It’s a cold hard fact: the Big One is coming for San Francisco. Or if you prefer, a big one. The United States Geological Survey projects that by 2043, there’s a 98 percent chance of at least a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in the Bay Area, and a 51 percent chance of a 7.0 quake or higher.
With that in mind, San Francisco will likely ask voters to approve a $535 million bond this June to spend on disaster preparedness, including seismic upgrades of fire stations, police stations, and other emergency facilities.
Board of Supervisors president Rafael Mandelman calls the funding critical “to prepare and protect our city and especially our first responders.” The mayor and most supervisors support the bond, which means it almost certainly be on the June ballot
Of that, $92 million is ticketed to fix a critical gap in firefighting infrastructure that’s been delayed for decades. Most of San Francisco benefits from a backup firefighting water system, installed after the city’s plumbing failed in 1906.
But that system doesn’t cover many neighborhoods furthest from downtown, including the Sunset and the Richmond. Generations of west side residents and representatives have pushed to expand it. With this bond measure they should finally get their wish.
But some critics say the design is flawed. “The thing they’re proposing is a very expensive and very time-consuming water main that will have all sorts of operational issues,” retired fire official Thomas Doudiet tells The Frisc.
Doudiet and others fear the design will be vulnerable to seismic damage and won’t offer adequate protection.
Normally, infrastructure and other expenditures to keep SF running get a rubber stamp from voters. But these aren’t normal times. A previous bond to finish the emergency water system expansion fell short due to cost overruns. And SF’s geographic politics mean more in 2026 than they have in perhaps decades.
An upgrade deferred
After the 1906 earthquake, which seismologists have placed between a whopping 7.7 and 8.3 magnitude, the fire department tried to fight dozens of fires with a water system laid low by more than 300 breaks. Only a single working hydrant remained. Approximately 80 percent of the city burned over four days.
(A quick geology lesson: for every 1.0 increase in magnitude, a quake is 10 times bigger and about 30 times stronger, based on energy release. If the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta packed a punch, the 1906 quake packed 10 to 30 punches.)
In 1908, a city engineer drew up a backup plan: the Auxiliary Water Supply System (AWSS). If the primary water system fails, the AWSS, a separate network from SF’s regular water delivery plumbing, would pump nonpotable water from the bay and shoot it great distances under high pressure.
The city financed it with a 1908 bond of $5.8 million — about $190 million in today’s dollars.
“The AWSS remains the only high-pressure network of its type in the United States,” writes Steve Van Dyke, superintendent of SFFD’s Bureau of Engineering and Water Supply.
The original build featured 72 miles of pipe and nearly 900 hydrants; upgrades have extended it to 135 miles and some 1,500 hydrants. But it still doesn’t cover the entire city, with large gaps to the west and south.
“It’s a very expensive system, and there’s competition for dollars,” Doug Jacuzzi tells The Frisc. Jacuzzi represents the Sunset District on the SF Public Utilities Commission’s Citizens Advisory Board (and couldn’t have a better name for a discussion of high pressure water systems).
‘Before It’s Too Late’
At last week’s Budget Committee hearing, City Administrator Carmen Chu made the case for the bond: “These infrastructure improvements are needed now.”
A former Sunset District supervisor, Chu didn’t need to reach back to 1906. To drive her point home, she invoked the specter of the devastating 2024 Los Angeles fires and the failures of that city’s water system.
Minutes later, committee chair Sup. Connie Chan, who represents the Richmond, pointed out that $100 million from a big 2020 bond was supposed to expand the system into the Outer Richmond, but it wasn’t enough because costs ran higher than expected. It ended up costing $42 million to lay down one mile of water main.
That previous bond, and the work coming up short, followed a 2019 civil grand jury report with an unambiguous title: “Act Now Before It Is Too Late.”
“City leaders have known about this issue for decades” without significant action, the report noted, and it laid out a plan to get it done by 2034. Civil grand juries have no authority over policy, but their findings are meant to give City Hall a push.
Earlier this week, SF’s chief resilience officer Brian Strong assured Chan the new bond would be enough this time.
That’s good news to some on the west side. “The city is making serious investments in the necessary infrastructure on the west side,” says Steve Shoemaker, a spokesperson for neighborhood group Grow The Richmond.
But others have reservations that range from the technological to the political.
A freshwater concept
Rather than expand the existing AWSS further west, the SF Public Utilities Commission (which took over maintenance from SFFD in 2010) has proposed a new high-pressure water main that would tap into the Sunset Reservoir, a catchment between 24th and 28th Avenues that’s part of the city’s standard water supply.
