Safety doors failed in NYC high-rise fire that killed 17
NEW YORK — Investigators sought answers Monday for why safety doors failed to close when fire broke out in a New York high-rise, allowing thick smoke to rise through the tower and kill 17 people, including eight children, in the city’s deadliest blaze in more than three decades.
A malfunctioning electric space heater apparently started the fire Sunday in the 19-story building in the Bronx, fire officials said. The flames damaged only a small part of the building, but smoke poured through the apartment’s open door and turned stairwells into dark, ash-choked death traps. The stairs were the only method of escape in a tower too tall for fire escapes.
Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said the apartment’s front door and a door on the 15th floor should have been self-closing and blunted the spread of smoke, but the doors stayed fully open. It was not clear if the doors failed mechanically or if they had been manually disabled. Nigro said the apartment door was not obstructed.
The heavy smoke blocked some residents from escaping and incapacitated others as they tried to flee, fire officials said. Victims, many in cardiac and respiratory arrest, were found on every one floor. Firefighters carried out limp children and gave them oxygen and continued making rescues even after their air supplies ran out.
Glenn Corbett, a fire science professor at John Jay College in New York City, said closed doors are vital to containing fire and smoke, especially in buildings that do not have automatic sprinkler systems.
“It’s pretty remarkable that the failure of one door could lead to how many deaths we had here, but that’s the reality of it,” Corbett said. “That one door played a critical role in allowing the fire to spread and the smoke and heat to spread vertically through the building.“
Dozens of people were hospitalized, including several in critical condition. Mayor Eric Adams called it an “unspeakable tragedy” at a news conference near the scene Monday.
“This tragedy is not going to define us,” Adams said. “It is going to show our resiliency.”
Adams lowered the death toll from an initial report Sunday, saying that two fewer people were killed than originally thought. Nigro said patients were taken to seven hospitals and “there was a bit of a double count.”
The dead included children as young as 4 years old, City Council Member Oswald Feliz said.
An investigation was underway to determine how the fire spread and whether anything could have been done to prevent or contain the blaze, Nigro said.
A fire department official said the space heater had been running for a “prolonged period” before the fire began. What caused it to malfunction remains under investigation, spokesman Frank Dwyer said. Fire then spread quickly to nearby furniture and bedding, Dwyer said.
Nigro said the heat was on in the building before the fire started, and the space heater was being used to supplement it.
But Stefan Beauvogui, who lived with his wife in the building for about seven years, said cold was an ongoing problem in his fourth-floor apartment. Beauvogui said he had three space heaters for the winter — for the bedrooms and the sitting room. The heating system that was supposed to warm the apartment “don’t work for nothing.” He said he had complained, but it had not been fixed.
Large, new apartment buildings are required to have sprinkler systems and interior doors that swing shut automatically to contain smoke and deprive fires of oxygen, but those rules do not apply to thousands of the city’s older buildings.
The building was equipped with self-closing doors and smoke alarms, but several residents said they initially ignored the alarms because they were so common in the 120-unit building.
Bronx Park Phase III Preservation LLC, the group that owns the building, said it was cooperating fully with the fire department and the city and working to assist residents.
“We are devastated by the unimaginable loss of life caused by this profound tragedy,” the statement said.
A spokeswoman for the ownership group, Kelly Magee, said that maintenance staff in July fixed the lock on the front door of the apartment in which the fire started and, while doing that repair, checked that the apartment’s self-closing door was working. No issues were reported with the door after that point, Magee said.
Residents smoking in the stairwells sometimes tripped the fire alarms, and property managers had been working with them to address the problem, Magee said. She said the alarms appeared to work properly on Sunday.
The tower was required by building codes to have sprinklers only in its trash compactor and laundry room because it has concrete ceilings and floors, she said.