The investigation continues into the warehouse fire in Oakland that killed 36 people and former Washington Attorney General says the City of Oakland will likely be held at least partially to blame. It’s that kind of culpability that Mayor Ed Murray seems to want to keep the City of Seattle out of in the future.

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The fire that erupted in a warehouse described as an “artists’ colony” occurred during a dance party Friday night and left dozens of people burned to death in a “mass grave.” According to The Associated Press, city and state officials fielded years of complaints about dangerous conditions, drugs, neglected children, trash, thefts and squabbles at the warehouse, raising questions about why it wasn’t shut down. Oakland city officials say a building inspector went to the warehouse before the fire but couldn’t get inside and sent a request to the owner to gain entry.

Once fire officials figure out how the fatal warehouse fire started, it will be up to the prosecutor to decide who is responsible. Assuming it turns out to be an accident, the question becomes: Who gets in trouble?

McKenna told Seattle’s Morning News that, more than likely, the answer will be everybody.

“In civil lawsuits, they’re always going to go after the deepest pocket, and not just (the building owner), but they’ll go after everybody who might potentially be at fault,” McKenna said. “The guy who ran the building, the guy who owned it, the city for inspecting it, you can believe that these lawsuits are going to name everybody that they can think of.”

Based on reports, the warehouse was not up to code and the casual, self-constructed apartments in the warehouse left no escape for people on the top floor. KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross asked if the city is liable for not insisting that code issues be fixed.

“It does,” McKenna said. “I think that the city is going to have a problem here in terms of not enforcing their own code requirements. The fire safety codes exist for a reason. They’re typically pretty conservative and sometimes people say, ‘Well, why do we need to be that strict?’ Well, this is an example of why and if the city is shown to have not enforced their own code and require improvements or required the entire building to be red-tagged so that everyone would have to move out, the city could certainly be held liable under California law.”

The utter devastation from the warehouse fire is unusual, but the economic issues and social dynamics in Oakland are not altogether different from ones in Seattle. For example, the City of Seattle is becoming notorious for its many regulations on housing — including consideration this summer of requiring old buildings to retrofit for earthquake safety. Squatters have also been a problem throughout the area, thanks in large part to the area’s major development that has slashed affordable housing options and increasingly pushed more people to the streets or into vacant homes. The issues can be spotted around the region, including fires being started in the old Seattle Times building and at a vacant building across the street from KIRO Radio.

Mayor Ed Murray recently proposed that the wait time for permits be shortened for developers demolishing old buildings that are being turned into rental units, and to eliminate the waiting time altogether for single family housing. His proposal aims to create a process by which chronic problem buildings could be demolished immediately.

“Where the Director of the Department of Constructions and Inspections finds that a building poses an imminent life safety threat or a significant criminal threat, based on reports from the Police Chief and Fire Chief, the new law will allow the Director to order, in effect, immediate demolition of that property,” said Scott Lindsay, with the Seattle Mayor’s office.

Ongoing warehouse fire questions

As for who will ultimately be held culpable for the Oakland warehouse fire, McKenna says the first thing to do is establish the cause of the blaze and decide if there was negligence involved.

“Sometimes it is just an accident and no one is really at fault,” McKenna said “But if it turned out that needed maintenance had not been performed, if it turned out that sprinkler systems weren’t working or that smoke alarms or fire alarms weren’t working, if the doors were chained so people couldn’t get out, there are many factors that could work into civil liability but also potentially criminal charges.”

What about when a tenant is informed before signing a lease or renting a place that the fire alarm isn’t in place or things aren’t quite up to code. Does that change the culpability?

“Well, you shouldn’t be allowed to move in if the building is not up to code,” McKenna said. “That simply shouldn’t be allowed. It’s different if you’re moving into a single-family structure or a single-family residence where if it’s old enough and isn’t required to have sprinklers or other safety equipment, but if you’re moving into a regulated building, unless it has some sort of legal exemption, I would be surprised you would be allowed in under current law. Maybe in the past, they would let you move in with the disclosure, but these are supposed to be strict requirements that you can’t just waive off by getting people to say, ‘OK, I’ll live here without sprinklers. I’ll live here without smoke alarms.’ That’s not something people should be able to waive as a right as a tenant.”