San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Fire adds another close call to ship’s history
Something woke Joan Raphael in her room aboard the old gray Liberty Ship Jeremiah O’Brien last Saturday. It was just after 4, the darkest time of the night, nearly two hours before sunrise. “I didn’t know what woke me exactly,” she said. “But I was awake, and then I heard this huge sound. I heard it before I saw it. It was fire.” The ship was tied to a pier, and the pier was ablaze. Raphael — everybody calls her Joanie — is a member of the volunteer crew of the O’Brien, a ship that is both a floating museum and a living memorial to the American flag merchant marine. The ship is 76 years old and survived wartime service in the Atlantic and Pacific. It almost did not survive that night.
The story is personal for me because I sailed on the O’Brien on its 1994 voyage from San Francisco to Europe to commemorate the 50th anniversary of DDay. I worked as a deckhand and wrote stories for The Chronicle about the trip. I got hooked on the ship and have done volunteer work aboard off and on ever since. All sailors — even amateur ones like me — will tell you that once you sail in the crew, a little of that ship stays with you. So the fire was personal, as if someone close to me nearly died.
Here’s what happened. Raphael and three other crew members were spending the night aboard at the ship’s berth at Pier 45 at Fisherman’s Wharf to do some work and for security reasons. She acted quickly when she realized the danger. “I jumped up,” she said. “And I pounded on the doors where the others were sleeping. ‘Get up! Get up! Fire!’ ”
By that time the pier shed, not 50 feet away from the ship’s side, was blazing and roaring, a wall of fire. “It was terrifying,” Raphael said. She and the others managed to lower the gangway. It had been pulled up for the night, but the fire was close and out of control.
They had to get away. Raphael and Jeff Croutier ran down the pier away from the fire as fast as they could. Steve Wright and Bob Jarvis jumped in their cars parked in the shed and tried to drive out. The smoke was rolling and black. “I couldn’t see where I was going,” Wright said. “I kept running into things, like bumper cars.” But they couldn’t stop. “I looked back and saw the other cars right where we had been parked just engulfed in fire.”
All four got away, shaken but safe. In the meantime, San Francisco firefighters were on the scene with engines and ladder trucks; it was a fouralarm fire, the biggest on the waterfront in years.
But now the Jeremiah O’Brien was in grave danger, tied to the pier with stout mooring lines, the engine cold and dead. The only way to get the ship off the pier would be with tugs if any were available nearby at that hour. There was no time for that.
Just then the San Francisco fireboat St. Francis came steaming to the rescue. The St. Francis can pump 18,000 gallons of bay water a minute and poured water between the burning pier shed and the O’Brien. Later a second SFFD fireboat, the Phoenix, came to help. The shed, where the fire smoldered for two days, is a total loss, but the O’Brien sustained only minor damage. There was no doubt the fireboats saved the ship.
“It was a miracle,” Cevan LeSieur, captain of the O’Brien, said later. “I don’t use that word easily, but it was a miracle. We will be eternally grateful to the San Francisco Fire Department for their quick and professional response, but I think we can also thank the angels above that were on watch early this morning.”
Sailors are superstitious. It’s bad luck to whistle on a ship, it’s bad luck to start a voyage on a Friday, and it’s bad luck to say a ship has good luck. Fingers crossed, they do say the O’Brien is a lucky ship.
Named for a Revolutionary War hero and launched on June 19, 1943, in South Portland, Maine, the Jeremiah O’Brien was built in 56 days, one of 2,751 almost identical cargo ships. Only two remain. The other operational Liberty Ship is the John Brown in Baltimore.
They were built to a simple design, powered by an oldfashioned steam engine that developed only 2,500 horsepower. They were slow — 11 knots was a good speed for a Liberty Ship. That’s 12.659 land mph. They were not beautiful. Shown the design of the first Liberty Ship, President Franklin Roosevelt said, “That will do, but she’s rather an ugly duckling.”
The O’Brien first sailed in the Atlantic. On DDay in 1944, it carried 167 tons of ammunition, 135 armored vehicles and 573 American soldiers across the English Channel to France. According to ship historian Chris Friedenbach, the O’Brien was at anchor off Omaha Beach when it was targeted by German bombers. They missed, but shrapnel hit one of the lifeboats. Later the ship sailed to South America and then to the Pacific carrying ammunition. It also went to India and Australia. Not a scratch.
After the war the ship was laid up in the Mothball Fleet in Suisun Bay. It stayed there for 33 years in a state of suspended animation until a group of volunteers, headed by retired Rear Adm. Thomas Patterson, brought the ship back to life as a memorial to the merchant marine and the Navy armed guard who sailed aboard in wartime.
The O’Brien has been sailing on San Francisco Bay for 40 years, and its last big adventure was in 1994 when volunteers — average age 70 — took the ship to Europe and back for the anniversary of DDay.
All of the Jeremiah O’Brien’s wartime crew is gone now, and many of the hundreds of the men and women who volunteered on the ship in the years since have also crossed the bar for the last time. “I think those people must have been looking out for us,” LeSieur said after the fire.