Ghostship Fire More Articles

Video Inside Ghostship Fire Found:
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Fire-victim-Jennifer-Mendiola-Doctorate-dancing-10781979.php

Firefighter: Warehouse missing from fire-inspection records

Ellen Knickmeyer and Paul Elias, Associated Press

Updated 9:44 pm, Thursday, December 8, 2016
http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/Investigators-to-look-at-electrical-system-in-10782232.php

The Video from the actual firefighter's truck..

https://twitter.com/OaklandFireLive/status/804966374506274816

Oakland warehouse fire leads to crackdown

SO NOW...

Oakland warehouse fire leads to crackdown on illegal artist spaces around the country

Dylan Stableford,Yahoo News 8 hours ago

In Baltimore, dozens of artists living in a building known as the Bell Foundry were evicted last week after the city said it received a complaint “about individuals living there in deplorable conditions.”

“The main electrical source had illegal, dangerous connections; there were extension cords used to feed multiple fixtures,” said Katy Byrne, a spokeswoman for Baltimore’s Department of Housing and Community Development. “None of the electrical systems was grounded.”

In Denver, fire officials shut down Rhinoceropolis, a landmark “DIY” performance space, and evicted five people who had been living in illegal lofts on Thursday after it was deemed “unsafe.”

While the Denver Fire Department did not immediately specify what those safety violations were, a 2015 profile of the venue by Denver’s Westword gives a hint:

In Philadelphia, Mayor Jim Kenney announced a citywide crackdown on spaces like the Ghost Ship.

“As Philadelphia mourns with the people of Oakland, it’s also important to examine how we can prevent similar tragedies form occurring here,” Kenney said in a statement three days after the Oakland fire. “In our city there are unlawfully converted buildings and underground clubs, and while [the Department of Licenses and Inspections] works hard to track down these hazardous locations and enforce the fire code, they can’t do it alone.”

Kenney called on residents to report illegal holiday parties “in unsafe and misused spaces.”

In New York City, the Loft Law — first enacted in the early 1980s during the booming Soho art scene — and subsequent city task forces have forced many operators of illegal living spaces to bring them up to code, and cracked down on those who fail to comply.

Those measures, coupled with industrial neighborhoods becoming more and more gentrified, mean that fewer and fewer illegal spaces like the Ghost Ship exist within the five boroughs.

But make no mistake, they do still exist.

The New York Times reported investigations prompted by the Oakland warehouse blaze in other cities, including Nashville, Dallas, Austin, Indianapolis, New Haven, Conn., and Dubuque, Iowa.

Related: Artists, musicians, teachers among the 36 victims

In Oakland, some residents are wondering if the city missed repeated warnings about the Ghost Ship.

“Officials fielded years of complaints about dangerous conditions, drugs, neglected children, trash, thefts and squabbles at the illegally converted warehouse,” the Associated Press reported, “with inspectors knocking on the door as recently as two weeks before the blaze.”

At a press conference late last week, officials said that it appeared the warehouse was not equipped with smoke detectors and had no exits on the second floor. And Oakland Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said a criminal investigation is underway.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/oakland-warehouse-fire-leads-to-crackdown-on-illegal-artist-spaces-around-the-country-214021920.html

Oakland fire victims: A family of connections much larger than nightlife

By MARISA KENDALL | mkendall@bayareanewsgroup.com and MICHELLE QUINN | mquinn@bayareanewsgroup.com

PUBLISHED: December 10, 2016 at 6:00 am | UPDATED: December 11, 2016 at 7:10 am

They were musicians, fans and artists, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who loved the weird, the surreal and each other. This was no random gathering of people who saw a flier about a party. To many, this was a surrogate family, an eclectic group that had spent many similar nights together, dancing and making music. They knew and admired each other’s work, played gigs together, ran sound and video for each other’s shows.

http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/12/10/oakland-fire-victims-a-family-of-connections-much-larger-than-nightlife/

Hallowing tales from the last hour of the Ghost Ship Fire.

