Me too. Not an Engineer, but having stood on the bridge and hoped that the Engineers would be able to restart the engine in reverse, (sometime at all) or keep it running long enough to get out of a tricky situation.(No not US flag, but still)
What you do when you are young and dumb. (Some never learn, though)
John your OP is right on the money.
If the Navy won’t provide Fireboats in the harbors they shouldn’t provide Destroyers or Mine Sweepers for Carriers either. Think of the money saved. Or in a similar vein why have Fire Departments at airfields? When jets and helicopters go down it is seldom there.
Well apparently it didn’t conform to the particular vision the navy brass and emergency services had for fighting fires either. The police boats and helicopters did so they were used first. 
Norfolk is just as important if not more San Diego. Largest naval installation in the USA. Haven’t ever looked into if they have a designated fire boat for the area. Do they?
Contrary to today’s situation in San Diego already in 1694 Amsterdam had a number of ‘fire boats’ which were in use for the protection of ships: flatboats, each of which had two double suction pumps on board.
Ship under construction on the VOC shipyard Oostenburg which partly burnt but was saved with the help of the fire engine hose, May 14 1690. The fire boat is seen in front.
Jan van der Heyden was a Dutch Jack of many trades: painter, draftsman, etcher and inventor. He is best known for his many cityscapes and as the inventor of an improved street lantern. Jan van der Heyden improved the fire extinguisher pump as early as 1672.
He and his brother published about it in 1677: “Report Because of the Newly invented and patent hose sprayers: invented by Jan and Nicolaes van der Heiden”. Already in 1694 ‘fire boats’ were in use for the protection of ships: flatboats, each of which had two double suction pumps.
Instructions for the Double Suction Pump
An image of such a primordial fire boat, as can be seen above, can be found in the world famous ‘Fire Extinguisher Book’ from 1690 by Jan van der Heiden and Jan van der Heiden de Jonge.
Smaller harbour then I thought. On the west coast I only was in San Francisco and Seattle, on the east coast almost in every harbour, also in the GOM. Having and maintaining 24/7 a fire boat there is a costly business and watch keeping could be pretty boring which is not good for the motivation. In the Rotterdam harbour we have about 60 to 80 incidents per year, including oil spill pollution and lost containers.
Maybe they could for instance upgrade two harbour tugs to a larger fire fighting capacity although I doubt that this can be done as their might not be enough space on board for the extra equipment like pump units etc.
San Diego Harbor Police have some firefighting capability with at least one specially equipped fireboat
Years ago, standing on the police dock waiting for Customs, I was chatting with an officer while admiring the new fireboat. The officer told me it pumps a lot of water, but drives itself backwards from the force of the monitor. They would have to approach the fire, train water on it, drift back, shut off the P.T.O. and drive the boat back to the fire. One or the other; pump or propulsion. Probably solved, by now.
https://www.portofsandiego.org/public-safety/harbor-police#collection-2697-tab-2706
That’s not a fireboat. That a boater assist vessel.
This is what a modern fireboat looks like:
Or like this:
That is true and with the new generation of fireboats which can pump enormous amounts of water the effect is quite considerable. In fact I can imagine when propulsion is lost that they probably could sail in any direction they want to with the help of the monitors. Therefore a DP system is a an essential piece of equipment to keep the ship in position.
Perhaps not fully correct but it gives an indication of the forces that can exist when operational.
Maybe it could be in gear at the same time the monitor is running from the PTO, but it may be moving rather quickly towards the fire 
I remember talking to one of the crew on the Tellepsen in Houston when they moored next to us. The FDNY boat looks like a battleship compared to it.
We live in a country where we can’t even maintain an adequate supply of facemasks to protect doctors and nurses from being infected in an epidemic and you want someone to oversee the building and maintenance of hundreds of dedicated fireboats in all the ports around the country? Dream on, brother. We’re lucky someone had the foresight to require firefighting gear on harbor tugs. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be a good thing to do, but there are a great number of fine things to do and the resources are not unlimited. Look at who responded, how quickly and how effectively in the last major fire in Houston. The tugs, both harbor and push boats, and the pilots responded magnificently in moving the flaming ship away from other vessels and using their water canons and wheel wash to keep flames away from other moored vessels. They weren’t trained to do it but being American seamen they stepped up. I remember another fire in the Bolivar Roads Anchorage where a passing tug and pilot had the initiative to push the stern of the flaming vessel upwind so the smoke and flames didn’t overwhelm the berthing quarters. They didn’t learn that in school. I can easily see a situation where everyone watches and waits for the miracle fireboat to take care of everything instead of realizing they better act because no one else will.
That’s a good point. But in San Diego everyone was watching the police boats and waiting for a miracle because they didn’t understand the local tugs capabilities.
I also said I would be fine with using local tugs if the money was available for the local tugs to train with emergency response crews.
The rest of your post is nonsense.
How about instead of dumping the harbor tax fees into the general treasury and spending them on subsidies for big agricultural and bank bailouts we use them to hire local tugboats to participate in emergency response training. Hiring one tug for a few hours each Sunday wouldn’t cost a fortune. We could also pay one captain as a liaison to local fd and make that a rotational position so everyone learns the ropes.
I didn’t say ever port needs one but certainly every port that has over a billion dollars in navy equipment on the water. How many of those are there? At the top of my head: new london, norfolk, kings bay, corpus, san diego, Kitsap, Pearl harbor? Certainly not hundreds.
That seems like a top priority to me. Once that’s done we can talk about overseas bases and the hundreds of smaller ports around the country.
There was a time when the Navy was fairly well staffed with “fire boats.”
ARS/ATS had significant fire-fighting capability and were located in the Fleet concentration areas for the most part. Nowadays the few assets left are few and scattered and facing obsolescence. I believe six new Navajo class ATS are planned.
I was Harbor Master in Concord California back in the 70’s. We had four single screw tugs mostly used for docking ships and moving barges of rockets and ammo around the Bay Area. We were the marine firefighting resource for the area - civilian and military.
Nonsense? When we were talking about fireboats I just assumed we were talking about more than just Navy ports. You just want to leave all the civilian terminals to fend for themselves?
Don’t forget also that early on the local ECO tugs were dead shifting other ships, such as the Fitz, out of the way.
