Ms. Deloach Reed has not agreed to an interview, but we have learned a few things about her tenure. In 2014, she responded to an Alameda County civil grand jury’s investigation of deficiencies in the department’s inspection bureau with an 11-page letter acknowledging that “many of its findings were accurate and that the Fire Department was ‘working diligently’ to correct the problems — including improving its revenue collections and filling jobs that had been frozen or eliminated because of budget cuts,” The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

In 2015, The Mercury News reported, “The Oakland Fire Department for years has filled staffing shortages by spending millions on overtime for existing employees, rather than hiring more firefighters and paramedics” — a situation that union leaders said was dangerous.

Zac Unger, the vice president of Local 55, the Oakland firefighters union, told me the Fire Department was understaffed, with only a handful of inspectors responsible for many buildings. “A comparable city of our size would have two to three times that,” he said.

Ms. Deloach Reed said on Tuesday that eight fire code inspectors were tasked with annually inspecting about 1,800 buildings. She added that firefighters inspected commercial businesses, but that checking seemingly empty warehouses was not part of their duties.

But a search of the database of the city’s Business Tax Office shows that the owner of the Ghost Ship warehouse, Chor Nar Siu Ng, has a business license for the property, and the Oakland fire inspection services website says all “commercial facilities” must be inspected at least once a year. The question now: Does Ms. Ng’s license mean her warehouse should have been inspected regularly?

To try to get a better sense of how the department is run, I spoke with Darryl Von Raesfeld, the former chief of the San Jose Fire Department, who worked closely with Ms. Deloach Reed for 25 years, including when she was assistant fire chief there. Mr. Raesfeld described Ms. Deloach Reed as “very professional.” But he also said that during his tenure, he made sure his department was properly staffed.

I also put a call in to the State Fire Marshal’s office in the hopes of understanding California’s regulations for inspections of warehouses, to get a sense of how often the Ghost Ship should have been inspected.