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On April 7, 2022 Cheryl Chambers, a representative of Caltrans, announced to the press that a recent fire at the Wood Street community in West Oakland, was "the last straw", and because of this and other fires, Caltrans was going to evict several hundred residents of the largest homeless encampment in Northern California.
At a hearing in the U.S. district court on March 25, 2022, where a handful of members of the Wood Street community were attempting to get a temporary restraining order against Caltrans' threat to demolish four of the residents' tiny homes, the first statement made by Caltrans' lawyers was, "Your honor, there is no evidence of arson at Wood Street." Since fire was the sole pretext given by Caltrans for their threatened mass eviction of the entire community, the lawyers for Caltrans were apparently trying to shift all of the blame for the fires onto the residents. However, when senior federal judge Maxine Chesney asked the lawyers for any evidence for their allegation, they responded that they had none, other than some pictures of burnt out RV's, because they claim that the Oakland Fire Department had not provided any evidence from their investigations to support the lawyers' allegations. Judge Chesney then ordered that the residents would have three weeks to figure out a way to move the tiny homes in order to save them, thus foiling Caltrans' wish to have them immediately demolished. Meanwhile, the members of the Wood Street community say that neither Caltrans nor the Oakland Fire Department has provided any evidence that residents are the cause of any of the fires; on the other hand, community members are building a growing body of evidence that they have been the target of both suspicious fires and outright arson. Residents of Wood Street also claim that they have been victims of a long train of abuses by Caltrans, which has forcibly displaced hundreds of people from both sidewalks and encampments over the years, destroying and stealing their property, their homes, and their access to enough land to survive, and causing untold stress and misery, and undermining their health and their capacity to survive. Legal documents filed by Caltrans state that residents of Wood Street are the sole or primary cause of both trash and fires at the vast encampment, but this sampling of evidence and eye-witness testimony from residents tells a different story. +1 510-712-7639 I witnesses saw a Caltrans move this truck with a forklift from Zone 1 to the area that has the long line of cars and flammable materials at the base of the support column. |