The scene of a fire in Portland on Wednesday, March 8. In the course of responding to the fire, crews found that people had been living inside the structure at the base of the Steel Bridge.
Courtesy of Portland Fire & Rescue
A structure at the base of Portland’s Steel Bridge caught fire Wednesday. Crews found that people had been living inside the structure after tunneling inside. We’ll get an update on the situation from Rick Graves, public information officer for Portland Fire & Rescue.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. A structure at the base of Portland’s Steel Bridge caught fire last Wednesday. Crews found that people had been living inside. Rick Graves is the public information officer for Portland Fire & Rescue, and he joins us now with more of the details. Rick Graves, welcome to the show.
Rick Graves: Thanks for having me.
Miller: What was the information in the initial call for service on Wednesday?
Graves: Crews responded to a potential grass fire, someone had driven by and seen smoke emanating from an area that had brush and grass and assumed the smoke was of that nature. And upon arrival, there was quite a bit of smoke, pushing out of cracks in the cinder block wall that was underneath the base of the eastbound entrance to the Steel Bridge off of Northwest Everett.
Miller: What did it take for members of Fire & Rescue to actually get inside to see what was happening?
Graves: Crews that responded quickly grabbed some sledgehammer-like tools and sledgehammers and simply just broke down the wall in multiple locations to find heavy fire. At that time, they extended their hose lines and extinguished the fire to find excessive clutter and evidence of life underneath the bridge.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for what it was like down there? What the people who had been living there had done?
Graves: Sure, I’m not certain as to their entry ports, but they have effectively created a home within this confined and protected area underneath the bridge that whatever they decide is needed to exist, they bring in and utilize. There was evidence of warming fires, evidence of cooking fires and evidence of inappropriately discarded smoking materials. But it’s kind of a cluttered situation that is difficult to understand how people are existing within that environment and successfully living.
Miller: You mentioned inappropriately discharged smoking materials, which seems like the language of fire investigators.
Graves: I’m very well versed in fire investigator ‘speak.’
Miller: Yeah. But does that mean that investigators have figured out what likely happened?
Graves: They’re waiting to be able to interview . . . we did find a victim, pulled the victim out that was burned and had smoke inhalation concerns and that individual is still in the hospital and is yet to be interviewed. So it’s very difficult for our investigations unit to actually get to the root cause of a fire without interviews. There’s no cameras, obviously, around that allow us to see what goes on in and behind the cinder block walls. So they’re hopeful they can get information from the individual but they have yet to interview them.
Miller: Do you know, at this point, how many people were living inside this space?
Graves: I do not know… I’m unaware.
Miller: What’s it like for firefighters to try to put out a blaze in a space like this?
Graves: That’s interesting. All of our fire training is based off of studies, knowledgeable construction that is designed for residences or commercial spaces. And this is just such an unusual situation, where we have these camps in these areas that aren’t intended for long term livable spaces, that we just don’t have background knowledge on how to fight it.
What we do is we pull hose lines, we extinguish and cool the flames as best as possible. But there’s definitely not a whole lot of fall back on your common sense. Let me search here and search there. So it’s because it takes a lot of searching to get through these areas. There are underground vaults and tunnels that may have access to these zones that could have life in it. And once you find one, you start searching and continue until you check the whole space to make sure it’s clear of human life.
Miller: We’ve talked in the past about fires at homeless encampments and the challenges that they bring up
for everybody in Portland, for people living there, for people near there, for firefighters. But has anything like what we’re talking about now happened before – a fire in a piece of critical infrastructure, in this case transportation infrastructure under a bridge?
Graves: I don’t think to the extreme that we saw last week, but I don’t think that that’s the only location within the city where these situations might crop up. All along all of our bridge abutments, there are these enclosures that are utilized for protection, environmental protection, for those that are living in a houseless setting. So they try to find themselves a warm location. And so I suspect we have other situations like this across the city that we are unaware of, and hopefully we’re able to find them before we have a fire and lose, lose the life or lose the structure itself as a result of fire damage.
Miller: Do you know if people in the city, city officials, were aware of this particular encampment or population inside this on-ramp?
Graves: I can say fairly strongly, I can say without a doubt, no one knew within city officials, any agency that might have any sort of involvement with that particular situation, that anybody was there. This was a very, very strange situation that hit people . . . that were completely unknowing of it. Now, that doesn’t mean that these other locations across the city, you can see people residing underneath these bridges, taking shelter from the rain. And I think those are fairly well known, but this particular… behind the cinder block wall hidden. I don’t think anybody knew anything.
Miller: Now that we have seen this, whether it’s Portland Fire & Rescue or the Portland Bureau of Transportation or I’m not sure what other Bureaus this would fall under, are people, [city officials], actually going out now and looking for the possibility of similar enclosed makeshift shelters?
Graves: My guess is this happened last week. So, how quickly things may or may not occur? No one has probably gone out yet. But I’m guessing that there are probably some discussions within the organizations that would address these to reach out and take inventory. That is not underneath our purview with Portland Fire & Rescue. We respond to emergencies and we certify existing permitted living spaces, but these unsanctioned, non-permitted locations are not within our evaluation spectrum.
Miller: This next question may fall into a similar category, but you’re with us right now. The Oregon Department of Transportation and the Portland Bureau of Transportation did a joint inspection of the on-ramp and found that it was structurally sound, despite some surface issues. And so as a result PBOT announced yesterday that the ramp had reopened. Do you know if PBOT or anybody is going to be doing anything to prevent people from going back?
Graves: I believe the discussions are occurring and reconstruction of this particular wall will … they will repair the holes that we utilized to make entry. I mean, Oregon ODOT and PBOT are both involved because ODOT has involvement, ownership, as does PBOT and involvement and ownership, and that’s sort of the difficulties with regard to so many agencies involved. So I believe that the cinder blocks will be replaced and that [the] enclosure will remain tight and they’ll evaluate how people got in and probably shore up those entries as well, so that we don’t have a situation where a fire crops up and we can’t get people out quickly.
Miller: Now I want to go back to what you were saying at the beginning, which is that the kinds of fires you’re seeing now are really different from the ones that, traditionally, firefighters would have been trained to handle. Is training changing, as these dangers become more common?
Graves: Training is changing in a sense that we have a lot of on the job training for these types of situations that allow us an opportunity to learn as we go. But we don’t necessarily alter our training program to incorporate houseless encampments, specifically. We certainly have challenges when we arrive at locations where some people might welcome us and others may not welcome us. So we have some strategies and tactics that we utilize when we interface with individuals. But for us, when there’s a fire, we do our best to quickly assess the situation and extinguish it with whatever means possible. So, [we] can’t really train for a houseless camp, but we do get the opportunity to experience those frequently and you become pretty trained, quickly.
Miller: Rick Graves, thanks very much.
Graves: Thank you for having me.
Miller: Rick Graves is the public information officer for Portland Fire & Rescue. He joined us to talk about last week’s fire under an on-ramp to Portland’s Steel Bridge.
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