About 150 firefighters battled a four-alarm blaze that destroyed a quarter of the structures on Pier 45 in San Francisco early on Saturday morning, the authorities said.
One firefighter had a severe cut to an arm, Lt. Jonathan Baxter, a spokesman for the Fire Department, said at a news conference. He said the firefighter was taken to a hospital and was expected to recover. No other injuries were reported.
Officials were investigating the cause of the fire, which was reported around 4:15 a.m. at a warehouse. The fire broke out at Fisherman’s Wharf, a commercial tourist district with attractions, including restaurants and museums, that is home to Pier 45.
“We traditionally don’t have fires of this magnitude with warehouses,” Lieutenant Baxter said in an interview on Saturday, adding that the pier was being evaluated for structural integrity. “It was an impressive, massive fire.”
Video footage showed huge plumes of smoke rising over the bay, creating a thick haze. Christine Pelosi, who said she lived a mile from the pier, wrote on Twitter that people “can see and taste the hazy smoke.”
Lieutenant Baxter said that the fire was contained to the building and that “multiple walls on all four corners” had collapsed. He said the building was a total loss and had housed several businesses, ferry fleet offices and multiple independent crabbers and fishers.
Pier 45 had warehouses A, B, C and D, he said, and C was the one destroyed.
Lieutenant Baxter said that officials did not believe anyone was inside the building but that on occasion, people who were homeless had been found sleeping inside. Other local businesses were evacuated.
Fifty pieces of firefighting apparatus, including fireboats, were used to battle the blaze. Lieutenant Baxter said the St. Francis fireboat “was aggressively protecting” the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, which was built during World War II, with multiple water streams.
The vessel, which launched on June 19, 1943, and participated in the D-Day invasion in 1944, is one of about 2,700 so called Liberty ships. The ship, which is a tourist attraction moored at Pier 45, had been closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We are happy to say that we have really saved the Jeremiah O’Brien, and we really secured the rear end of Pier 45,” Lieutenant Baxter said.
On the ship’s Facebook page, officials, crediting the work of the firefighters, wrote, “We can confirm the O’Brien remains intact and doing well.”
Laura Schaefer, a spokeswoman for Fisherman’s Wharf Community Benefit District, said the response from the city’s Fire Department and Police Department “was extremely quick and we are thankful that due to the rapid emergency response, the damage to the area was mitigated as much as possible.”
The district, a 30-square-block area with approximately 300 businesses, extends from Pier 39 to Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco’s northern waterfront.
The offices of the Red and White Fleet, a sightseeing cruise company, and its maintenance and repair workshop were destroyed in the fire, Tyler Foster, the company’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, said.
The company, which has been family-owned and operated for 128 years, was already struggling because of the coronavirus pandemic, he said.
“We were ordered closed here in San Francisco as nonessential back in March,” Mr. Foster said. “Shortly after that, we went from a mandatory furlough to a mass layoff scenario, just looking at what the industry was likely facing coming back.”
“I guess if bad things happen in threes,” he said, “maybe this is the third thing.”
Aimee Ortiz contributed reporting.
