The two agencies tasked with ensuring San Francisco’s residential buildings are safe from fires are doing a poor job of getting building owners to correct safety violations, according to a new report from the city’s civil grand jury.
The Department of Building Inspection and the Fire Department barely coordinate on code enforcement and take too long to complete inspections of multi-unit residential buildings, the report released Thursday found.
“If they’re not able to, on their own, complete all inspections and have timely code enforcement, they must find a way to work together in order to deal with this problem,” civil grand jury foreperson Alison Ileen Scott said in an interview Thursday.
“We found that fire safety hazards that go undetected or take too long to correct unnecessarily contribute to the risk that our housing stock and its residents will suffer from catastrophic fires that take lives, damage property, and displace tenants,” the report stated.
The study was prompted by three large fires in the city’s Mission District in late 2014 and early 2015 that killed three people, displaced scores of others, shuttered dozens of businesses, and caused more than $11 million damage.