The last hours of Oakland’s Ghost Ship warehouse

The harrowing stories of that night tell a heartbreaking tale of what was lost, and who should have known better.

Max Ohr, a jewelry maker and Ghost Ship resident, who served as doorman the night of the fire. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group) 

“I greeted almost every single person who walked through that door,” said Ohr, 26, “and I’m usually the one who says goodbye to them at the end of the night as well.”

On this night, he would be screaming for them to escape.

On this night, Ohr would be the doorman to an epic tragedy, Oakland’s deadliest fire ever.

This was no natural disaster, no earthquake, no terrorist shooting. This disaster was avoidable; 36 people were victims not just of the smoke and fire, but of recklessness, bureaucracy and indifference.

The harrowing stories of that night — from those who made it out, those who traded panicked texts, and those who tried to help — tell a heartbreaking tale of what was lost and who should have known better.

http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/12/11/oakland-fire-ghost-ship-last-hours/

Oakland Firefighters @OaklandFireLive

31st Ave- 2nd alarm struck. E13 Fire Attack, E4 Back-Up fire attack. #oakland #fire #workingfire

11:31 PM - 2 Dec 2016

 
•  33 Retweets
 
•  4

The Ghost Ship Fire Continued..

Politicians CAUGHT in a lie?? Seems like it.

Oakland city workers visited warehouse, did not flag fire hazard

By Heather Somerville, Kristina Cooke and Dan Levine

ReutersDecember 9, 2016

By Heather Somerville, Kristina Cooke and Dan Levine

(Reuters) - In the two years leading up to the fire at an Oakland, California warehouse that killed 36 people at a dance party late last week, city officials had entered the building on numerous occasions and had multiple opportunities to see that residents were illegally living there in hazardous conditions.

The Oakland Police Department received dozens of complaints about the warehouse, and went inside at least half a dozen times, according to police reports and accounts from former tenants and visitors.

A former friend and tenant also say city fire officials were in the building at least twice.

Those who spent time in the artists' cooperative known as the "Ghost Ship," say that potential code violations would have been apparent to anyone entering the building, which was not permitted for residence.

Living quarters with narrow, winding halls were built from scrap materials, including highly flammable wooden pallets. Nails were exposed, plumbing improvised and a makeshift stairway to the second floor was extremely hazardous, they say.

"If you opened the door and stepped even three feet inside it would be grossly apparent to anyone that it wasn't just being used as a warehouse or a workspace," said former Ghost Ship neighbor Ben Acevedo, 45, who estimates he made about 60 calls to police about the property over 16 months to report noise, blight and illegal occupancy.

On Wednesday, amid questions about why the city did not act to shut down the warehouse, an Oakland official said that code enforcement personnel had not entered the building in 30 years.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said she did not know the last time fire inspectors had gone inside. She did not mention police visits, but said the city would launch a new effort "to clarify the responsibility of city employees to properly report any observations of dangerous living conditions or illegal events."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/oakland-city-workers-visited-warehouse-did-not-flag-013402036.html

The Ghost Ship Fire & The Local Politicians!!

The Ghost Ship Fire represented a BROKEN SYSTEM. The system was put in place to protect the people! Government is supposed to WORK FOR THE PEOPLE & SERVE THE PEOPLE.
Politicians are not doing what they should be doing.

We the people are sicked and tired of the BUREAUCRACY that are SELFISH, SELF-SERVING and IGNORANCE POLITICIANS!!!

"Local politicians clamber for scapegoats: leaseholder, inspector, or gig organizers? One city councilperson bizarrely offered “anarchist rejection of regulation.” Droves of distraught family and friends, meanwhile, gather to mourn in Oakland bars, homes, and warehouse residences reminiscent of Ghost Ship. Their talk centers on fallen community pillars, feckless and tone-deaf officials, survival, and the undertow of displacement. “It feels like the end of individualism around here,” Barenbaum said. “There’s just this needed commitment to solidarity.”     
..........

