Oakland’s latest fire hazard: homeless camps

In the past five months, Oakland has endured the tragedies of the Ghost Ship fire that killed 36 people and a blaze at a halfway house that took four lives. Both buildings turned out to be deadly hazards, but both fell through the cracks of the city’s inspection system.

Now there’s a new danger for Oakland’s embattled Fire Department to worry about: the city’s spreading homeless encampments.

The threat was made clear in an April 13 fire at a camp along East 12th Street near Interstate 880. Five tents burned and smoke billowed across the freeway during the morning commute. The camp’s 40 residents escaped injury, but a dog died in the fire.

The cause is unknown, but Fire Department Battalion Chief Dino Torres said the culprit may have been a cooking fire, which are common at homeless camps.

What we do know is that the Oakland Fire Department hasn’t been checking the camps for possible hazards. Like San Francisco, which is also experiencing an explosion of homeless encampments, the city occasionally sends fire inspectors to camps — but not on a regular basis.

“Homeless encampments are not regulated under the California fire code,” said Karen Boyd, spokeswoman for the Oakland city administrator’s office.

Oakland acting Fire Chief Mark Hoffmann said that because tents aren’t considered structures, they don’t “fall in our wheelhouse.”

Hoffmann said there is “general safety language” in city codes that might give the Fire Department the power to say, “You have an unsafe activity in a public right-of-way.”

However, he said, Oakland has historically been reluctant to enforce such safety rules partly out of fears that it would be seen as an excuse to come down on homeless people.

Fire inspectors will walk through camps now and then. They recently paid a visit to a city-sanctioned camp on Wood Street, where authorities had brought in portable toilets and barriers to keep traffic away. Boyd called it a “public education effort” in which two inspectors talked with residents about “identifiable fire hazards and safety measures.”

And the city did move to clear out a camp at Grove Shafter Park, in a residential neighborhood near the junction of Interstate 580 and Highway 24, after tent dwellers were seen using open flames and gas-powered generators.

For the most part, however, the city is still trying to settle on a strategy.

“There is an internal working group reviewing/rewriting the city’s standard operating procedures around encampments.” Boyd said. The fire marshal is involved in the talks, she said.

In the meantime, the city is coming up with a safety flyer to hand out in the camps.

“This is not a policy per se, but an immediate step toward increased safety,” Boyd said.

San Francisco, which hasn’t had any large fires in homeless camps, takes largely the same approach as Oakland.

San Francisco Fire Department spokesman Lt. Jonathan Baxter said the agency conducts inspections in response to “any and all fire complaints, including encampments.”

When asked, he said the department also takes part in inspections conducted “as part of an interdepartmental effort to monitor encampments.”

Torres returns: Mayor Ed Lee has tapped Art Torres, a former state legislator and ex-member of the city Public Utilities Commission, to replace Tom Nolan on the powerful San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

Word is, Lee picked Torres partly because of criticism that the agency — which handles all things transit in the city — has not been responsive to the public on such issues as bus lanes, parking and traffic congestion.

“He understands the pressing transportation issues facing this city and understands how to find smart, innovative solutions to those challenges,” said Deirdre Hussey, a spokeswoman for Lee.

Torres said that although the mayor never mentioned concerns about the MTA needing to be more in touch, “I hope to bring that kind of thinking with me.”

Torres comes on board as some of the agency’s biggest projects are nearing completion, including the Central Subway and the Transbay Transit Center — and with some of its biggest challenges brewing as well, like how to handle traffic at the new Warriors arena in Mission Bay when it opens in 2019.

All of which should make for an interesting ride for Torres, once he is confirmed by the Board of Supervisors.

By the way, Torres’ son, Joaquin Torres, is president of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission and works in the mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

Fare play: The recent report by BART that at least 17,000 people a day cheat on their fares, costing the system anywhere from $15 million to $25 million annually, was a shocker. Add it all up, and it means that every year, the combined populations of San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles — and then some — are jumping the gates.

How BART came up with the figure is almost as interesting as the estimate itself.

According to BART spokesman Jim Allison, analysts started with the number of entry tickets and compared that with clocked exits to see how many people paid the minimum fare to enter the system and then sneaked out without paying the full fare.

Next, they added estimates based on watching people jump the gates.

Finally, they looked at a study of how many people cheat the subway system in New York, then applied a similar formula to BART.

The 17,000-a-day total is a threefold increase in the number of skippers estimated in the last such count in 2014. After that study came out, BART spent $600,000 to combat the problem.

Clearly, something is not working.