Oakland fire: Refrigerator fault may have been cause

Oakland Fire Battalion Chief Robert Lipp said crews have cleared 85 per cent of the “Ghost Ship” building with one corner still inaccessible because it is unstable. Crews then returned to search through the warehouse.

Mack took a video which she said shows the potentially hazardous conditions. Delivered at 11 a.m. Monday-Friday. Several people were unaccounted for.

Hundreds of people holding candles honored those who died in the fire at a vigil Monday night in Oakland’s Lake Merritt. One staircase led to a boarded up door. The water and electricity were stolen from neighbors and often didn’t work. Ray Kelly said officials expect the death toll to rise, but he wouldn’t speculate how high it might go.

Authorities would not answer questions about the couple that operated the Satya Yuga collective, who were identified as Derick Ion Almena and Micah Allison and were believed to have been out of the building at the time of the blaze.

Lauer began the interview by asking if building manager Derick Almena if he’s the man who should be held accountable for the lives lost.

Officials said they would turn next to investigating the fire, which erupted late Friday during a dance party.

On Saturday, the artist retreat had turned into a scene of horrors, the 4,000-square-foot structure to rubble.

Officials said the roof collapsed onto the second floor, which was connected to the ground floor only by a makeshift stairway made of wooden pallets and plywood.

“The occupants were consumed by smoke before they could get out of the building”, said Jill Snyder, special agent in charge of the San Francisco office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“I can’t explain, like, who I am anymore”, Almena, who leased the warehouse, said in an interview with TODAY.

Darin Ranelletti, of the Oakland Planning Department, said the city opened an investigation November 13 and an investigator went to the premises on November 17 but could not get inside.

Neighbours had complained to the city about rubbish piling up on the street outside, and about the illegal tenants.

He says about 20 people lived there as part of a collective of young artists and that he was like the group’s grandfather. “It’s been something, every day, realizing that more people lost their lives needlessly”, she said.

Emergency crew workers walk in front of the site of a warehouse fire in Oakland, Calif., Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016.

Live-work warehouses are becoming increasingly common in urban areas as the rising real estate market squeezes out artists and longtime residents of formerly bohemian enclaves including San Francisco and Oakland.

“It’s like a horror house”. Survivors said flames spread quickly and thick, black smoke filled the interior, blinding and choking occupants as they struggled to flee the cluttered space.

Authorities said they did not suspect arson, but investigators want to find out if the building had a history of code violations.

Almena has not responded to emails or calls by The Associated Press to phone numbers associated with him.

“It was like living with your best friends and your family”.

Online records listed the building’s owner as Nar Siu Chor.

Taking place in warehouses, galleries, bars, even homes in industrial and low-income areas, these parties — usually promoted via text, social media or old-fashioned word of mouth — could in some ways be thought of as high-energy, music-infused, 21st-century versions of the classic artists’ salon. But it wouldn’t be enough to escape what was about to happen on Friday night. City officials have said he wasn’t allowed inside. “It was random pieces of wood put together to create something that you could get up to the top floor on”.

The recovery of three more bodies took the confirmed death count to 36, making the blaze the deadliest in the United States since 100 people perished in a 2003 nightclub fire in West Warwick, Rhode Island.

Hummel said the building had bedrooms and workspace and the uneven stairs to the second floor were like “climbing a fort”.

Monica Kat, a paralegal, feared four of her friends were dead.

“It just doesn’t seem that that’s a fire that’s survivable, so the reality, I think for a lot of us, is beginning to set in”, she said.

Almena went on to answer a question that hadn’t been asked, referring to the fact that he, Johnson and the children were in a hotel, not the Ghost Ship, the night of the fire: “Did I know there was gonna (sic) be a fire?”