After the fire
Awoman and her 1-year-old baby dead in a bathtub, the little one cradled in her mother’s arms. A 37-year-old woman killed along with her 2-year-old and 7-year-old daughters and her 19-year-old niece. A 63-year-old woman. A man whose age and identity are not yet known.
And still more lives, snuffed in infernal instants, along with four people in the hospital clinging to life, their skin reeling from burns, their lungs and hearts from smoke.
Each a singular loss, the pain from which will ripple outward, leaving family and friends desperate for comfort, gasping, through their cries, for air.
All together, a dozen deaths in the blind and primal fury of Thursday night’s Bronx fire, a deadly furnace in a freezing cold night, creating unfathomable agony.
Our grief is compounded by how it all began: by a 3-year-old boy playing with a stove. And by how it accelerated: by his mother and her children leaving their apartment door open when they fled to safety, giving the flames precious oxygen to rush up an open stairway.
And then by more air that fed the blaze when other residents opened their windows to escape, as of course every instinct told them they must.
Thus, the simple physics of fire and smoke, the brutal work of unforgiving nature, took all that was precious to so many families.
Even in an age of technological wonders, fire can still bring us to our knees. It can, in a flash, turn the places where we live into the places where we die.
What was horrifying beyond imagination surely would have been far worse if not for the reliable heroics of those who suit up for world’s best fire department — who managed to contain the blaze despite temperatures that turned water from their leaking hoses to ice.
They managed to save at least a dozen men, women and children from the five-story building. Rescues we must celebrate even as we weep for the dead and injured.
We must celebrate because, after families of the dead, it is those we know as New York’s Bravest who are hit hardest when fires take lives. Who stay up late asking themselves whether more lives could have been saved, more pain spared.
These are the very same men and women who have, through prevention campaigns and innovative tactics and declining response times, driven civilian fire fatalities toward record lows.
In 1960, some 200 New Yorkers died in fires. In 1970, more than 300 did. In 1990, the year the city’s worst-ever fire, at Happy Land Social Club, took 87 lives, 275 people died. In 2005, fires took more than 100 New Yorkers’ lives.
For a solid decade now, despite a growing city, civilian fire fatalities in the five boroughs have been kept in the double digits.
When digits represent lives, the lives of mothers and children found in bathtubs, that is no consolation. It is, however, a fact to appreciate all the more so on department’s, and the city’s, darkest days.