At 2:15 AM Thursday Morning a massive fire broke out at Mandela and 7th Street right next to the West Oakland BART Station. The fire spread to other buildings and eventually onto the BART tracks at the station, causing the shut down of the facility and eventually the entire BART line for almost 13 hours.
Here’s a video from BARTable on YouTube that explains what happened, but has been seen just 58 times to this point in time!
Now service is restored, and while no one knows exactly how the fire that destroyed the Red Star Senior apartments happened, some at BART are investigating if it was started on purpose.
The Mercury News reports that three men were seen coming into the construction site of the under-construction complex, and then when an unarmed security guard saw them, one person ran off, but the other confronted the guard with some kind of weapon – the guard, who’s not equipped to take on violent actions, ran to a sandwich shop seeking refuge, saw smoke, and ran back to the complex to get his phone and call 911.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
On the subject of fire, SF State Professor Joe Tuman met with me earlier this week to announce the fire he put out: he’s not running for the Oakland City Council At-Large Seat against Incumbent At-Large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan, who had her kickoff event Saturday of last week. In a wide-ranging, 20-minute long video coming this weekend, Joe Tuman said that he paid into a poll survey, which reported that the only way for him to win was to “go negative” against Councilmember Kaplan. Tuman said that he’s “not that kind of guy” and so determined not to run.
But, and as you will see in the video to be released Sunday, Tuman’s still got fire – and a lot of choice words for Oakland Mayor Jean Quan. Basically, Tuman says Quan lacks leadership style, and hinted that he may run for Oakland Mayor again in 2014.
Stay tuned.