Fire in Bronx building leaves 19 people dead, including nine children
Nineteen people including nine children were killed in an apartment fire in the Bronx in New York on Sunday, one of the worst fire disasters in the city in 30 years.
Thirteen people remained hospitalised in critical condition, authorities said late on Sunday afternoon. In all, more than five dozen were hurt.
Authorities said the fire was caused by a space heater in a duplex apartment.
Eric Adams, the mayor who is in his first days in the job, said: “The numbers are horrific. This is a horrific, painful moment for the city of New York. The impact of this fire is going to really bring a level of pain and despair in our city.
“This is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times.”
More than 200 firefighters fought the blaze, at a 120-unit, 19-storey building on East 181st Street known as Twin Parks.
The fire commissioner, Dan Nigro, said the fire started shortly before 11am in a duplex on the second and third floors and spewed smoke through the building because a door was left open.
Nigro said firefighters “found victims on every floor in stairwells and were taking them out in respiratory and cardiac arrest. That is unprecedented in our city.”
Almost all victims suffered smoke inhalation, not burns.
“This fire took its toll on our city,” Nigro said, comparing the blaze to the Happy Land social club fire, which killed 87 in 1990.
News photographs showed firefighters entering the upper floors of the burning building on ladders, children being given oxygen after being carried out and evacuees with faces covered in soot.
At an early evening press conference, Nigro said evidence and witness testimony confirmed that the fire “started in a malfunctioning electric space heater … the fire consumed that apartment that is on two floors and part of the hallway. The door to that apartment unfortunately when the residents left was left open, it did not close by itself.”
Central heating was on in the building, Nigro said, and smoke alarms functioned. Some residents could not escape simply because of the volume of smoke, he said.
Nigro also said “there was at least one door open from the stairwell to a floor, one of the upper floors. Smoke and heat travels upwards.”
Adams said a number of immigrants, many from Gambia, were caught up in the fire.
“This is a heavy immigrant community,” Adams said. “And we want to make sure the residents know that if you need assistance your names will not be turned over to ICE [Immigration Customs Enforcement], any other institution. We want people to be comfortable coming forward.”
Some residents said they initially ignored wailing smoke alarms because false alarms were so common in the building. “It seems like today they went off but the people didn’t pay attention,” said Jose Henriquez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who lives on the 10th floor. He said he and his family stayed, wedging a wet towel beneath the door once they realised the smoke in the halls would overpower them if they tried to flee.
Another resident, Cristal Diaz, 27, told the New York Post she was drinking coffee when she smelled smoke.
“We started putting water on towels and the bottom of the door,” she said. “Everything was crazy. We didn’t know what to do. We looked out the windows and saw all the dead bodies they were taking with the blankets.”
Sandra Clayton said she grabbed her dog Mocha and ran for her life when she saw the hallway fill with smoke and heard people screaming “Get out! Get out!”.
Clayton, 61, said she groped her way down a darkened stairway, clutching Mocha. The smoke was so black she couldn’t see, but she could hear neighbours wailing and crying nearby.“I just ran down the steps as much as I could but people was falling all over me, screaming,” she said from a hospital where she was treated for smoke inhalation.
In the commotion, her dog slipped from her grasp and was later found dead in the stairwell.
Another resident, Luis Rosa, said he was woken by a fire alarm but thought it was false. But when a notification popped up on his phone, he and his mother began to worry. By then, smoke began wafting into his 13th-floor apartment. He heard sirens in the distance. He said he opened the front door but the smoke had gotten too thick for an escape.
“Once I opened the door, I couldn’t even see that far down the hallway,” Rosa told the Associated Press. “So I said, OK, we can’t run down the stairs because if we run down the stairs, we’re going to end up suffocating. All we could do was wait.”
Another resident, Vernessa Cunningham, 60, said she raced home from church.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Cunningham said from a nearby school where residents gathered. “I was in shock. I could see my apartment. The windows were all busted out. And I could see flames coming from the back of the building.”
The building dated from 1972, Nigro said, and was part of a project to provide modern, affordable housing.
Ritchie Torres, who represents the area in Congress, told the AP: “There’s no guarantee that there’s a working fire alarm in every apartment or in every common area. Most of these buildings have no sprinkler system. And so the housing stock of the Bronx is much more susceptible to devastating fires than most of the housing stock in the city.”
The fire comes just days after a house fire in Philadelphia left 12 dead, including eight children. That was the deadliest fire at a US apartment building since 2017, when 13 people died in the Bronx. That fire started when a three-year-old boy played with stove burners.
Adams praised the “men and women who went in this building, these firefighters. Their oxygen tanks were empty, and they still pushed through the smoke. You can’t do this if you don’t feel attached to the city, this community, and I really want to thank them for putting their lives on the line to save lives.”
Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, visited the school where residents gathered.
“We are indeed a city in shock,” she said. “We’re in such grief, we see such pain. I see it in a mother’s eyes as I held her, who lost her entire family.”
A victims’ compensation fund would be established, Hochul said.
“It’s hard to fathom what they’re going through,” she said. “I went table to table, helping children make the ramen noodles and eat their pizza and I let them know one thing. And the mayor and I are united in this. We will not forget you, we will not abandon you. We are here for you.”