Inspections lag despite deadly blaze
A year after the Ghost Ship fire, people are still living in unlawfully converted artist warehouses throughout Oakland, and city officials have yet to fully correct deficiencies in their inspection programs to prevent another disaster.
The city still has a backlog of roughly 1,000 commercial properties it has not inspected as required by state law. And 21 of 32 buildings brought to the city’s attention after the Ghost Ship fire for possibly holding unauthorized events or residents remain out of compliance with building and fire codes. Some are used as dwellings. The city acknowledges it probably does not have a full tally on illegally converted buildings or the hazards they may hold.
City officials have defended their response to shortcomings that drew scrutiny after the fire, saying they have taken steps to make Oakland safer than it was a year ago. They point to an array of new policies, better technology systems to improve communications and the recent hiring of inspectors. And they say the fire that killed 36 people on Dec. 2, 2016, was a unique event at an outlier warehouse, and the dangers in Oakland are no worse than those anywhere else.
“We didn’t do what many other cities did right after the Ghost Ship,” said Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. “We did not launch a reactive crackdown to make people feel better and then go back to business as usual. And, believe me, there was plenty of pressure to do that.”
Schaaf said she takes pride in her administration’s resolve to work with landlords to fix code violations. Avoiding tenant displacement and evictions, she said, was her top priority a year ago — and remains one today. Still, only one landlord of the 32 buildings chose to work with the city to bring his building to code. At least five of the owners evicted their tenants.
In a report to the City Council and interviews with The Chronicle, Schaaf and other city officials stressed the progress Oakland has made around inspections, staffing and technology.
But critics and others say the city is failing to keep buildings and people safe.
Robert Thompson, an attorney representing a dozen families whose children died in the fire, criticized the city’s report as “patting itself on the back” on the eve of the oneyear anniversary.
“What’s the point of creating new rules when you’re not going to follow the ones you already have?” he said. “I understand the city wants a vibrant arts and cultural community, and I understand there’s a housing crisis . ... But that doesn’t mean you get to turn a blind eye to fire and safety issues just because your mayor is worried about displacing people from a building they shouldn’t have been in in the first place.”
David Gregory, whose daughter, Michela, was among the victims of the Ghost Ship fire, said Oakland has not done enough to reduce the chances of another tragedy. Indeed, just three months after the warehouse burned, a fire in a halfway house on the other side of the city killed four people, displaced more than 80 tenants, and exposed further dysfunction in the Fire Department and its internal-communication systems.
“There were so many things that could have prevented this,” Gregory said of his 20year-old daughter’s death. “The city knows what it needs to do. Just enforce the city codes and the laws that already exist and hire the inspectors they have a budget for.”
Had the Ghost Ship gotten a legally mandated inspection, authorities would have found about 25 people living in the elaborate art collective, even though the building was zoned only for industrial use. There were no sprinklers, automatic fire-detection systems or fire exits. The interior of the 10,000-square-foot building was a maze of salvaged materials, pianos, organs and wood benches stacked together to form twisted hallways and makeshift live-work areas.
Thirty-one of the families whose children died in the fire have filed a wrongful death suit against the city, county, property owner and a host of others. Their lawyers say the warehouse was a death trap. The city’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued at a recent court hearing that there was no legal basis for a number of claims in the suit. But an Alameda County Superior Court judge last month allowed many allegations in the lawsuit to stand.
Judge Brad Seligman said the city had a “mandatory duty” to fix the hazardous conditions in a building like the Ghost Ship. By its own ordinances, the city was required to repair, rehabilitate or demolish structures deemed to be a public nuisance or danger to health and safety, Seligman said.
“There is no question of the authority and obligation of the city to act when faced with an unsafe and substandard building,” he said in the ruling.
The Chronicle examined where Oakland stands today on key areas of concern exposed by the Ghost Ship fire.
Illegal residences
Problem: Oakland still has people living in illegally converted industrial buildings. The city created a list of 21 properties with fire- and building-code violations — many of which are unconventional, collective-style warehouses that have long underpinned the city’s art scene championed by Schaaf and other politicians. The city’s initial efforts to shut down problem buildings were met with opposition from vocal artists, musicians and others in the community. City’s solution: For the first six months after the fire, city inspectors sent out two dozen notices telling property owners to revert their buildings to the original, permitted use and cease residential occupancy. Some landlords began evicting tenants. But after complaints from residents, Darin Ranelletti — interim director of the Planning and Building Department — told the inspectors they have to give landlords the option to legalize converted properties, in line with an executive order from Schaaf to allow residents to remain in “non-conforming spaces” with certain safety upgrades.
