‘Horrific’ fire in flats block kills at least 19
Nine children among victims in deadliest New York City blaze for decades
At least 19 people, including nine children, died in a fire at a Bronx block of flats, the deadliest blaze in New York City in more than three decades.
Stefan Ringel, a senior adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, confirmed the death toll. He said the children killed were 16 years old or younger.
Thirteen people remained in hospital in critical condition, Ringel said. In all, more than five dozen people were hurt. Most of the victims suffered severe smoke inhalation, fire commissioner Daniel Nigro said.
Adams called the fire’s toll “horrific”. At a news conference on Sunday near the building, he said: “This is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times.”
Firefighters “found victims on every floor and were taking them out in cardiac and respiratory arrest”, Nigro said. “That is unprecedented in our city.”
Approximately 200 firefighters responded to the blaze at around 11am on Sunday. Initial reports said the fire was on the third floor of the 19-storey building, with flames billowing from the windows.
“The marshals have determined through physical evidence and through first-hand accounts by the residents that this fire started in a bedroom in a portable electric heater,” Nigro told reporters.
News photographers captured images of firefighters entering the upper floors of the burning building on a ladder, and multiple limp children being given oxygen after they were carried out and evacuees with faces covered in soot.
Building resident Cristal Diaz, 27, told the New York Post she started putting wet towels at the bottom of her door after smelling smoke while drinking coffee in her living room.
“Everything was crazy,” she said. “We didn’t know what to do. We looked out the windows and saw all the dead bodies they were taking with the blankets.”
The fire originated in a duplex flat spanning the second and third floors, Nigro said. Firefighters found the door to the apartment open, he said, which apparently allowed the fire to quickly accelerate and spread smoke upwards.
The fire was not believed to be suspicious, officials said.
The 120-unit is one of multiple buildings in the Twin Parks Northwest complex and was built in 1973 as part of a project to build modern, affordable housing throughout the Bronx.
“Many of these buildings are old. Not every apartment has a fire alarm. Most of these buildings have no sprinkler system,” congressman Ritchie Torres, a Democrat who represents the area, said on television.
“And so the risk of a fire is much higher in lower income neighbourhoods, in the Bronx, than it might be elsewhere in the city or in the country.”
Nigro and Torres both compared the fire’s severity to a 1990 blaze at the Happy Land social club where 87 people were killed when a man set fire to the building after getting into an argument with his ex-girlfriend and being thrown out of the Bronx club.
The death toll was the highest for a city fire since the Happy Land fire. It was also the deadliest at a US residential apartment building since 2017 when 13 people died in a block of flats, also in the Bronx.