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Little fires in every single place: Fires rose by 26 p.c in San Francisco final yr

Throughout 2020, an average of 12 fires burned the mission each week.

Things didn’t look much better in the neighboring communities. There were roughly three fires a week in the Castro / Upper Market area, seven in SoMa and eight in the Tenderloin.

This was not a typical year. Between 2019 and 2020 there was a dramatic increase in fires in many parts of the city. They rose by 43 percent in the tenderloin, 50 percent in the mission, 63 percent in the Castro / Upper Market area and over 70 percent in SoMa. Overall, the fires in San Francisco increased by more than a quarter in one year.

The situation does not seem to have improved in 2021 either. According to public data from the San Francisco Fire Department (SFFD), the city suffered more fires in the first 10 months of this year than in all of 2019.

Mission residents have long realized that fires are a problem in their neighborhood, but the pandemic has dramatically made the situation worse. With shelters closing their doors to prevent the spread of Covid-19, many San Franciscans only had camp sites. These are often extremely unsafe and the combination of flammable materials and open fire can turn tents into tinder boxes.

In the mission the fires jumped over 50%

in 2020. Garbage fires have almost doubled.

The number of incidents of fire

specially recorded as a tent

or campfires more

than tripled in 2020.

Fires jumped in the mission

over 50% in the last year. garbage

Fires almost doubled.

The number of

Fire incidents

special

recorded as a tent

or warehouse

fires more than

tripled in 2020.

SFFD data shows that the increase in fires in San Francisco was mainly driven by so-called “garbage fires”. This is a broad label used by SFFD that covers many different scenarios, but in general it means that the fires happened outdoors and garbage was involved.

Lt. Jonathan Baxter, a fire department spokesman, said frontline firefighters were putting many of these fires back into camps. Although they are generally small, their impact should not be underestimated, he said: “Any fire is dangerous – especially in San Francisco, where we have such a dense city.”

The department’s data did not show an increase in the number of injuries or fatalities from fires in 2020, but there was considerable damage to property. Records state that there was combined property and content damage estimated at $ 80 million throughout the year.

Baxter said many of the recent fires were caused by people in and around tents using open flames for cooking and keeping warm. Drug paraphernalia found on the site of some of the fires suggests some began making drugs, he added.

So far this year, SFFD has counted 245 cases of deliberately started fires, and some believe the real number is higher. Christin Evans, a local business owner and Coalition for Homelessness volunteer, said she saw cases of alleged arson in tents that were not registered as deliberate.

In July 2021, at around 10:30 p.m., three tents near 750 Florida Street went on fire. The inmates survived, although one of them burned his hands from extinguishing the fire. Evans said the tent residents insisted they didn’t use open flames at the time. They believe that a house neighbor set their tents on fire after they refused to move.

The incident was reported by Evans and a report is pending from fire investigators. It was recorded in the SFFD data as an “outdoor garbage, garbage or trash fire”.

“Arson isn’t exactly common,” said Evans, “but it wasn’t an isolated incident either.”

Most of the neighborhoods in San Francisco saw an increase

in case of fire. The rise in mission was greater than most.

Financial District / South Beach

Change in fire events from 2019 to 2020 (%)

Most of the neighborhoods in San Francisco

saw an increase in fires. The rise in

the mission was bigger than most.

Financial District / South Beach

Change in fire events from 2019 to 2020 (%)

Please note: Districts with fewer than 50 fires in 2019 have been excluded from this graph.

Kelley Cutler, a Coalition Organizer for Homelessness, said the rise in camps – and fires – was due to a lack of resources made available to the homeless.

“The number of tents has risen sharply because nothing else was available,” says Cutler. “There were no alternatives”

As the pandemic began, the city’s municipal housing (which, according to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, can accommodate 2,000 to 3,000 people) began at significantly reduced capacity to reduce the transmission of Covid-19. They also saw frequent closings as positive tests meant closure. Service 311 to get on a shelters waiting list has been discontinued and has not yet returned.

The city has made some alternatives available. Safe sleeping areas were established in several locations where homeless people could use tents and have access to basic amenities such as showers and food. Fire extinguishers were even available at these locations in the event of a fire. But all together they could only accommodate a few hundred people.

In addition, around 2,000 hotel rooms were made available. However, entry was generally restricted to people over the age of 60 or to people with previous illnesses.

Comparing the availability of temporary shelters, safe sleeping and hotel rooms to the city’s 8,000+ homeless residents in 2019 suggests that thousands of unhoused residents had few options other than tents.

The latest August 2021 estimate by the Healthy Streets Operations Center in San Francisco found over 500 tents and 1,000 vehicles used by homeless people across the city.

In an effort to contain tent fires, Baxter said the fire department went beyond their traditional scope by distributing leaflets and talking to people without shelter about the dangers of open flames. After a year of public relations, he said the number of fires did not seem to be increasing or decreasing, but had reached a new plateau.

Cutler said the best way to reduce fires is to add more living space. “It’s not about building trust,” she said. “This is nonsense. When good resources are available, people take advantage of the opportunity.”

After $ 1 billion of Proposition C funding finally poured into homeless services – some of which have already been used to buy hotels for lodging – Cutler and Evans are cautiously optimistic that better days may be ahead. But they said they shouldn’t expect changes to happen immediately.

“This situation was made worse by Covid, but it took 40 years to get that far,” said Evans. “It won’t be resolved overnight.”

That year there were over 3,500 fires in the city by the end of October

Contains fires from January 1, 2021 through October 31, 2021. You can see the full screen map here.

methodology

The data for this story comes from the SFFD’s public fire incident data set. The analysis was completed with Python. Here you get to our notebook.

Jesus Mora, a manager at SFFD who organizes the department’s data, said the number of fires included in our analysis could actually be underestimated. Not every fire alarm is recorded as a fire event, he explained. Some may be recorded as medical incidents and some minor incidents may not be recorded at all.

The categorization of the fires in our analysis is slightly different from the categorization used internally by SFFD. Many of the incidents listed as “garbage fires” in the public record are reclassified as “outdoor fires” or “campfires” in SFFD’s internal data.

Mora explained that there are many gray areas around so-called outdoor, garbage or campfires, and changes are sometimes made based on the attributions of the incident that are not available in the public record.

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