Of the 32 buildings under city scrutiny, just one had a property owner who worked with the city to draft a socalled compliance plan, designed to abate hazards. But the plan, tenant advocates point out, requires the residents to leave while corrections are made. Since the fire, at least five of the 32 landlords have evicted tenants, according to the city.
Problem: The city is probably undercounting potential hazardous buildings in Oakland. The list of 32 was based on complaints from neighbors, landlords and others. A building that no one complains about, even one in which people are residing without permission, might not have made the tally.
David Keenan, who created the group Safer DIY Spaces after the Ghost Ship fire, said there are nearly twice as many such buildings in Oakland as the city’s estimate. In the past year, his group has conducted about 70 confidential inspections with licensed contractors at Bay Area properties, most in Oakland, for tenants seek-
ing safety but hoping to avoid eviction.
City’s solution: Because of the difficulties in identifying problem buildings, Fire Department brass asked firefighters to survey their own districts for potential hazards. In all, they noted such conditions as blight, hoarding and debris at 135 properties.
Inspection lapses
Problem: Though state law requires annual inspections of businesses, apartments, hotels, schools and other structures, a 2014 report by the Alameda County civil grand jury said the Oakland Fire Department wasn’t even trying to inspect one-third of the 12,000 buildings it was supposed to be checking. And of the 8,000 the department did attempt to inspect, one-quarter couldn’t be accessed.
City’s solution: Oakland’s inspection backlog has been cut to 1,000 commercial properties. City officials said they are going to hire a contractor to reduce it further.
Communication breakdowns
Problem: Communication breakdowns within and between city departments happened before both the Ghost Ship and halfway house fires. In some cases, police officers and firefighters thought they were kicking warnings up the chain of command, only to have them go nowhere.
City’s solution: The Oakland Police Department now requires its officers to report parties and events they come across that do not have permits — a policy initially delayed by city officials when the department sent out the directive.
The officers are instructed to email their observations to the department’s special events unit and the city administrator’s office. Since the rule was implemented in February, seven parties have been reported through the new process.
Assistant Police Chief John Lois said that the system ensures that the right authorities get notified and can follow up in a timely manner.
The Fire Department, meanwhile, uses phone calls and emails to communicate dangers that firefighters come across, said Fire Chief Darin White.
The department has also drafted a new “fire watch” policy in which firefighters are required to remain at the scene of a building if there’s a major hazard, like a broken sprinkler or alarm system, which happened in the West Oakland halfway house. Crews must wait at the building, providing continuous surveillance in case a fire breaks out, until inspectors arrive or a property owner brings in a security company to relieve them.
Problem: Oakland uses two separate software systems for inspections — one for the Fire Department, which checks for compliance with the fire code, and one for the Planning and Building Department, which reviews compliance with the building code. The separate programs, city workers say, have hindered interdepartmental communication, particularly when a property has both fire- and building-code issues.
Firefighters had long complained about their technology, saying it was out of date, required triplicate paperwork prior to data entry and was missing many properties.
The database was — and remains — incomplete because it was created using the existence of commercial business licenses. In the case of the Ghost Ship warehouse, for instance, there was never a license on file, which meant the property was not on the Fire Department’s inspection list.
City’s solution: Although firefighters continue to use the reviled software, city officials say the department will soon have full access to the better one used by the Planning and Building Department called Accela, which was created using county parcel data — a more complete picture of properties in the city.
“We all would like to have Accela yesterday,” said Joe DeVries, an assistant city administrator. “But we really took the time over the past several months to build it properly.”
The city said creating the fire module of the program is a complex process, but that it will be ready sometime in the next several months.
Leadership and staffing
Problem: Many inside and outside the Fire Department blamed dysfunction on then Chief Teresa Deloach Reed. From 2013 to 2015, she acted as both fire chief and fire marshal. And in the eight years leading up to the Ghost Ship fire, largely due to budget cuts, no one held the permanent position of sworn assistant fire marshal. The roles are critical to fire prevention and inspection efforts in the city.
Deloach Reed, who went on and off leave in the months after the fire, retired in May, when she was eligible to be vested in the city’s pension system.
City’s solution: The national search Schaaf and City Administrator Sabrina Landreth said they would conduct to find a new fire chief ended with the appointment of White, a 20-year veteran of the department.
Problem: The Fire Prevention Bureau and code enforcement unit of the Planning and Building Department each were operating with eight inspectors at the time of the fire and for much of this year.
City’s solution: The city is just now beginning to expand their ranks. By the end of next year, the city plans to have 14 code inspectors and 20 fire inspectors. Oakland in recent weeks has hired several of them, who are going through training.