Editorials

Accidents will happen.

That’s the truism that links the reports on the biggest Berkeley happenings in the last month, the police break-up of the Occupy Cal demonstration and the big fire which destroyed the Sequoia apartments. Something unpleasant takes place, and the people in charge report that they are shocked and surprised by the outcome—which, however, could have been predicted. 

Let’s take the Sequoia disaster first. It’s a great graphic story, amply reported complete with photos on this local site and others, in the corporate press and by the many eager young folks who report for the Daily Cal. If you’ve missed anything, take a look at two recent stories which will bring you more or less up to date on the details: Carolyn Jones’ story in today’s Chronicle and Doug Oakley’s story in the Bay Area News Group papers. 

The gist of it is that the building, close to a hundred years old, has been deteriorating for a long time. The tenants knew about it and complained—one even won a Small Claims lawsuit when an electrical malfunction destroyed his computer. The elevator—reported in the Chron to be an old-fashioned bird-cage of the type now found mostly in Paris apartments—hasn’t worked right for a long time. There’s some question about where the complaints ended up. Perhaps they only reached the landlord, not the city of Berkeley. 

So the Berkeley fire department checked things out this week and concluded that the fire was just “accidental in nature and was not intentionally set.” But there’s a lot of grey area between the two black-and-white poles of accident and arson, under the general heading of negligence. It’s wrong to conclude that no one’s at fault in this situation, 

If someone had died in the fire authorities might have been looking at a charge of negligent homicide. Thank goodness that didn’t happen. But under the circumstances the students who’ve been literally left out in the cold might have to sue the owner of the building in order to be reimbursed for their destroyed property. 

And they’ve suffered other kinds of injuries too. Probably many of the displaced students won’t be able to complete their school work in this grading period, and even if instructors are lenient it will cost them more time (and more tuition) to progress toward their degrees. Lawsuits, however, are expensive to pursue, even if you might eventually win. 

Besides the apparent liability of the building’s owners, what’s the responsibility of the city of Berkeley for what happened? 

From the BANG story: 

“Berkeley Deputy Fire Chief Gil Dong said he didn't know anything about the fire escape problem, but the department is researching its records to find out if there were any problems with previous yearly fire inspections.”I don't recall this building being a problem property," Dong said. "But it doesn't mean there were not previous inspection problems." 

Dong said there may well have been electrical and other problems in the building that the landlords did not pay attention to, but if tenants did not report it to city officials, there's nothing the city could have done. 

"You can't fix a problem if nobody in the city knows about it," Dong said.” 

What’s the point of city inspections if they don’t identify obvious sources of potential problems? Didn’t anyone notice that the elevator where the fire started was close to 100 years old? 

It’s time to take a hard look at the city of Berkeley’s policies for inspecting and regulating rental properties, not only in the fire department but also in the building department. It appears that city policy is that enforcement of safety regulations is almost all complaint-driven. This is obviously inadequate, especially where student rentals are concerned, since tenants turn over fast and are often young, with little experience dealing with bureaucracy. 

Rent Board Commissioner Igor Tregub and Councilmembers Worthington, Arreguin and Maio are launching a program to inform renters of their exposure to dangers from "soft-story" buildings, which are in danger of collapse in an earthquake. They say that "efforts to mandate seismic retrofitting of soft-story residential or mixed-use properties by the City of Berkeley (Phase II) and to enforce the existing Phase I have been stymied over a lack of funding, staffing, and prioritization." 

Now on to the other “accident” in the news this week, the assault by the U.C. Berkeley police on Occupy Cal protesters and their faculty supporters. By implication, this also includes the Davis pepper-spray assault as well. 

The Berkeley faculty, bless their hearts, rallied round and staged a lively discussion on Monday of what went wrong. Many of them made eloquent impassioned speeches invoking time-honored principles of freedom of speech and assembly, and at the end they passed a variety of critical resolutions by a 10-1 margin. 

But the most interesting part of the program was when three administrators explained what happened from their perspective. From our story: 

“Three U.C. Berkeley executives, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and two of his subordinates, attempted an explanation of their actions on November 9, when students and faculty were clubbed by police. They were greeted with stony silence by the faculty members in the front of the International House auditorium where the meeting was held, and with audible snickers from the students in the back of the room.” 

Birgenau’s apology was nothing short of pathetic: he was out of town, he’d said no pepper-spray or tear gas but forgot to mention batons, it would never happen again in just the same way and even that ”there’s a level of confusion even among ourselves about what actually happened.” 

But Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer, whose speech was captured on audio by the redoubtable Daily Cal reporters, had a pretty clear version of what happened. 

He spoke of a “sense of urgency to remove the tents as early as possible, as soon as they went up” because of apprehension about what had happened with the tree-sitters, at Occupy Oakland, and elsewhere. He said that “tactically it would have been better to wait until the middle of the night to minimize the encounters between police and protesters and observers.” 

Say what? If you’re doing the wrong thing, it’s better to do it in the dead of night when there are no witnesses? 

He’s not mistaken about that. Various half-remembered Shakespeare quotes come to mind here, Lady Macbeth perhaps. Coming from an academic background, he tried to attribute the outcome to a poor choice of analogies in his take on the situation—but that’s much too easy. 

While we’re on the subject of academic jargon, we note with regret that Breslauer spoke of his desire to produce “additional actionable ideas for how to address the underlying socio-economic issues”. The word “actionable” has traditionally been a legal term, defined in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary as “subject to or affording ground for an action or suit at law”. Unfortunately, social scientists and other careless speakers seem to be converting it into what M-W now lists as a secondary meaning: “capable of being acted on”, which is what we assume Breslauer meant. 

But in both of these cases, the Sequoia fire and the assault on Occupy Cal protesters and observers, the first meaning of “actionable” seems to apply. It’s not enough to disclaim responsibility, as both the Sequoia landlords and the city of Berkeley seem to be doing in the fire situation. It’s not enough to apologize, as Birgeneau has done. 

It seems clear that some degree of negligence is involved in both cases, and it’s likely that the legal system will be required to evaluate it. Some of the Occupy protesters who claim injuries have already filed suit against the University of California. It’s quite possible that the displaced Sequoia tenants will have to take the same route to be compensated for their losses unless the landlord or his insurance company offers them a prompt and just financial settlement. 

Accidents do happen, but more often than not bad choices by responsible humans cause predictably bad outcomes. The courts are there to decide about liability.