In 2007, Barenbaum co-founded storied underground venue Bay Area 51. It was in the expanded garage of a two-story San Francisco structure once used as a hippie bus depot. A professional electrician, she toiled and fretted over visitors’ safety. The eccentric, permissive landlord “lived on a sinking houseboat in Marin,” Barenbaum said, but he nevertheless ousted residents earlier this year to better tempt buyers.

By then, Bay Area 51 seemed starkly anachronistic against what outgoing residents consider technocrats’ antiseptic vision for San Francisco. And that narrative has migrated to Oakland, where Uber’s future headquarters sits downtown wrapped in tattered white plastic like a spurned gift. According to a recent report by the local organization Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, more than 50,000 formal eviction notices were posted between 2008 and 2015, a figure that only begins to reveal the scope of displacement in Oakland.

“With more than 2,000 [eviction notices] a year, it makes sense that people are living in these precarious scenarios,” said Erin McElroy, cofounder of the Mapping Project. “And a crackdown isn’t going to keep people out of unsafe places. It’s going to accelerate it. …The priority of the city should be securing affordable housing for residents and preventing evictions.”

City officials often decry the housing crisis, but the recent Mapping Project report includes a troubling finding: Oakland’s leading “mega-evictor,” William Rosetti, whose associated companies are responsible for over 4,000 evictions in the period studied, is a member of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s handpicked “housing cabinet.”

“When [Schaaf] was asked about it, she said that she wanted a diverse group, including landlords and tenants rights people, but the fact that the landlord she chose is behind 4,000 evictions is significant,” McElroy said. “People with that much property here have always had the power.” 

The damage; photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

What remains of Ghost Ship; photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1383-after-ghost-ship-fire-oakland-diy-grapples-with-a-broken-system/


http://www.endhomelessness.org/library/entry/SOH2016

The State of Homelessness in America 2016

On a single night in January 2015, 564,708 people were experiencing homelessness — meaning they were sleeping outside or in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.

Medical Care Like Outside the U.S.

Travelling Overseas? Good to know about medical care in case of emergency & local hospitals.
What is Medical Care Like Outside the U.S.?

Posted by John Eganon February 22, 2016in Travel

When you visit the ER or the doctor's office in the U.S., you pretty much know the routine. That routine isn't the same in other countries, however. From Argentina to Zimbabwe, people access health care in a variety of ways.

Here's a look at how medical care works in a number of popular travel destinations outside the U.S., and how American travelers might receive care in the event of an unexpected illness or injury while abroad:

France

In France, the federal government covers most medical bills for its citizens, with funding derived from income and payroll taxes. Expenses not covered by the government are paid by a patient's private insurance.

Sweden

Swedish patients who must wait more than 90 days for planned operations or treatments are guaranteed that these costs will be covered by a county government.

...............

Brazil

Brazilians have developed a community-based approach to universal health care, assigning Primary Care Teams to 150 households per geographical area. Healthcare services are free for legal citizens and travelers may find out that it's important to do research prior to traveling to Brazil, as it is common to encounter many doctors who do not speak English.

If you plan to visit Rio De Janiero for the upcoming 2016 Olympics, be advised, public health care will not be available. You are strongly advised to purchase travel medical insurance.

http://www.hccmis.com/blog/travel/medical-care-outside-the-us/?utm_source=Outbrain%20Contently&utm_medium=paid%20social&utm_campaign=blog%20traffic&utm_term=5376658

 

Eating Dog Meat.

EATING DOG MEAT IN THE WORLD: A Thai website lists the following countries or regions where mainstream culture favours or at least condones dog meat eating: 1. China; 2. Indonesia; 3. Mexico; 4. Philippines; 5. Taiwan; 6. Korea; 7. Switzerland; 8. Vietnam; 9. Polynesia; 10. Siberia; 11. Alaska; 12. North Canada; 13. Groenland — See:

http://thaispca.org/?page_id=39&lang=en

In the same site, world dog population is evaluated at 500 M and dogs killed for consumption at 16 M per year, i.e. 3.2 %.

These figures can be compared with the following:

Some 21,000 children die every day around the world.

