OAKLAND — As firefighters arrived at a middle-of-the-night blaze on a steep hillside near a cluster of houses in August 2015, they confronted more than flames — the area was so badly overgrown it appeared the danger might quickly careen out of control.

Only the windless night kept the flames, sparked by a blown electric transformer, in check as firefighters scrambling down the steep hillside — using hoses as ropes — found themselves in brush over their heads.

The firefighters soon learned that the property at 6969 Elverton Drive had been marked as passing a vegetation safety inspection just weeks earlier. Those annual inspections were meant to ensure that vegetation was cut back so as not to become fuel for fires.

The Aug. 27, 2015, fire was extinguished without injuries or property damage — but it was a close call in an area adjacent to the 1991 Oakland firestorm where 25 people died. In the year and a half since, it has become a flashpoint for growing concerns that the fire department is failing to control dangerous conditions in the Oakland hillsides — and that some employees may be covering up the inadequacies in the inspection program.

Now, as the Oakland Fire Department is coming under even more scrutiny in the wake of the deadly Ghost Ship fire, for the first time a firefighter is blowing the whistle and asking: Why was that property marked as compliant, and who created apparently faked documents involving inspections near that Elverton fire?

“In the 1991 fire the city seemed to be claiming that it was an act of God, and there was nothing we can do,” said Gordon Piper, who lost his Hiller Highlands home in the 1991 firestorm. He and his wife, Sue Piper, chairwoman of the Wildfire Prevention Assessment District, have made it their mission to educate the public about the risks of allowing vegetation to grow unchecked.

“But what is coming out is that proper inspections and enforcing the fire code are key, and we need the fire department to enforce the code to its fullest extent. The current situation with inadequate inspections leaves us all at risk to another catastrophic fire.”

Even before fire engines left the Elverton fire scene, a civilian vegetation inspector arrived and issued the property’s San Francisco owners violations for overgrown weeds and untrimmed trees.

But the biggest shock to firefighter Zac Unger came a week later. He filed a California Public Records Act request to his own department for 2014 and 2015 inspection records of properties on Elverton Drive. What he received led Unger to wonder whether the documents he received were created to appease his curiosity.

While the 2014 records included copies of inspection reports filled out by firefighters on scene, there were no such records for 2015. Instead, the department released six puzzling documents labeled fire clearance certificates, which Unger had never seen before, dated the day after he submitted his public records request.

The documents, addressed to homeowners, claimed five properties had passed inspections a month earlier. The sixth claimed a property had passed inspection in early 2014 but informed the homeowner they were cleared through the 2015 fire season, despite no annual inspection that year. Although unsigned, the forms listed the author as former Oakland fire Marshal James Williams, who had left the department two years earlier.

Williams, now a Sonoma County fire marshal, declined to comment when reached by reporters, confirming only that he was not an Oakland fire department employee in 2015.

Two neighbors whose names were on the certificates told this newspaper that they had never seen the documents. Former Oakland fire inspector Mark Grissom, who complained about inspections relentlessly during his two-year tenure in Oakland, said they were form letters but rarely mailed out, usually only at the request of homeowners for insurance purposes.

“It seems strange to me that no paperwork was generated until I asked about it,” said Unger, who is the Oakland firefighters union vice president. “I think there was a scramble to demonstrate that these buildings had been inspected when in fact they had not been.”

It was not the first red flag for Unger, who works out of Station 24 in Shepherd Canyon. He had already complained earlier that fire season to fire Chief Teresa Deloach Reed that 10 to 20 percent of hills homes were not being inspected at all.

On June 18, 2015, Unger emailed Reed and other department brass to complain that the station received the forms for properties the station’s crew were to inspect a month late and completely out of order, with streets and addresses all mixed up. He said it wasn’t the first time.

“Last year, I mentioned the problem to you and you called me an ‘exaggerator’ so I’ve included a video clip here showing just how badly the forms were organized,” Unger wrote. The union has been at odds with Reed frequently during her five-year tenure in Oakland.

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Unger said he got no response to his email. Two months later, he and his crew responded to the Elverton fire.

Neighbor Avi Bar-Zeev remembers the fire well.

“The first thing I did was get my wife and kids in the car and told them to get ready. My first thought was this was gonna be the big fire,” he said. “We were very lucky.”

Bar-Zeev said he helped direct firefighters that night from his back porch because firefighters had trouble seeing over the overgrown brush. He did not remember getting a 2015 fire inspection certificate.

Neither did another neighbor, Patricia Staggs. Shown a 2015 inspection certificate, addressed to her home, she told reporters: “I don’t remember seeing that.”

On Oct. 8, 2015, Unger emailed Chief Reed and told her that they were missing paperwork for 10 of 44 properties on Elverton Drive. It was late in the fire season, and those properties had still not been inspected, he said.

Chief Reed responded by email to Unger’s email: “I am taking your report seriously and will look into why some properties are not being inspected and some are … and why inspections are marked as being in compliance when they are not.”

She told him she spoke with the city auditor’s office about those issues and would speak to the fire prevention bureau. Reed, who is on leave because of a family matter, did not return multiple requests for comment on this story.