San Francisco’s aging and limited fleet of fire trucks and engines could restrict firefighters’ ability to quell the blazes that could rip through the city after a major earthquake, the city’s fire chief said.
A four-alarm fire that tore through a Nob Hill apartment building in April and injured three people got fire chief Dean Crispen’s attention, he said. More than 100 firefighters responded and extinguished the blaze in about two hours, but the event stoked Crispen’s lingering fears about worst-case scenarios.
“I would have been concerned that that fire would have continued to burn for several days if it had been subsequent to an earthquake,” Crispen told the Chronicle. If it had, he said, the blaze could easily have spread through Nob Hill to Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf and beyond…