That is equivalent to:

1 child dying every 4 seconds;

14 children dying every minute;

A 2011 Libya conflict-scale death toll every day;

A 2010 Haiti earthquake occurring every 10 days;

A 2004 Asian Tsunami occurring every 11 days;

An Iraq-scale death toll every 19–46 days;

Just under 7.6 million children dying every year;

Some 92 million children dying between 2000 and 2010;

The silent killers are poverty, hunger, easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and other related causes. Despite the scale of this daily/ongoing catastrophe, it rarely manages to achieve, much less sustain, prime-time, headline coverage.

Too Poor To Retire.

Reprinted from Los Angeles Times:
JAN. 29, 2016 | REPORTING FROM DARIEN, N.Y.
http://graphics.latimes.com/retirement-nomads/ 

Sad but true stories of many older Americans who can not afford to retire.

I usually have a short attention span, this is a compelling article that I can understand and identified with. I read it all the way though to the end. As a real estate agent & started this endeavor in 2007, I have seen my fair share of homes being taken over by the banks. I have had to work on short sale & sell homes for clients who lost their jobs and no longer can afford to keep their homes. I have had my fair share of sadness seeing all the belongings left behind in the garages; family albums, children's shoes, books, clothes, boxes and boxes of stuff they no longer can take with them etc. I have so many friends who have been in these positions described in this article. This is one of the most heart breaking, real life stories & who knows how many more are out there? This is what's going on in our country, shrinking middleclass, aging poor and homelessness. 

A

t the wise age of 79, Dolores Westfall knows food shopping on an empty stomach is a fool’s errand. On her way to the grocery store last May, she pulled into the Town & Country Family Restaurant to take the edge off her appetite.

ADVERTISEMENT

After much consideration, she ordered the prime rib special and an iced tea — expensive at $21.36, but the leftovers, wrapped carefully to go, would provide two more lunches.

The problem, she later realized, was that a big insurance bill was coming due. How was she going to pay it? Was she going to tip into insolvency over a plate of prime rib?

“I thought I could handle eating and shopping,” she said, “but lunch put me over the top.”

Westfall — 5 feet 1 tall, with a graceful dancer’s body she honed as a tap-dancing teenager — is as stubborn as she is high-spirited. But she finds herself these days in a precarious place: Her savings long gone, and having never done much long-term financial planning, Westfall left her home in California to live in an aging RV she calls Big Foot, driving from one temporary job to the next....

Continued on LA TIMES with more story & pictures..

Ageism??

A Case of Agism?
Fremont woman finds herself living on the street
By Rebecca Parr, rparr@bayareanewsgroup.com Stephanie Welch weathered the booms and busts of Silicon Valley since its infancy in the 1960s, always able to find a job but that changed during the recession and a health setback where she now finds herself living on the street and bewildered. 

2016-3-5 11:00:00 A.M.

Reprinted from The San Jose Mercury News:

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_29598188/fremont-woman-finds-herself-living-on-the-street

After weathering booms and busts of Silicon Valley, Fremont woman finds herself living on the street By Rebecca Parr, rparr@bayareanewsgroup.com Doug Stewart, with the Central County Homeless Outreach program, looks for homeless under an overpass late in the evening in Martinez, Calif., on Thursday, March 4, 2016. Stewart started the Central County Homeless Outreach program 13 years ago to help them in whatever ways he could. And now, after ... Central County Homeless Outreach founder to end operations

FREMONT -- Stephanie Welch weathered the booms and busts of Silicon Valley since its infancy in the 1960s, always able to find a job.

But that changed during the recession when Welch, then in her late 50s, could not even get an interview. Since 2010, her life has spiraled downward, and Welch now finds herself living on the street and bewildered.

"The ageism -- I never saw it coming," she said.

Welch is homeless, pushing a shopping cart with some of her things around a retail parking lot in the Warm Springs neighborhood.

"I was raised here; I went to Mission San Jose. Warm Springs is a comfort for me. I don't know where else I would go," she said.....