You’re not going to believe this, but the businesses on San Francisco’s Industrial Street tend to be — wait for it — industrial.
There’s lighting and tile design and auto body shops and windows and doors and, in a concession to modern times, ghost kitchens for food delivery apps. But, incongruously amid businesses like these — since all the way back in 1980 — there’s also the Big City Montessori School.
Owner and teacher Amanda Riccetti has been here since opening day — her parents founded this school, which serves some 75 students between ages 2.5 and 6 — and she’s seen the city transform from her corner on Industrial and Loomis. It hasn’t always been a march toward progress: The open space on Loomis abutting the school went from being a bereft vacant lot to a cute little soccer field to a taxi parking lot to a covid testing drive-thru. It is now back to being a bereft vacant lot. A recycling plant came in (which induced a major rat problem) as did the massive Lowe’s on Bayshore (which did not). Things change in an industrial neighborhood. And Riccetti is okay with that.
“We’ve never been anti-growth,” she says. “We’ve never had a problem with business.”
So Riccetti was aware that Cruise has leased the 0.67 acre scrap of land one lot down the road at 241 Loomis St. and is moving its autonomous vehicles in and out of the gated blacktop. She was also aware the company was hoping to install a 24/7/365 charging station for its electric cars; someone in her office looked that one up on the internet.
She was not aware, however, that Cruise is hoping to generate the electricity to power its charging station by placing a 97,359 cubic foot hydrogen tank at 241 Loomis. Cruise noted this on a pre-application document it sent city departments in December, also indicating that the tank would be located “approximately 215 feet” from the Montessori school.
Cruise is calling this proposal — which is still very much in the pre-application stage — “a temporary hydrogen refueling station.” But the word “temporary” is doing a bit of work. Within its submitted materials, the company notes that the temporary facility would be used for two to eight years. The electricity to recharge Cruise’s autonomous cars would be derived from a “hydrogen trailer (on wheels) to provide an interim power source” until PG&E gets its electric capacity for the area up to speed, and this hydrogen trailer — carrying about 500 pounds of flammable gas — would be replaced “every 1-2 days” by a new trailer being trucked in on city streets.
Well, this Riccetti did not know. And nobody from the city reached out to inform her about it.
“I would hope that having children so close by is something that would be considered,” she said after taking a deep breath. “You know, I would really want to know more about this.”
And she’s not alone there.
In a chain of correspondence between fire, planning, building and public health department personnel obtained by Mission Local, assistant fire marshal Kathy Harold fired off more than a dozen safety questions across multiple emails. Fire Department personnel this month told Mission Local that none of her questions have yet been formally addressed.
The department’s “main concern,” Harold wrote last year, “is this fuel being transported through the city and the gas catching fire and exploding and taking out a block of people and structures.”
Cruise aims to store its hydrogen trailer at the 241 Loomis St lot
Big City Montessori School is some 215
feet to the south
Cruise aims to store its hydrogen trailer at the 241 Loomis St lot
Big City Montessori School is some 215
feet to the south
Map by Will Jarrett. Basemap from Mapbox.
David Letterman once did a bit in which he pondered whether a “guy in a bear suit” could get into the Russian Tea Room. The answer: An unambiguous yes.
But if you’re wondering what you’re probably wondering by this point — Can you just plink down a trailer (“on wheels”) containing 500 pounds of hydrogen 215 feet from a school? — the answer is more ambiguous.
A more general question, however — Can you put an even larger hydrogen tank even closer to a San Francisco school? — is settled. You can. It’s been done. Many of you have driven or taken the 14 or 49 buses past it without likely even knowing.
In 2020, a hydrogen fueling facility debuted at the extant Shell at 3550 Mission St., which straddles Mission and San Jose — one of three hydrogen stations installed in the city that year. With up to 1,235 pounds of hydrogen on site, the Shell facility is actually far larger than the proposed tank on Loomis Street. And Dolores Huerta Elementary School across San Jose is closer than 215 feet — even a mediocre high school outfielder could wing a ball from this hydrogen fueling facility over the street, over the fence and into the playground.
What’s different here is that this facility is not only permanent (not “on wheels”) but built with a sense of permanence. It resembles a tiny fortress — imposing bollards surround a locked concrete bunker-like structure, with concrete walls strategically placed to mitigate any unforeseen combustible lunacy here. And while the fuel here must, naturally, be periodically replenished, it is not happening on a near-daily basis.
