December 2016
Fire department emails: Inspections flawed in fire-prone Oakland hills
OAKLAND — Oakland’s embattled fire department, already under scrutiny for failing to inspect the Ghost Ship warehouse before this month’s deadly blaze, is facing a new round of allegations about its lax fire prevention efforts in one of the region’s most vulnerable areas to wildfires: the Oakland Hills, site of a 1991 firestorm that killed 25 people and destroyed thousands of homes.
Internal fire department emails obtained by this news organization conclude the department’s firefighters — tasked with regularly monitoring the hillsides — often signed off on properties despite overgrown vegetation around homes that clearly posed a high fire danger.
The issues date back to at least 2011 and persist to as recently as this month. One email, dated Dec. 15, shows department inspectors conducting spot checks earlier this year found fire hazards at 28 properties that had recently passed review by department firefighters. A 2014 email from a ranking inspector alleged that a property firefighters had passed turned out to be in “extreme violation” of safety rules.
“Any experienced firefighter with even basic knowledge of either structural or wildland firefighting could see these homes on this street are completely at risk and should have been marked out of compliance” and written up, the head of the department’s civilian wildland fire inspection team Vincent Crudele wrote to Deputy Fire Chief Mark Hoffmann.
Records show department infighting, arguments among people responsible for safety and what a city audit described as an attitude among firefighters that the inspections aren’t important.
The latest revelations upset Councilwoman Annie Campbell Washington, who represents neighborhoods at the center of the 1991 fire and said the city should investigate the integrity of the inspections.
“We suffered one of the worst wildfires in the country,” she said. “There’s no other part of the city that feels fire danger as severely. I take this extremely seriously.”
Both Fire Chief Teresa Deloach Reed and Fire Marshal Miguel Trujillo, who’s in charge of inspections, declined requests for interviews.
In an email sent on the chief’s behalf, she said: “Engine companies are directed to reinspect properties where deficiencies are identified. The Department makes every effort to ensure vegetation management inspections are done properly.”
The concerns about hills inspections raise new questions about whether the Oakland Fire Department can adequately perform an array of public safety inspections. The doomed Ghost Ship artists collective, where 36 people were killed Dec. 2, had never been inspected despite its owner registering it as city business 21 years ago. A fire station was right around the corner.
Last year, the department became the first in California to be stripped of its state certification to perform hazardous materials inspections of places like gas stations and industrial buildings where chemicals are used. In 2014, an Alameda County Grand Jury found more than a third of commercial buildings went unchecked despite city code that at the time had required annual inspections.
In the hills — where a firefighter and police officer were among the dozens killed in the 1991 blaze — firefighters are assigned to inspect about 21,000 residential properties each fire season. They are supposed to check for overgrowth of trees and bushes, tall weeds and grasses, dead vegetation, and even ivy growing on houses, which can act like a ladder for fire. A team of two full-time civilian inspectors, along with a few seasonal employees, check vacant lots and open lands. Those inspectors also investigate complaints about fire hazards, a duty that often leads to them spot-checking the firefighters’ work.
In 2013, then-City Auditor Courtney Ruby released an audit detailing problems with fire inspections in the hills dating back to at least 2011. “Our citizens’ lives are literally at stake,” Ruby wrote.
She identified the need for “stronger supervision, quality control measures, better oversight,” after finding lax enforcement and an attitude among firefighters that “fire inspections are not necessarily important.”
Current Auditor Brenda Roberts said Wednesday that many of the core problems remain with no firm timetable for fixing them. The department blew a deadline in February to explain how it would address the problems, and then missed a second deadline over the summer to formalize a vegetation inspection policy. Roberts plans to release another progress report in February 2017.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/12/24/fire-department-emails-inspections-flawed-in-fire-prone-oakland-hills/
