A fire broke out Tuesday afternoon under San Francisco’s Central Freeway, sending up a massive plume of smoke and destroying a homeless encampment.
Firefighters were battling the blaze around 12:40 p.m. on Division Street in the South of Market neighborhood. Multiple fire trucks responded to the blaze.
A 911 caller told dispatchers a man was setting tarps on fire near a tent, said San Francisco Fire Department Capt. Justin Schorr. The department was alerted at 12:36 p.m. and responded in less than a minute. The fire was extinguished in less than five minutes.
San Francisco police officers questioned a man at the scene and later placed him in handcuffs.
Allen Joyner sat on a curb and cried after losing everything he owned. “It was all my stuff,” he told The Standard. A woman came and handed him a blanket.
Joyner was later cuffed and led away by police.
A police officer at the scene told The Standard there was a fire at a homeless encampment. The Standard reached out to SFPD to clarify whether any arrests were made, but they did not immediately respond.
After a fire beneath a freeway in Los Angeles created traffic chaos and caused significant damage around Thanksgiving, Caltrans real estate professionals—called the Right-of-Way Team—began an assessment of freeways statewide, according to Bart Ney, a spokesperson for Caltrans Bay Area.
“After the fire down in Los Angeles, our Right-of-Way team looked at all locations underneath different bridges in the Bay Area and identified two that we wanted to go a little deeper on and get the fire marshal involved,” Ney said.
“In San Francisco, along the 280 freeway, there was a site that had excessive vehicles that needed to be looked at. We talked to the people that were renting it and the vehicles are being removed,” he said.
The other site was in Alameda on the 580 near Oakland, “where there was a trespasser compound,” Ney explained.
“The problems weren’t like L.A. where there was a bunch of pallets and that type of stuff where there was a lot of fuel,” Ney added.
There were no apparent delays in traffic or road closures from Tuesday’s blaze.
