The Westlake Pirates

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For reference, the building at upper right is St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral on Capitol Hill. Interstate 5 runs across the middle of the image from left to right (you can see the lights in the right half of the image... the left side is entirely shrouded in thick black smoke.) The fire is on the docks, and the blue lights around it are some Police Harbor Patrol boats.

Here's a slightly longer exposure. The fire was reported at 1:30 am, and started on a NOAA research dock next to a 200 foot steel-hulled research vessel, which is visible in sillouette in some of the pictures. It flared up for a while as the police and fire boats raced to the scene (and sent some HUGE wake into the marina - to the point that almost everyone woke up, plates and glasses broke in various boats, and many lines needed to be re-secured.) WIth dock fires, the fire department has a tough time battling the fire effectively due to limited access by land. These docks have the added problem of being soaked in creosote, which is basically coal oil tar, so the wood was like a giant wick and water was nearly useless in suppressing the flames. Instead the main focus was preventing the flames from spreading further.

As you can see, their efforts were unsuccessful at first, and the fire rapidly engulfed a second and third pier. Detonations could be heard as (gas cans? transformers?) exploded, although there weren't any visible fireballs among the already thirty-foot high flames. These piers are all part of a NOAA research facility, with some small buildings and lots of hydrological materials on them. The boats are steel hulled (and diesel powered), so other than heating up quite a bit and getting in the way, they were holding up fairly well, all things considered. The captains of a few other boats in the area managed to get their vessels powered up and out of harm's way, so the lake had scattered running lights most of the night.

The city's freshwater fire boat, Alki, eventually arrived after the crew was mustered and the engines warmed up, and once it got there it started pumping many thousand gallons of lake water onto the conflagration as well. Most of the time it was so shrouded in smoke and debris that I couldn't locate it. The main city fire boat, Chief Sealth, which is moored on Elliott Bay downtown, also arrived much later as it had to go around Magnolia and through the locks.

Probably the most impressive part of the battle was a tugboat the city requisitioned and brought in shortly after the arrival of Alki. It did a lot of tight manuvering in and out of the burning piers and around the massive NOAA research vessel, with a firefighter on top manning a massive water cannon in the face of huge quantities of billowing smoke. They were by far the most visible part of the battle, although from land several ladder trucks could be seen dousing the nearest portions of the docks, and police boat crews used their sirens and bullhorns to roust the nearby floating home residents, evacuating about forty residences (some by boat!) in case the fire spread further, or sparks rained down.

Here was another brief flare-up as a piling ignited like a giant candle. By about 4 am the major flames had died down and the docks were down to smoldering ruins, glowing orange under a constant stream of water. At this point the smoke cleared somewhat, with the heavy black smoke replaced by a lot of steam.

After spending about four hours watching the events unfold, I finally called it a night because the wind hadn't shifted toward our marina, and the blaze was contained, even if not close to being extinguished. As the skies started to show signs of dawn, it was time for a few hours of sleep. The yacht repair guys were going to start arriving in about a half-hour anyway, and they could keep an eye on things if needed.