SF investigators seek cause of fire that left 58 people homeless

Crews douse the embers of a fire a day after it destroyed a building at Mission and 29th streets. Three people had minor injuries. Crews douse the embers of a fire a day after it destroyed a building at Mission and 29th streets. Three people had minor injuries. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 45 Caption Close SF investigators seek cause of fire that left 58 people homeless 1 / 45 Back to Gallery

Fire investigators on Sunday methodically poked through the smoldering remains of six buildings on the edge of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood that were gutted over the weekend by a huge fire that left 58 people without homes.

The team of inspectors hoped to pinpoint the origin, path and cause of the fire that kicked up into the unwieldy inferno Saturday afternoon and took firefighters almost four hours to get under control. Remarkably, no one was killed and only three people suffered minor injuries from smoke inhalation.

Many of those left stranded lived at the Greywood, a single-room-occupancy hotel with a history of city code violations on the corner of Mission and 29th streets, where residents first reported seeing and smelling smoke.

Video: Fire in SF's Mission District

“I was in my room, and I thought it was just a drill because the sprinklers weren’t working,” said Cristel, who lived at the hotel but didn’t want to give her last name.

Dramatic evacuation

While eating breakfast Sunday morning at a shelter at the Salvation Army on Valencia and 23rd streets, the 21-year-old nursing student at San Francisco State University described the dramatic evacuation that happened around 2:30 p.m. the day before.

“People were yelling ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’” she said. “I was panicking. I didn’t have time to grab anything, just my backpack.”

She had yet to learn if her books, computer and other school supplies were destroyed.

Joe Williams said he smelled something burning from his room at the hotel and checked a circuit breaker box on the second story. He said smoke and fire shot out of the box and spread so quickly it could not be smothered.

His wife, Tavey Soy, and their son, Joseph, scrambled out of the building with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing and two diapers. The boy recently turned a year old, and all his presents burned in the fire, Soy said. “I’m not really worried about my stuff,” she said. “But he needs his clothes and his diapers.”

Investigators have to first pinpoint the origin of the fire and determine how the flames spread before they can identify the official cause, said Jonathan Baxter, a Fire Department spokesman.

Members of the San Francisco Fire Department’s Fire Investigation Task Force began their work early Sunday as crews continued to snuff out pockets of smoldering debris near a smoke-blackened fire engine.

Mission Street between Virginia and Cesar Chavez streets was expected to stay closed to traffic until Monday, Baxter said. Muni buses were cleared to pass though the area around 9:30 a.m. Sunday.

Hardware store destroyed

The 3300 Club, a watering hole on the ground floor of the Greywood, was intact Sunday, but the floor was flooded and the waterlogged celling sagged.

Other establishments were not so lucky. All that was left of Cole Hardware, just south of the Greywood, was its facade. Behind it, scorched lumber lay collapsed in piles. Another apartment building south of the hardware store was ravaged by fire, as were the buildings behind the store.

“I feel bad for all the people living upstairs,” Shukry Lama, 30, whose family owns the 3300 Club, said as he viewed the damage Sunday. “Luckily we’re insured, but a lot of the people above us didn’t have much. What they had was in that building.”

Greywood residents have filed almost 50 complaints over the past two decades, resulting in numerous citations, according to San Francisco Department of Building Inspection records.

In the past year, inspectors found that a heating system at the hotel was installed without a permit and that possible wastewater was flooding into units. Residents also often complained about circuit breakers that would trip several times a day, cutting off some power to the buildings.

Tom Hui, director of the Department of Building and Inspection, was at the scene Sunday and said he was aware of the complaints.

“We need to find out what’s going on, and I’m going to have my staff look into it,” he said.

Hillary Ronen, chief of staff for Supervisor David Campos, whose Ninth District includes the fire-devastated block, rushed to the scene Saturday to translate for Spanish-speaking tenants affected by the fire.

On Sunday, she said she was aware of the building violations and planned to meet with Department of Building Inspection officials to discuss them Monday.

“I’m very concerned, and I want to find out all the details,” she said. “There have been many violations along with eyewitness reports of where the fire originated. We need to find out immediately if there is anything that could have been done to prevent this.”

But code violations at single-room-occupancy hotels, known as SROs, are not unusual, according to tenant advocates.

“The thing is, SROs in San Francisco across the board have building code violations,” said Chirag Bhakta, an outreach and campaign coordinator for Mission SRO Collaborative. “If this fire did indeed originate at the Greywood, it would not surprise me.”

The Greywood’s owner did not return phone calls Sunday.

Several recent Mission fires

The fire is the latest large blaze to cause devastation in and near the Mission District, where soaring housing costs have put a suffocating squeeze on lower-income residents.

A January 2015 fire that tore thought a large building at 22nd and Mission streets killed one person and injured six. That was followed by several other large fires, including one two months later that killed a 13-year-old girl and her father in their family home at 24th Street and Treat Avenue.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: EvanSernoffsky