December 2016
Oakland inspection problems extend to hazardous materials
It’s not just firetraps that Oakland has had a hard time keeping up with: The Fire Department was doing such a poor job of tracking hazardous materials being stored at hundreds of locations across the city that the state stripped the department last year of its oversight authority.
Oakland became the first city under the state’s two-decade-old environmental regulatory program to be decertified — an embarrassing distinction that led to the job being handed to the Alameda County Environmental Health Department.
The Oakland firefighters union called it a real black eye for the department.
“They got a warning letter from the state, and they had a year to get their act together — and they didn’t,” said Zac Unger, the union’s vice president.
It was all reminiscent of problems with the department’s fire-safety inspection program cited in 2014 by the Alameda County civil grand jury. The panel concluded that the city wasn’t even trying to check one-third of Oakland’s 12,000 commercial buildings for fire hazards.
Oddly enough, even while the Fire Department complained of a shortage of funds to pay for fire inspectors, its hazardous-waste program ran up a $1.46 million surplus in 2014, according to a report last year in the East Bay Express.
All the while, the state found that some of that extra money that the department was sitting on — $249,000 — had been illegally transferred to the city’s general fund.
According the Cal EPA, the Fire Department not only didn’t correct the program deficiencies, it didn’t even respond to the state’s “notice of intent” to decertify Oakland from conducting the inspections.
Upshot: After more than a decade of complaints about the Fire Department’s training and handling of hazardous waste, the state pulled the plug on the program and turned it over to the county.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Oakland-inspection-problems-extend-to-hazardous-10789607.php