If need be, the new high-pressure main could also draw from Lake Merced.
This is what’s known as a “co-benefits” setup. The new plumbing would serve as regular, low-pressure water delivery most of the time, but in an emergency, SFFD could make it high-pressure by closing a series of more than 60 valves.
On the drawing board for some time now, that double duty doesn’t sit right with everyone. In 2019, retired assistant fire chiefs Doudiet and Frank Blackburn, who was hailed as a hero for saving the Marina after the ‘89 quake, published an open letter urging the city to abandon the “entirely impractical” proposal. In 2021, they did it again, this time with 64 other retired SFFD officials.
Five years later, Doudiet hasn’t changed his opinion. (Blackburn died in 2025.) Using huge quantities of potable water right after an earthquake is also a health and sanitation risk for the west side, say Doudiet and company. And they worry that the new system could run out of water if a quake damages transmission lines to Hetch Hetchy.
(Sections of the lines run over the Hayward fault. The Governor’s Office of Emergency Services anticipates that a large quake “will impact major water conveyance systems in the Bay Area, including the Hetch Hetchy aqueducts.”)
Neighborhood groups Way Out West SF and Planning Association For the Richmond have seized on Doudiet and Blackburn’s comments to push for “equal protection” — the same AWSS setup as most of the rest of the city. “The PUC has given us reasons to be skeptical,” says Way Out West organizer Lisa Arjes.
John Crabtree, also with Way Out West, says an AWSS expansion must happen eventually, but he’s so mistrustful of PUC’s plan that he says he’ll vote against the upcoming bond.
Backups to the backup
In a statement to The Frisc, SFPUC spokesperson Nancy Crowley says that the co-benefits design is sound and will deliver “emergency fire protection and drinking water resiliency” to the western neighborhoods, even as they grow denser with looser zoning.
The PUC also notes there are other backup systems: hundreds of 75,000-gallon cisterns including 40 on the west side, fireboats (some of the bond money will go to SFFD to purchase more and build a special dock at Fort Mason); a special system to draw water from Blue Heron Lake, formerly Stow Lake; and suction machinery that lets fire engines draw water from the bay and other bodies of water.
SFFD is also officially on board. “A lot of people ask why the west side is being short-shrifted, and that’s being addressed now,” Assistant Deputy Chief Michael Mullin tells The Frisc.
Jacuzzi of the PUC’s citizen advisory board says critics haven’t thought everything through. For example, Doudiet questions tapping freshwater supplies when the ocean is right there, but Jacuzzi points out it would be much more difficult to draw water from the Pacific than from the comparably placid bay. “The telemetry of the ocean changes constantly, sometimes you have 40-foot waves,” he says. “It’s just not the same.”
Going to the political well
The lack of progress is more fuel for west siders who say City Hall doesn’t listen to them — a central theme in the Great Highway fight, leading to Sup. Joel Engardio’s recall, and the Family Zoning Plan debate. Arjes gave more than $40,000 to the recall effort and tried to sue to reopen the highway.
“We have always felt like we’re treated as a bit of a backwater,” and the long wait for expanded fire coverage is another example, says Albert Chow, a hardware store owner and Engardio recall organizer. He is running in the special June election for the Sunset supervisor seat. (Chow was also party to the suit with Arjes.) Chow criticizes the west side design and predicts the project will run out of money again, but says he “tentatively supports” the bond.
Natalie Gee, another District 4 candidate and an aide to Sup. Shamann Walton, says there are “concerns that must be addressed” and criticizes the expansion’s long time coming. But she gives her support because the need to prepare for the Big One is simply too great.
The west side’s current supervisors — Alan Wong in the Sunset and Connie Chan in the Richmond — are cosponsors of the bond proposal. Wong did not return requests for comment. Wong was an aide to former D4 supervisor Gordon Mar, who commissioned the 2019 grand jury report.
Many southern neighborhoods are also not part of the AWSS; the bond won’t cover expansion there. Sup. Chyanne Chen, who represents the Excelsior and more, supports the bond but tells The Frisc that “the southern neighborhoods must be next in line.”
Arjes of Way Out West still holds out hope that some lawmakers will change their minds once they hear more detailed criticism. She tells The Frisc she’s even considering running for the D4 seat herself. She’ll have to move fast. The bond now has nine cosponsors, and the board’s first vote to put it on the June ballot is next week.
The city’s political and geological clocks are always ticking.