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The residents of the Wood Street Commons have been taking active measures to reduce the fire threat, and to protect human life and property, and the highway infrastructure that we live with. These measures include removing flammable items of trash from close proximity to freeway columns, and out from the shadow of the roadways above, where the heat and acidic smoke of fires can harm the infrastructure. We then organized volunteer crews with the help of the Cob on Wood village and members of the housed community to remove trash completely, and to drag abandoned vehicles out from underneath the highways, to a safe spot, until they can be brought to a scrap processor.
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After Caltrans evicted 6 of our residents from "zone I" on April 12th 2021, the Southern-most portion of the Commons, their heavy equipment traveled back and forth past this highway column, where they could clearly see this large pile of flammable items, including mattresses, foam rubber, car seats, plastic, hay, tires, wood, paper, etc. but they did nothing to remove it.
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A member of the community captured video footage of Caltrans moving this truck directly under the freeway structure with a forklift, when they could have moved it a hundred feet away to a spot where it would not harm the infrastructure if it caught fire. Or they could have moved it and all of the other abandoned vehicles that have been dumped underneath the freeway structures completely off of their property. But they allowed a huge pile of flammable items and a string of abandoned vehicles to remain under the freeway.
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Residents saw that this represented an extreme threat to the highway structures and the residents if this accumulation of flammable items were to catch fire. We took immediate action to reduce the threat in phases. Phase I was moving the items that could be carried about 100 feet away, to a spot under open sky where a fire would not pose a threat to the highway structures. We also spread the flammable items out as thinly as possible on the ground, to reduce the severity of a fire.
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Site 1 after the removal of trash, flammable items and abandoned vehicles.
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Residents of the bottoms and the Wood Street Commons, along with our friends from the Cob on Wood village and housed persons from around the Bay Area cleaned the ephemeral stream which runs through the heart of this land, in the hopes that the herons, egrets and frogs would soon return.
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The vernal stream aftrer clean up.
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Immense amounts of illegally dumped trash had built up on the Wood Street frontage for years, even though the Department of Public Works had been removing some of it with a bulldozer and dump truck. We worked hard with the help of Urban Park Clean Up to removed tons of trash from the frontage and within the commons.
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This enabled our residents Lamonte and John to landscape and beautify the frontage.
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