The fire at a critical switching center in a downtown Oakland BART station has been traced to an aging piece of equipment slated to be replaced as part of the agency’s ongoing bond-funded overhaul, transit agency officials said Wednesday.
The fire – touched off on Saturday at the 12th Street station -- caused much more extensive damage than previously thought and burned for several minutes before crews could get down into the tunnel, according to BART reports and fire dispatch logs.
An Oakland fire rig on a medical call nearby first called the incident in to headquarters, according to fire dispatch recordings reviewed by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit.
“This is Pumper 12, there’s smoke at the BART station,” one firefighter reported to a dispatcher at 5:02 p.m.
BART has told governing board members that the first sign of problems at the station actually happened a dozen minutes before that report, when monitoring equipment picked up a power outage at that station. BART officials said a fire alarm was also activated, but when they called in to report the fire, crews were already on scene.
Some 50 firefighters eventually converged on the station, with one reporting at 5:08 p.m. that crews had encountered “light smoke from Bore 2, looks like it’s coming from the tunnel.’’
At 5:12 p.m., a firefighter speculated that since no fire had been reported on any of BART’s trains, the problem could be a “debris fire.” Crews ultimately evacuated a total of 300 passengers from two trains.
BART officials said Wednesday that the damage was worse than first thought.
“We’re getting new information all the time,” said Anna Duckworth, a BART spokesperson. She said the fire started in the so-called gap breaker station, which she described as a “glorified switch, it literally adjusts the conduit for the electricity, and we tell it where to put the power in our system.”
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The fire touched off by a ground fault at that gap breaker damaged a nearby train control room in the station, she said.
BART has 47 gap breaker stations in its system. BART acknowledged Wednesday it was planning to replace the equipment destroyed in the fire as well as 16 gap breaker stations that have been in service for five or more decades.
Duckworth said crews were having trouble accessing the charred remains of the station in Oakland until Wednesday morning. “There’s asbestos inside that gap breaker room, so that’s what’s prevented us from going in there.”
BART says to expect continued delays of up to 15 minutes traveling through the downtown area as a result of the fire.
BART board member Debora Allen says that’s because trains going through downtown are running at half-speed as a precaution, given the limited capacity of the cables being used to bypass the damaged equipment.
She says the fire makes it clear that BART is now paying the price of years of delayed work on its system.
“That’s the part that concerns me,” she said, “that this agency has not prioritized making the system run.” She says the agency suffers from what she calls “mission drift.”
BART says it has made improvements to its aging system thanks to funds form the Measure RR bond passed by the voters and it rapidly restored service after the fire. Still, as a precaution, it has posted workers in the tunnel because the fire knocked out critical train control equipment it relies on to activate ventilation fans needed to clear the tunnel in a fire or other emergency.
