San Francisco fire officials say they've issued a citation to a firm working on a massive Mission Bay apartment project destroyed in a spectacular fire in March.
San Francisco Fire Department spokeswoman Lt. Mindy Talmadge says the unidentified contractor is being cited for failing to keep a required watch on an area of the construction project where workers had been doing "hot work" — welding and metal grinding.
"There's a 30-minute requirement for any type of hot work being done to have an individual on site in the area of the work to make sure nothing has been heated enough to the point where some smoldering occurs and then eventually a fire," Talmadge said.
Fire Department investigator Stephen Engler said in his report on the blaze that on the afternoon of March 11, a four-person construction crew was using a welder to install a rooftop steel guardrail and a grinder to prepare rail that was to be installed later. The workers told Engler they finished welding at 2:45 p.m.; at that point, two members of the crew left that part of the site while the other two began grinding the remaining steel rail. That final pair of workers said they finished the job at 3:10 p.m. and both left the job site by 3:15 p.m.
Engler concluded in his report that he believed the fire started in the area where the welding and grinding had beeng going on. He said he was "unable to eliminate an event involving either the by-products of welding coming into contact with the bare wood roofing materials, or embers resulting from grinding the steel end-caps of the steel hand-rail coming into contact with the bare wood roofing materials as the ignition source" of the blaze.