A large fire broke out Friday morning at an East Oakland warehouse that rents space to artists, sending a cloud of black smoke across the sky and slowing nearby traffic on Interstate 880 as roughly 50 firefighters worked to get the blaze under control.
Officials said the fire broke out at 6:23 a.m. at 976 23rd Ave., which is home to M0xy, a business that leases studios to woodworkers and other artists who have created large-scale pieces featured at events like Burning Man, the annual late-summer festival held in Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
Michael Hunt, an Oakland Fire Department spokesman, said the block-long warehouse, which covers about 41,000 square feet, is subdivided into about 37 separate spaces, but damage appeared to be limited to about 10 of the studios.
No fatalities or injuries were reported.
Unlike the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, which killed 36 people attending an electronic music concert in 2016, the M0xy warehouse was not used as a residence, Hunt said.
“As far as we know no one was in the building. No one lives there,” he said. “It’s purely an ‘artist workspace coop.’ It is not a live-work space.”
Nick Luby, Oakland’s deputy fire chief, said the building functioned like most businesses.
“Individuals come in, they work during the day, they go home at night,” he said.
Six teams of firefighters wielded hoses and sprayed water on the fire through broken windows of the warehouse Friday morning, while dozens of fire trucks were at the scene.
Justin Watson, 36, lives in the nearby 1080 Lofts and was walking his dog when he stopped to look at the large fire.
“Fires happen all the time here,” he said.
Dreisbach Enterprises, a company that specializes in cold food storage, owns the property, said Russell Chaplan, the company’s executive director. He arrived on the scene while firefighters were still working to beat down the flames, and he said the structure that burned is primarily a space rented out by woodworkers.
The company leases the building to M0xy, which is operated by Atticus Wolf and Brian Krawitz, Chaplan said.
Wolf and other artists who use the space declined comment Friday.
A YouTube video posted in 2014 and titled “The Birth of M0xy” features Wolf discussing the way the business came together and the political process of arranging terms to lease the space and engage local residents and artists.
“The biggest thing about our artists and the art that we do is that a lot of it, fundamentally, just comes from Burning Man and the sense of community out there,” Wolf said.
“There isn’t one individual who is responsible for this art,” he continued. “It’s the community at large.”
Wolf said that volunteers, grant writers and experts in marketing and digital production come together to help produce “large-scale art” that is featured at the desert festival.
Miguel Rosas, a father of four who lives a couple of houses away, stood not far from the building three hours after it first caught fire.
“We were in the bathroom and we saw the fire through the windows,” he said.
Rosas turned on a 25-foot garden hose to try and help, but he quickly realized his hose was no match for the flames.
“Oh, this is so huge,” he recalled saying.
Rosas immediately packed his car with important documents, clothes and food, and he drove down the road before coming back to watch from his porch.
“My next-door neighbor couldn’t get out to the street in front of his house because of the fire, so he broke through my fence and went out the side,” Rosas said, adding that he “felt really scared” in the first moments of the fire.
Steve Corona, 46, said he came out of his home about 10 minutes after the fire started and saw a woman in distress.
“There was actually a lady having a heart attack here on the corner at the same time the fire was going on,” Corona said. “The fire was just going outrageous.”
As of 11:20 a.m., the incident was “completely under control,” said James Bowron, an Oakland fire battalion chief. Firefighters had knocked down the last embers and hot spots, and a wall featuring graffiti art could be seen through the wreckage.
Bowron said the blaze is under investigation, but “it doesn’t appear to have any reason for criminal investigation.”
“We aggressively saved 26 to 28 businesses,” he said. “That’s the important part. We made a good stop, an aggressive stop.”
Bowron said the owners and property managers have been cooperative with officials as they try to learn what happened.
“I wish I knew more,” Chaplan said. “I’m dying to know what happened.”
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