‘GAME’ OF DISASTER
Playing 3-year-old started fatal blaze Spread so fast it left no time to react
IT WASN’T the first time the 3-year-old in the first-floor apartment sneaked off to play with gas stove jets — but for 12 of his Bronx neighbors, it was the last.
The preschooler was blamed Friday for the raging blaze that killed a dozen residents of a fivestory Belmont building, critically injured four others and left 22 families homeless.
FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro described a five-alarm conflagration started by the child’s antics and fueled by a door left wide open as the boy and his family ran for their lives.
The nearby stairwell sent the fire and smoke spiraling quickly upstairs, cutting off the main escape route and trapping people inside the building’s 25 apartments.
Although firefighters reached the scene in three minutes, they were already too late to save many from the city’s deadliest blaze since the Happy Land arson fire killed 87 people in 1990.
“The stairs acted like a chimney, and took the fire so quickly upstairs that people had very little time to react,” Nigro said at a Friday news conference outside the evacuated building.
“They couldn’t get back down the stairs. Those that tried, a few of them perished . ... Most of the deaths occurred pretty early, some of them before we could arrive.”
The fast-moving flames were further whipped by desperate residents opening their windows to escape via the fire escapes, stoking the already raging blaze.
The survivors gathered afterward at St. Barnabas Hospital, where most of the injured were taken and several other victims were declared dead.
“There were families in shock,” said the Rev. Jonathan Morris, who spent the night at the hospital. “They just wanted to hug each other and pray.”
The victims included a Bronx woman and her 7-month-old granddaughter; a mother and her two daughters, ages 2 and 7; and a 12-year-old boy.
The youngster who started the blaze escaped safely with his mom and a 2-year-old sibling. High-ranking FDNY sources said the panicked child began screaming after the flames began spreading in the kitchen. “Fire!” he howled. “Fire!” The paternal grandmother of infant victim Amora Serenity Vidal was outraged that the little boy’s mom left him unattended in the kitchen despite a history of such behavior.
“She should have been watching her kid,” said Nyvia Vidal, 47, of the Bronx. “I’m an angry grandmother. This is all her fault. You have to watch your children. This didn’t have to happen.”
Nigro said the youngster “had a history of playing with the burners and turning them on. Before the mother knew it, this fire had gotten a good hold in the kitchen ... A lot of fire, a lot of smoke.”
The dead were found in apartments on the third, fourth and fifth floors, as well as in hallways
and the stairwell of the building.
An FDNY video offered a glimpse of the devastation inside the fire-ravaged Bronx building: Charred doors, scorched walls and crumbling ceilings.
The grim aftermath of the blaze was chronicled in a 96-second clip released Friday afternoon, moving from the missing windows on the building’s facade to the post-fire debris dumped in its courtyard.
The hand-held video takes the viewer into the dark, damp and dank interior of the building.
Icicles dangle from the railings of the building’s lone staircase, bearing mute testament to the water poured on the raging blaze Thursday night.
One day later, authorities said four survivors were still fighting for their lives.
According to Nigro, there were 20 building residents outside on the fire escapes when the FDNY arrived about three minutes after the first 911 call.
Nigro blamed a combination of the flames and heavy smoke for the deaths.
Mayor de Blasio, on his weekly Friday radio show, described the Christmas week carnage as “a horrible, tragic accident” while absolving the building’s landlord of any role in the nightmare.
Fire survivor Reginal Ramdhanie, 51, recounted a terrifying scene where people were trapped inside their apartments because the fire escapes were full — with no one directing the evacuees to the ground.
“There was no room for people to come out,” he said. “I helped most people come down from the second and third floor.”
Two other residents recounted spending 30 harrowing minutes on the fire escapes after the blaze erupted shortly before 7 p.m. Thursday.
Mothers and their children could be seen frantically scrambling down building fire escapes after the fire trapped them inside the apartments. Many wore just shorts and shirts on as they raced for their lives into the frigid 12-degree temperatures.
There were reports that the first floor had no working smoke detectors as recently as a month ago.
Nigro said the building was fitted with smoke alarms, but it was unclear if all were working.
And a city Department of Housing and Preservation Development spokesman said investigators will examine why the apartment door didn’t close behind the family on the first floor.
The building is required to install self-closing doors, said spokesman Matthew Creegan.