Residents of the building have filed a lawsuit over a fire in West Oakland that left four people dead. Candice Nguyen reports.

Survivors of a deadly fire that tore through a West Oakland halfway house last month sued their former landlord and the nonprofits that acted as master tenants Wednesday in Alameda County Superior Court, saying their slum-like housing conditions were illegal and led to the inferno.

The lawsuit brought by 15 former tenants alleges that the building near San Pablo and Mead avenues had no working fire alarms, sprinkler system, emergency lights or carbon monoxide detectors. Those defects, the suit says, created a chaotic scene in the early hours of March 27 as residents constructed makeshift fire escapes out of bedsheets or kicked down neighbors’ doors to alert them to the flames.

“This is probably one of the worst properties in Oakland,” Ken Greenstein, an attorney representing the survivors, said during a news conference. “This property was so substandard that even if this fire hadn’t started, it was a fire that was waiting to happen.”

The blaze killed four people, injured six and displaced more than 80 residents.Named in the complaint are owner Keith Kim and his company Mead Avenue Housing Associates, as well as the nonprofit organizations that held the master lease at different points in time: Urojas Community Services, House of Change and Dignity House West. An attorney representing Urojas said he had to review the lawsuit before responding to its allegations, and an attorney for Kim said the building owner was trying to remove Urojas as a tenant due to concerns about its oversight of the facility and the people it was bringing in.

Representatives for the other defendants did not immediately return to requests for comment.

One of the survivors filing suit, 29-year-old Eliza Anderson, said she and her three daughters dealt with deplorable conditions — rats, mold, leaks, cockroaches, power outages, no working heat — for years before the fire.

The night of the fire, Anderson said her elderly aunt was able to kick down her door and tell her to get out only because its wood was so derelict. Once in the hallway, Anderson said she and her children were guided to the fire escape with just the light from her cellphone.

“I didn’t hear no alarms. All I heard was people banging on walls, that was the alert,” said Anderson, who’s staying in a transitional home in Oakland now. “There was no sprinklers wetting us as we were going out. Nothing. It was just pitch-black, like a barbecue grill.”

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @kveklerov