The search for remains at Oakland’s charred ‘Ghost Ship’ warehouse came to a somber conclusion Wednesday. The final death toll of Friday’s catastrophic fire now stands at 36. Many of the deceased—writers, artists, musicians and free spirits—were found clutching one another in the rubble. Some had even texted their loved ones to say goodbye.
Attention has now shifted to the cause of the fire and the extent to which the Ghost Ship’s many preexisting safety hazards and a lack of government oversight contributed to the horror. When all is said and done, for Oakland’s many unsafe and unpermitted structures, the day of reckoning could soon be near.
According to officials, inspectors with the city’s planning and building department hadn’t stepped foot in the warehouse for 30 years. Yet there were nearly two dozen building code complaints or other city actions involving the structure, documents show. The city has refused to say when or if the building underwent a fire inspection.
“City and county officials missed at least 10 chances to flag dangers at the Ghost Ship art collective that might have led to Friday night’s inferno,” the Mercury News reports. One retired Contra Costa firefighter said he was outraged that the city did not shut the place down.
The Ghost Ship is no anomaly. In this excellent piece for Oakland Magazine, Robert Gammon sheds light on the torrent of hazardous structures in the East Bay city. But the epidemic, he notes, is tied to the region’s affordable housing crisis and many fear that a crackdown on code enforcement could result in mass evictions for people who have nowhere else to go.
“The city and the rest of the Bay Area have failed to build enough housing to keep up with the growing population and the economic boom,” Gammon writes. “The dearth of housing has caused rents to soar as people have competed feverishly for a limited number of living spaces. Artists are often among the first to be displaced. So many of them have banded together over the years and created their own spaces by transforming warehouses and other older buildings to serve both as their homes and their artistic venues.”
In this case, the outcome was deadly.