Five months after a fire ripped through an East Oakland warehouse, killing 36 people, some of the more than 20 residents who called the building home are still trying to find permanent places to live. Others have moved out of the Bay Area entirely. Many, if not all, remain haunted by the fateful night.
When Bob Mule closes his eyes, he thinks about his roommate, Pete Wadsworth. In the chaotic first minutes after the fire broke out in a corner of the artists’ collective on December 2, Wadsworth fell and hurt himself as they tried to escape the inferno. Mule tried to pull him, but the heat was too strong. He turned to run, and his friend didn’t make it out.
In the first few days and weeks after the fire, Mule, like others who were members of the Satya Yuga artists’ collective and who lived at the Ghost Ship warehouse, was homeless and focused on finding a place to sleep each night. But now, nearly five months out and inside a stable home, the memories come flooding back.
“I’ll be in bed going to sleep, and all of a sudden I am transported to this moment where my body lets go of Pete. I let go,” he said. “It can be really tough sometimes.”
That trauma has been compounded with the stress of finding affordable housing in the Bay Area, coupled with the loss of the community that kept many in the collective afloat. At least one member moved to Portland, another to Colorado, another to France, several moved to the Los Angeles area, and others bought plane tickets to travel instead, said Carmen Brito, a former resident who found a new home in Oakland. The collective keeps in touch regularly, she said, but it’s not the same as being housemates.
“When you go from a communal setting, where anytime you’re home you never feel alone … there is a sense of camaraderie,” Brito said. “To have that abruptly taken away while we are all coping with this horrible tragedy, it really bums me out because there is no way for us to rebuild.”
To do that would have required finding a space large enough to house everyone’s creative endeavours, she said. Lacking the room for her pottery wheel and the community that inspired her, Brito said, “It just feels like a piece of my heart is missing.”
Mule’s friend gave him a jalopy of a van, and he spent the first of the money donated to fire victims fixing it up. He slept in it for several weeks while bouncing from couch to couch. It wasn’t until the end of February that Mule found a place to live, and it wasn’t in the Bay Area.
The New Jersey native searched for a similar warehouse space closer to his old home, an effort he called “nearly impossible.” When an opportunity to move to a live/work space in Los Angeles opened up, Mule said he didn’t really consider other options.
“There was no way I could have waited this long and not spent any of the money that was given to us,” he said, joining the exodus of nearly half of the artists’ collective who left the area.
Brito, one of roughly a dozen residents who stayed around, is grateful for the housing she was able to secure, thanks to a longtime friend who happened to have an open room when she needed one. That was also true for Nikki Kelber, who found a small room to rent for a few months in San Francisco. That offer has come to end, she said, because the room, which is barely large enough to fit a bed, was never intended to be occupied permanently.
Kelber, who works a night job as a bar manager for an event company, was preparing to launch her own jewellery line in January. She was in “mad creation mode,” finishing up the large feather earrings, headpieces and leather cuffs that had become her signature items. But the fire consumed everything, including thousands of dollars in supplies and tools.
“It was a tremendous amount of inventory,” she said.
She’s hopeful someone within her community of creatives will come through with housing that offers her enough space for a worktable or desk so she can start making jewellery again. Kelber said she, like other members of the collective, is grappling with the fear that she might soon be homeless. —East Bay Times (Walnut Creek, California)