December 2016
Oakland Fire Department’s troubled building inspection effort
Two years before the deadly Ghost Ship warehouse fire, the Alameda County civil grand jury sounded the alarm about deficiencies in the Oakland Fire Department’s inspection bureau — saying the city wasn’t even trying to check a third of the 12,000 commercial properties that were supposed to be examined every year.
Despite assurances from Fire Department brass that they would address the problem, the city continues to have fewer inspectors on the streets than its website reports, interviews and public records indicate — leaving most buildings to be checked by rank-and-file firefighters on a catch-as-catch-can basis.
Under California law, cities are required to enforce building standards that the state has adopted. That means inspecting businesses and large residential structures for fire hazards and other safety dangers — including live-work warehouses like the one that burned Friday in Oakland, killing 36 people.
But according to records that the Oakland Fire Department submitted to the civil grand jury for the watchdog panel’s 2014 report, fire inspectors were being sent to only 8,000 buildings a year — and couldn’t gain access to 2,000 of them.
The remaining buildings — 4,000 in all — were going unchecked because of what the Fire Department called competing priorities.
The upshot, according to the grand jury: The Fire Department was giving people “the false impression that all commercial businesses are inspected annually.”
One big problem, the grand jury concluded, was that Oakland’s funding source for the $1 million-a-year inspection program was being pinched. City fees assessed to commercial operations were supposed to help pay for it, but budget cuts left City Hall unable to collect all the money. The city turned the job over to the Fire Department, which didn’t have the capacity to handle it, the grand jury said.
Grand jury members are barred from speaking individually about an investigation, but one source who had a hand in the report told us that Fire Department officials “were quite concerned” about the missed inspections. Nonetheless, the source said, they chose to not bolster their fee-collecting efforts because that might divert money needed to retain firefighters.
“They didn’t seem to understand their mission — their mission seemed to be to keep (firefighters’) jobs,” the source said.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-Fire-Department-s-troubled-building-10778749.php
