Hand-colored ambrotype portrait of a group of firemen posing with a mobile fire hose on Meiggs Wharf near what is now the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, California, c. 1850s.
The fire of May 3 and 4, 1851 in San Francisco, as seen from Broadway and Stockton streets, burned nearly three-fourths of the city, including the storeships Niantic and General Harrison.
The Islais Creek flood on Jan 14, 1916, looking northwest near Innes and 3rd streets in the Bayview neighborhood.
The dam that formed the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park in 1923. The reservoir supplies water to the city of San Francisco.
Inside one of San Francisco's 177 underground cisterns, each of them holding up to 75,000 thousand gallons of water to be used exclusively for fighting fires.
Dozens of emergency water storage cisterns are found beneath San Francisco intersections, each one marked by an outline of bricks.
Most of San Francisco's emergency water storage cisterns are marked by a circle of bricks embedded in the pavement.