Placing a hydrogen fueling facility in San Francisco was novel, even in 2020 — but, in the end, it was not novel to put a highly fortified tank of flammable gas on an extant gas station.
That is not what Cruise is proposing to do now. And that’s why the specifics of the company’s proposal have been viewed with no small degree of wariness — both by city officials and by chemical and fire experts who reviewed it at Mission Local’s behest.
Multiple emails to multiple Cruise communications personnel over the course of nearly two weeks were not returned. The internal status of the project at 241 Loomis, then, is not known to us. It is also not known to us whether Cruise is basing its proposal off of a successful setup anywhere else in the nation or world.
The tiny Fort Sumter erected at 3550 Mission St. and the proposed hydrogen trailer on wheels at 241 Loomis — which would be replaced on a daily or near-daily basis — are not wholly analogous. And that’s what seems to be occupying the fire department.
“How much fuel is being transported through the City and what route is being used, time of day and number of times per week? … What safety guidelines are in place for 1. Leaks, Fires, vehicle protection, explosion’s? [sic]” were among the questions posed by Harold, the assistant fire marshal, in a June 2022 email to colleagues at the planning, health and building inspection departments.
In January, she followed up with more questions: “Impact protection around hydrogen and generator? … How are the generator and trailer being seismically secured? … Are you planning to use electrical cords as permanent wiring? … I’m sure there is a lot more. Thank you.”
David Manuta, a chemical consultant specializing in fires and explosions, told Mission Local that he sees a sizable distinction between a fortified storage and fueling facility like the one at the Shell station and the trailer (“on wheels”) Cruise proposes to swap out every 24 to 48 hours. “The Fire Department is asking a lot of the right questions … those all have to be answered,” he said after reviewing Cruise’s pre-application document.
Mantua was uneasy about a proposal to truck 500 pounds of hydrogen through the city on a near-daily basis and to leave a trailer of hydrogen 215 feet from a school. “Hydrogen is about the most flammable fuel there is,” he said. “When we move gas or oil around, it’s much safer to do that in pipelines than to transport it. And this is much, much worse than transporting oil or gas.”
Meyer Rosen, a chemist and consultant focusing on explosions, fires and chemicals, also noted that the odds of a mishap are never greater than during transport and/or hookup — and the plan on Cruise’s pre-application document calls for a lot of both of these. A spark, he said, could come from a source as innocuous as a cell phone.
Rosen said it would be challenging to construct adequate blast protection for a trailer being replaced on a daily or near-daily basis.
“Having this next to a school?” he asked. “Gee, that seems like an accident waiting to happen.”
Cruise and the city have had some preliminary meet-and-greets. Cruise, as noted earlier, didn’t get back to us. And city officials said the proposal was too preliminary to discuss in detail.
But, even from the pre-application materials, it was clear Cruise and San Francisco’s regulators did not see entirely eye-to-eye. Cruise, for one, claimed that its researchers found “no special City regulations that apply to hydrogen fuel storage/handling.” Fire department personnel, however, didn’t seem to buy into that line of argumentation.
“The Fire Department regulates hydrogen and hydrogen fueling,” Harold wrote, unambiguously, in June 2022. “The Fire Code has a difficult time keeping up with current technologies and for hazards not addressed in the Code, the Code leaves it up to the Authority having Jurisdiction on how they will regulate the activity.”
Cruise also claimed that installing a hydrogen-powered electrical charging station and swapping out the hydrogen trailer on a near-daily basis would require “no new building permits” as “the project only involves temporary components (vehicular trailers and equipment not attached or affixed to the ground or any other permanent structures).”
So, this is where the whole “on wheels” thing comes into play. City officials I spoke with said they did not foresee Cruise pulling an end-around regarding local oversight of its proposed hydrogen tank the way the company did with its autonomous cars traveling through the city.
And yet, in January, the Department of Building Inspection’s Stephen Kwok wrote to his city colleagues that “where unoccupied mobile utility trailers are placed on the site and remain on wheels, the mobile trailers would not be considered structures.” Even for two-to-eight years, it would seem.
The Fire Department this month told me that it can “insist on certain safety conditions” — but only to the standards applied to the elements on site. And those standards could differ for a “temporary” trailer rather than a permanent structure.
It’s a complicated case. Lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous. These are the strands Amanda Riccetti now has to keep in her head.
“We have our questions about safety,” she says. “And respect.”
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