A drone operated by an investigator for the nonprofit San Francisco Baykeeper captures a fire at the metal shredder now known as Radius Recycling, on Aug. 9, 2023. (Courtesy San Francisco Baykeeper)
The engine from Oakland Fire Department’s Station Number 2 had rolled out to Schnitzer Steel before, but this call was different.
It wasn’t the typical smoldering nugget of debris. Instead, smoke was billowing from a massive pile of scrap as flames shot outward from an orange glow deep within.
Lt. Eduardo Ibarra was on that engine, the first to respond to the metal shredder’s bayside yard that night in August 2023. He guessed the burning pile was close to the size of a football field, 50 to 70 feet high in places.
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“We knew that we were gonna be there for a long time,” Ibarra told an Alameda County criminal grand jury, according to a transcript of the proceedings obtained by Public Health Watch.
The glowing core — the seat, the origin of the fire — proved hard to reach, with the scrap piled up near the back fence. Fire crews struggled to maneuver their trucks and hoses around the mound, and it soon became clear that something inside was volatile.
Hours after the first fire truck arrived, repeated explosions sent hot metal sizzling through the air. At one point, an oval piece of metal about two feet long and four feet wide flew over the heads of Ibarra and his crew, landing on a discarded Bay Area Rapid Transit car, where it burned through the roof and started another fire.
Lt. Eduardo Ibarra can see the Schnitzer Steel facility from Oakland Fire Department Station 2, which took the call to respond to a fire in 2023. (Molly Peterson/KQED)
“The explosions [are] not something that we deal with all the time,” Ibarra later told Public Health Watch. “We do deal with explosions from, like propane tanks and things like that, RV fires and things of that nature. But we never deal with explosions of this caliber on a regular basis.”
Ibarra’s sworn testimony and the testimony of others recorded in the 2,700-page grand jury transcript provide new details about the fire and its aftermath.
Public Health Watch also reviewed hundreds of pages of additional documents obtained under the California Public Records Act that recounted what state and local regulators have done — and what they haven’t — to keep the public safe over the years.
The new details raise questions about California’s oversight of the metal shredding industry and the potential health hazards posed by the toxic and airborne metals and other pollutants that drift off the property.
About 23,000 people live in West Oakland within a mile of the Schnitzer site, and thousands more live downwind.
The company, which has since been renamed Radius Recycling, and two employees were later charged with up to 10 separate environmental felonies and misdemeanors.
The charges include felony violations of the state’s health and safety code between 2021 and 2023, as well as conspiracy to destroy evidence, reckless handling of hazardous waste and negligently emitting air contaminants. The company and both employees pleaded not guilty in December.
Radius Recycling did not respond to requests for comment from Public Health Watch, before the article published, but the company has defended its business and the metal shredding industry as a way to produce steel — a construction staple — with a small or neutral carbon footprint that can help mitigate climate change and meet regulatory requirements for greener building.
On Tuesday, after the story published, the company issued a statement to Public Health Watch via email, complaining that allegations raised in the story, based on grand jury testimony and multiple other sources, were false.
“Radius Recycling remains committed to safety, environmental compliance, and transparency,” according to the statement from Eric Potashner, the chief sustainability officer. “Following the fire at our Oakland facility, we worked closely with the District Attorney’s Office and multiple regulatory agencies — including the California Department of Toxic Substances Control and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District — who were on-site immediately.”
“Our operations follow strict environmental regulations, and we remain fully confident that the facts will demonstrate Radius Recycling’s continued prioritization of public safety and compliance with the law,” Potashner said.
The statement also challenged some of the testimony presented to the grand jury that later issued the indictments, saying the company had alerted officials it would immediately shred the evidence from the fire and that no one objected.
“As part of standard fire prevention protocol, we proactively informed regulators that we would begin shredding the burned material that day to eliminate any risk of reignition. No agency or regulator objected to this process,” according to the statement.
Then-District Attorney Pamela Price called the criminal charges “historic.”
“We believe Radius has often shrugged off the regulations when it was convenient to them, treating minor administrative penalties and fines as the cost of doing business,” Price said at the time the indictment was handed down.
Regulators, it appears, also fell down on the job.
6231 Schnitzer Steel workers use cranes to pull metal out of the smoky mound after a fire started deep in a pile of scrap on Aug. 9, 2023. (Courtesy Oakland Fire Department)
Oversight of the metal shredding industry has repeatedly faltered. Over the years, the state has granted exemptions from a key rule, missed a deadline for drafting new regulations and avoided enforcement of existing laws, either through lack of resources or lack of effort.
Along the way, decades of poorly coordinated efforts among a host of public agencies have enabled — and in some cases exacerbated — problems across the industry, Public Health Watch learned.
“There’s multiple agencies in charge of making sure industry complies with relevant laws, but these agencies have failed to actually do the job of enforcing those laws,” said Karen Chen, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of stricter enforcement.
“In the meantime, real people suffer irreversible health harms while [the state Department of Toxic Substances Control] waits to truly do its job and enforce the hazardous waste control law,” Chen said. “In turn, metal shredders get to skirt regulations in order to make a buck.”
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