Water regulators: Remove debris
Rubble sat in a lot next to an Oakland soccer field since Dec. 4
OAKLAND — Air regulators have found no asbestos in debris from the Ghost Ship fire that the city dumped near San Leandro Bay, but another environmental agency has told Oakland officials to remove the charred rubble from the site.
Although the Bay Area Air Quality Management District found no hazardous material at the dump site off Oakport Street, asbestos was found in piping in the 1930s-era warehouse where 36 people died in an inferno on Dec. 2. It will have to be cleaned up before the gutted structure can be demolished, said Wayne Kino, the district’s enforcement chief.
Adifferent environmental regulator, the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, ordered Oakland to remove the debris that city workers discarded next to a soccer field in the days after the fire and properly dispose of it in a landfill.
That decision came without testing the material at the dump site, but regulators want the city to clean up the debris quickly and don’t plan on taking regulatory action, Dale Bower, a supervisor in the board’s Watershed Division, said Thursday.
“It’s just not the best place for it, especially with all the rain,” he said in a telephone interview. He said the board didn’t “have enough information” to clearly say if the debris was a threat to nearby wetlands and the bay.
Harry Hamilton, a spokesman for City Administrator Sabrina Landreth, didn’t answer an emailed question about if and when the site would be cleaned up.
Bower said he expects the city to comply.
City workers and a private contractor hauled the debris from the fire site on Dec. 4, dumping it near a walking path. Other debris that was considered possible evidence in the criminal investigation of the fire was taken to an indoor site.
Kino, of the air district, said that material needs to be tested for asbestos as well, but it can’t happen immediately because the evidence can’t be disturbed. “That can wait,” he said.
This news organization first reported on the outdoor site in early February in a story about a former Ghost Ship artist scavenging it for lost belongings. The city didn’t acknowledge it was responsible for the dumping until this week.
With grieving families waiting desperately for bodies to be removed the warehouse, the material needed to be removed quickly, Hamilton said. “We stand by our approach.”
But how the large amount of fire debris wound up in a field, open to the elements and recent heavy storms, is inconsistent with what the city had maintained since the first hours after the fire — that materials would be carefully collected and preserved.
On Dec. 4, Oakland Fire Battalion Chief Melinda Drayton said debris from the fire was being collected “literally bucket by bucket.”
“We have firefighters with basically coveralls and buckets and shovels taking bits of debris out into the vacant lot to then be loaded into dump trucks and removed to an offsite location,” she said.
Later that day, Mayor Libby Schaaf announced that the District Attorney’s Office had begun a criminal investigation into the fire. While the city’s first two priorities were to recover victims and support victim families, Schaaf detailed the third goal: “Our final focus is doing everything that we can to preserve evidence and conduct the recovery operation in a manner that allows us to fully and professionally investigate this incident so that we can get to the bottom of how this happened.”