Oakland Firefighters Struggled to Find BART Fire as Hundreds Waited to Evacuate

Oakland firefighters searched for 40 minutes before they found the source of a July 27 electrical fire at one of BART’s downtown Oakland stations, uncertainty that contributed to an hourlong delay in evacuating hundreds of passengers from two trains that had been forced to stop in the area.

The fire, which involved a 56-year-old piece of electrical equipment at 12th Street, shut down service between the MacArthur, Coliseum and West Oakland stops. In fact, trains are still running at slower-than-normal speeds through areas near downtown Oakland.

The incident is among several this year in which BART has suffered significant service disruptions due to a variety of system failures, the latest involving a computer network crash that halted service to service through Hayward and Fremont for more than eight hours on Thursday.

The California Public Utilities Commission said its Rail Transit Safety Branch is investigating the cause of the fire.

BART Deputy General Manager Michael Jones said in an agency memorandum obtained by KQED that the incident began about 4:50 p.m. July 27, a Saturday, when the system carried significantly fewer passengers than it would have on a weekday.

Jones said the fire broke out in a room containing train control equipment and a gap breaker, a piece of electrical equipment that regulates power to the system’s third rail. Loss of the gap breaker at that location meant BART had no way of feeding continuous power to the rail in central Oakland.

The effects of the fire were immediately visible inside and outside the station. Oakland firefighters responding to a medical call just outside the 12th Street Station reported seeing smoke at 4:59 p.m., and the department sent as many as a dozen units and more than 50 firefighters to the scene.

Fire Department spokesperson Michael Hunt said the first firefighters arrived on the scene in just over a minute.

“Our biggest priority was evacuating people safely from the trains that were stopped on the tracks,” Hunt said.

One train, No. 225, was stopped between 12th Street and Lake Merritt stations. The other, Train 451, was halted between 12th Street and 19th Street.

According to BART dispatch audio streamed live during the incident on social media, the process of getting passengers off the trains was slowed for nearly an hour by uncertainty about whether it was safe to evacuate and whether it was possible to move the stopped trains with first responders on the tracks looking for the source of the fire.

Half an hour into the incident, the operator of Train 225 asked BART’s central control center about firefighters in the tunnel near his train.

“The Fire Department walked off toward the rear of my train, I do not have eyes on them,” the operator said in audio streamed live on social media company X by an account called BART Fare Evaders. “Are you sending them back to help with the evacuation, or should I start now?”

“No word from the Fire Department,” a train controller answered. “I believe they are all assessing the situation at this time. (Trains) 225 and 451, be advised we have BART police and Fire Department personnel in all tracks between 19th Street and Lake Merritt stations. We are waiting for the Fire Department to confirm and BART police to confirm when it’s time to evacuate.”

“There is way too much smoke here where I am to evacuate in this tunnel,” the operator of Train 451 responded. “This train’s going to have to move back to 19th Street somehow. I stuck my head out the window just now to gauge, see how much smoke there was, and it’s way too much.”

Twenty minutes later, the operator of Train 451 told the BART controller, “The firefighters want to see if we can move the train back to 19th Street. They want to evacuate, and I’ve got two of them at the window asking us to move the train.”

The controller answered that moving the train was impossible because personnel were on the tracks elsewhere.

BART finally allowed the operators to begin evacuating their passengers at 5:48 p.m., 58 minutes after the incident began. It took another 25 minutes before the train operators confirmed that all passengers, including one in a wheelchair, had been safely offboarded.

By that time, Oakland Fire spokesperson Hunt said, firefighters had finally located the source of the smoke in a room at the south end of the 12th Street Station.

“It took upwards of 40 minutes to locate the room where the fire had occurred,” he said. “At that point, the fire was essentially out. We put some water on it, had crews go in with gear on, but the fire had basically extinguished itself by that time.”

BART spokesperson Anna Duckworth said the damaged gap breaker at 12th Street was installed in 1968, four years before BART operated its first paid service. The breaker is one of 47 such devices stationed throughout the 131-mile transit network, funneling electricity from BART’s power supply to sections of third rail.

“We don’t know if age had something to do with the fire,” Duckworth said. “That’s something we’re looking at.” She added that the damaged breaker was one of 17 that the agency had already been working on replacing.

Jones, the agency’s deputy GM, acknowledged in his July 30 memo that the fire and loss of electrical power had a lasting effect on service. BART was unable to run all five of its lines until three days later, and even then, trains were forced to slow dramatically as they passed through central Oakland.

“We understand the impacts the current service has on passengers being on-time, making timed connections and their overall customer experience,” Jones wrote.

BART said trains continue to run at a slightly slower speed as repair work continues. The agency still has no estimate for when repairs might be complete.

The fire is among several incidents that have caused major delays on parts of the BART system this summer:

June 23: A series of train breakdowns and track problems near West Oakland led to four hours of major delays.

June 26: A rail maintenance vehicle derailed near 19th Street in downtown Oakland, forcing the agency to suspend service on its Red Line (Richmond-SFO/Millbrae) and causing major delays.

Aug. 8: A network computer problem partially disabled BART’s train control system and shut down regular service on the Green Line (Berryessa-Daly City) and Orange Line (Richmond-Berryessa) for more than eight hours.