An explosion struck a Shell gas station in the Mission District on Monday afternoon, rocking nearby homes and sending a thick, black plume of smoke across the neighborhood.
Several dozen firefighters were on the scene at 16th and Guerrero streets alongside at least nine department vehicles, including six fire trucks. San Francisco Fire Chief Dean Crispen said an adjacent building was evacuated, and that there were no reported injuries.
Crispen said that an excavator at the gas station, which has been the site of construction work, may have scraped a gas tank, igniting leaked fuel and sparking a blaze.
Emma Silvers, a journalist with Coyote Media who lives near the gas station, said she heard an explosion a little after 4:30 p.m. and thought it was an earthquake.
Silvers was “sitting in the kitchen” of her apartment on 16th Street when she “heard a very large sound,” she said.
“I went online and saw if anyone else was talking about an earthquake, and they weren’t,” she said. Silvers then heard a helicopter buzzing overhead, walked over to her front window, looked out, and “saw a massive fire” at the Shell at 400 Guerrero St.
Nik Valbuena, a barber at Beyond The Pale barbershop across the street, said she was cutting hair when the windows of her shop began to shake. She thought the same as Silvers: “Is that an earthquake?” Then she saw the cloud of smoke.
Ed Joe, a 16th Street resident, said “the whole building shook” and people elsewhere in the building yelled, “Oh my god, an explosion just happened!”
Joe, too, said it felt like an earthquake. He saw the person manning the excavator throw dirt onto the fire in an attempt to contain it, he said, before firefighters arrived.
Bean Bull, the manager at Angie’s Pizza, said that workers initially thought it was a shooting.
“We were setting up the restaurant and we heard a ‘boom,’ she said. “Right outside, we saw a dad pick up his daughter and run.”
One of the staff locked the door to Angie’s, thinking someone with a gun was on the loose, then saw the smoke and realized there had been an explosion.
The blaze was quickly extinguished by firefighters, Silvers said, and was out by 5 p.m. The “whole bottom half” of the excavator was singed black, she said.
Construction workers had been busy at the gas station over the last day or so. It had been blocked off for construction by fencing for perhaps the previous week, Silvers said. “I’m mostly wondering about the person who was operating the excavator.”
Fire Chief Crispen said firefighters will remain on scene to ensure nothing else happens. A hazardous materials team was monitoring air quality at the site. Yellow tape has been placed across the entrance of the apartment building behind the gas station.
I was eating across the street from the gas station when it exploded, here’s some video of the firehttps://embed.reddit.com/widgets.js
byu/akanet insanfrancisco
Hmm yes, the comment board is conspicuously silent when it’s gas cars and gas infrastructure that goes kaboom but everyone is always ready to pile on when there’s a random EV fire.
This site is way too valuable of land to be a gas station. Can this please be a sign to the owners it’s time to sell?
When was the last EV going up in flames in SF? In any case, as you bring this up, if this would have been battery power storage going up in flames, it would still be going today, with the FD on the side throwing foam on the thing trying to hopefully extinguish the fire in a few days
Yeah the Moss Landing contamination of the local watershed with heavy metals ought to be a clue to the faux-futurist crowd, but they still believe that all things electrical are “green” and “clean”… it’s a fantasy world they live in where all goods and services come on the back of a bicycle. They don’t live in the real world.
This wasn’t about “cars” at all, zealot. It was about unsafe construction in practice, potentially negligence, but literally zero to do with the anti-car fetishism that pretends to be forward thinking. There were multiple fires this week but only one that you cherry picked for your off-topic agenda, I’ll note.
Go buy the land yourself if you like, run a nursery there. Whatever.
And I double dog dare you to never take another commercial flight again if you claim to value minimizing atmospheric carbon.
It’s literally hundreds of times more per individual, and you don’t think twice about it when you rationalize your PTO as a western carbon holiday.
what’s going on at the gas station? is it another closure and gas station to housing? or is it temporary? it doesn’t seem to be mentioned here.
Some splainin to do.