A one-alarm fire on the 300 block of Raymond Avenue in Visitacion Valley burned the second story of a home Friday morning, displacing six. One adult was rescued and family pets were carried out; no one was hurt.
On the 300 block of Raymond Avenue, a residential stretch of Visitacion Valley where the houses sit close and the hill climbs toward McLaren Park, the second story of a home caught fire just before seven on Friday morning. By the time it was over, six people had nowhere to sleep that night.
The San Francisco Fire Department logged the call at 6:55 a.m. July 31. What crews found on arrival was an active fire on the second floor of the residence, and one adult still inside; firefighters rescued the person from the building, according to the department. Several family pets were carried out too, evaluated at the scene, and appeared uninjured. No one was hurt. The department declared the fire under control at 7:35 a.m. — roughly forty minutes, start to finish. The American Red Cross was on the scene providing assistance, according to the department.
Six people were displaced. The department has not released a cause, and the extent of the damage beyond the second story isn't yet public. Who lived there, and for how long, isn't something the record tells you — so this account won't pretend to it.
The fire was one of two the department fought across the city that Friday morning. Ninety minutes earlier, before dawn, an underground PG&E vault fire at Haight and Cole streets forced a brief shelter-in-place order and cut power to part of the Upper Haight — a separate incident The Dissent covered when it happened.
Raymond Avenue is a quieter kind of block than the numbers usually flag. Visitacion Valley has seen two eviction notices filed with the Rent Board in the last 90 days and 97 requests to 311 in the past week — a neighborhood that mostly stays off the daily incident log. A one-alarm house fire that puts six people on the Red Cross's list is the exception, not the texture.
What someone walking Raymond Avenue this weekend would notice is a single house with a scorched second story and boarded windows, and the ordinary block around it going on as before.

The Discussion
Loading…