups for the boat, virtually all the maintenance, including rattling and cleaning rust and painting again on the keel. How do you all get along with the other members of the fire department, the regular members of the fire department? We're regular members of the fire department. No, I didn't mean it that way. I'm deeply hurt. You think they're a little envious of us? Yeah. Well, most of us have done our time where they're working right now. On regular fire trucks? Yes, sir, on fire trucks on land. Yeah, most of us have done all that, and possibly a little seniority or a special application like these guys or certified divers have allowed us to come down here and work at this assignment. Do you have to be comfortable on the water? What if you tend to get seasick or have problems on boats? If you tend to get seasick, then you just get seasick. I don't think it would deter anybody from trying to get an assignment down here. So this is considered primo duty for a firefighter. Absolutely. And getting back to that seasick business, there's only been a couple of instances where we've been in water rough enough to really cause us to get seasick, and luckily none of us did. Yeah. Yeah, if somebody got seasick, y'all would never let them forget it, would you? No, we would try and bring it up every time that we could. Okay, we have almost reached the end of today's adventure. There's the firehouse right here, and we're getting ready for a big moment, aren't we? This is the test for Paul. We're going to find out how good he is at backing this boat in the slip. So he's got to back it in. He's got to back it in. Well, he'll get it in there. It's just we give him a grade, what he does, and his best shot is to get it in without touching either side of the boat and backing it straight in the slip. And that's called a no-touchy. A no-touchy. So the pressure is on him today for a no-touchy. Oh, there's no pressure. He can do it. No problem. He can do it easy. Well, this has been an interesting day. Thank you all very much for giving us the... No pressure. No pressure, giving us the tour. This has been a lot of fun, a lot of fun. We've still got a finale. You and I are going to go up on shore for the big grand finale. There's Paul in there now going through. You feeling any pressure? No pressure. And, of course, we will have the cameras rolling to make sure that it's a no-touchy as we back in. It better be a good one. But it's been a good day, and I think hopefully all of us, everybody watching today, I know I have, learned a lot about the good job that you all are doing from day to day. It's not as high profile as a lot of, I mean, you know, you don't see the fire truck going down the street every day like you do here with the fire boat, but it's just as important, isn't it? Oh, yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. We can supply 12 of those fire engines up there if they need the water. And any other emergency that comes down, hopefully we'll be able to handle it with what we've got here. What are you doing? I'm going to blow the horn. You're going to blow the horn, so you better hold your ears. That's it? That's a signal. That's a maritime signal that we have to use when we approach quarters to let them know we're on our way back. I got you. Turn the stove on. We're ready to eat. Well, that's right. You've invited us for lunch today as well. You betcha. And look, there's a dad and his kids. That's an interesting thing, Huel. I don't know whether you're aware of it or not, but one of the things that we do is we give tours of the fire boat and the station to, oh, gosh, a couple of thousand kids a year, I would think. L.A. Unified School District, we're on their list of tours. So if you ever talk to any of the kids and they say, have you ever visited the Ralph J. Scott, well, they've probably been here and seen us. We're going to put the number up on the screen for people. They're all going to be coming down here for the tour. Well, that's okay because we're proud of the old fire boat. She's been here a long time, and we're proud to tell you all about it, and we're proud to be here. That's what I can say. All right, there he goes. He says there's not much pressure on him, but there is. He is a man of steel. Not a bit of pressure. This is just like the Super Bowl. No pressure at all. Okay, right now the pilot's backing into our quarters, and with the vessel being 100 foot long, he's got to account for the wind and the current and be able to maintain control of the boat. He has three propellers, which to use, but because of all the practice that we get, they're able to do that real easy. So far right now he's doing a really good job. He's backing in smooth and slow, and it's just going to be a perfect job. I think this is almost going to be a no-touchy as of right now. We'll see how it ends up. We better move out of the way or we'll get run over here. Uh-oh. Close. Watch this. He's going to save it. Look at that. Take this burn out. Beautiful. That was excellent backing, Paul. He did it. Congratulations. Thank you. It was a piece of cake. Our job here is we're given the Charter of Fire Protection and to serve the public down here, and that's what we do in many different ways. Visiting with Hewell Hauser is made possible through a generous grant from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. Well, now for a little fireboat update. We have come back down to the firehouse. I'm visiting with Ron Grove, firefighter Ron Grove. You weren't here when we did the show last time. No, I had a choice of staying here going to the river, so I went to the river. See what you missed out on? Yeah, I did. I get a lot of compliments from people who say, weren't you the guy? I said no. It was somebody else. Somebody else. Well, what has happened? Give us an update on what's happened. Have people been coming by? We have people that come by all the time, and most of the time they compliment that they had seen us on your show, which is a compliment to us and you because they do watch your show. Well, and people can actually stand up here and look through the windows at the fireboat. Yes, it's sort of a self-guided tour that you can read about it, look at the pictures, and see the boat also. Yeah, and you all are friendly. You invite people in every once in a while. Yeah, we invite people in. They knock on the door, so we usually give them a tour. It depends on how busy we are. It could be a short one. It could be a long one. How's the old fireboat, the Ralph Scott, holding up? It's holding up pretty good. The engineers keep it in real good shape. Yeah. In fact, I was with one of the engineers down at the river and one of the guys recognized him from your program. Oh, well. That's what they say to him. They just was, I know you. You were on Eulhauser, weren't you? It embarrassed him a little bit, but he was there. Well, the boat's holding up better than some of the firefighters. A bunch of them have retired, haven't they? Yeah, the captain's gone, and one of the engineers down below that you talked to, he's gone. Most of the guys are still here. Well, firefighters come and go, but the good old fireboat number two. It's still here. Thank you, sir. And come on by and pay her a visit because she's down here waiting for us. She belongs to all the taxpayers. She's part of the history of this harbor and of our city, and she is a real asset to the department.