Insult has been added to injury for the estimated 200 people who were displaced by Monday morning’s apartment fire in Oakland’s Uptown, after their landlord issued them all eviction letters.

You may recall the early morning apartment fire in Oakland's Uptown neighborhood at 19th Street and Broadway on Monday of this week, which also damaged the ground-floor Dope Era clothing store owned by local hip-hop icon Mistah F.A.B. There were three hospitalizations from smoke inhalation, and one Oakland firefighter was treated for minor injuries. Though a new Wednesday morning report from KTVU notes that all of those individuals have fully recovered.  

But that same KTVU report also contains some very shocking news about those displaced residents: the displaced residents of those 43 apartment units have all received eviction notices from their landlord, and on top of that, these eviction notices arrived “just hours” after their homes were destroyed in the blaze.

KTVU even obtained copies of the eviction notices, which read, “All leases are hereby terminated. You will receive a full refund of your security deposit after you retrieve your personal belongings from the premises and return all keys."

The building has of course been red-tagged because of its condition after the fire. But legal experts say that this is not cause for eviction of tenants who are current on their rent.

"You can't just terminate a tenancy just because there is a fire in the building," Centro Legal de la Raza managing attorney David Hall, managing attorney with Centro Legal de la Raza told KTVU. Hall also noted that the landlord could be on the hook for relocation payments if the (still-undetermined) cause of the fire turns out to be the fault of the landlord.

I’m no liability lawyer, but it sounds like this fire may not have been the landlord's fault. One evacuated tenant told KTVU that there was a certain apartment in the building where "People were storing scooters in there and charging the batteries, and a bunch of stolen stuff was being stored in there.”

The landlord is Ted Dang, who owns the building along with about a dozen other partners. Dang was not directly quoted by KTVU, but according to that station, Dang argues that “the notice was not intended as a formal eviction, but rather a way to inform tenants of the building’s current uninhabitable status.”

That doesn’t sound like what the notices said! Sidebar: this is the same Ted Dang who ran for Mayor of Oakland in 1994, coming in second to Elihu Harris.

Either way, the displaced tenants are reportedly being offered mere 30-minute windows (through Friday) to come and collect their possessions. Meanwhile several of those tenants apparently worked for nearby Oakland restaurants Jaji and Parche, and those restaurants’ beverage director has started a GoFundMe for the Oakland fire victims to help those employees get back on their feet.

Related: Five Residents and One Firefighter Injured In Apartment Fire In Downtown Oakland [SFist]

Image: @OaklandFireCA via Twitter