A fire in a residential building in the New York Bronx area killed 19 people, including nine children.
More than 60 people were also injured in New York City’s deadliest fire at a 19-story apartment building in the Bronx on Sunday morning.
According to the New York City Fire Department, the first emergency call was received at 11 a.m. local time (FDNY).
Among the dead were nine children, including a four-year-old.
As smoke rose from a lower-floor flat where the fire began, trapped people broke windows for air and tucked damp towels under doors. Survivors described fleeing in terror through shadowy hallways and stairs, gasping for oxygen.
According to Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro, firefighters discovered fatalities on all floors, several of whom were in cardiac and respiratory arrest. Some people were unable to evacuate due to the level of smoke, he said.
Some residents said they ignored blaring smoke alarms at first because false warnings were so common in the 120-unit building, which was constructed in the early 1970s as affordable housing.
Bronx 5th alarm with numerous victims @FDNY @NYCFireWire pic.twitter.com/Ae7UCKC3J1
— Billy Goldfeder (@BillyGoldfeder) January 9, 2022
More than a five-dozen people were injured, with 13 of them in critical condition at the hospital. Most of the casualties had serious smoke inhalation, according to Nigro’s statement.
According to Mayor Eric Adams, firefighters continued to perform rescues even after their air supplies run low on oxygen.
“Their oxygen tanks were empty and they still pushed through the smoke,” Adams said.
Investigators said the fire, triggered by the electric heater, started in a duplex apartment on the second and third floors of the 19-story building.
ALERT: Horrific fire in a Bronx building leaves numerous people seriously injured. People were seen “jumping from windows” from a scene of a 5-alarm fire.pic.twitter.com/anVksTsc93
— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) January 9, 2022
The flames didn’t spread far — only charring the one unit and an adjacent hallway. But the door to the apartment and a door to a stairwell had been left open, letting smoke quickly spread throughout the building, Nigro said.
New York City fire codes generally require apartment doors to be spring-loaded and slam shut automatically, but it was not immediately clear whether this building was covered by those rules.
BREAKING NEWS: #FDNY responds to 5-alarm fire in the #Bronx, at least '31 serious injuries to civilians' reported. MORE: https://t.co/Czp0HfM0Q5 pic.twitter.com/7ZOBcaJboo
— News12BX (@News12BX) January 9, 2022
Building resident Sandra Clayton 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 neighbors wailing and crying nearby.
“I just ran down the steps as much as I could but people was falling all over me, screaming,” Clayton recounted 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.
About 200 firefighters responded to the building on East 181st Street around 11 a.m.
Jose Henriquez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who lives on the 10th floor, said the building’s fire alarms would frequently go off, but would turn out to be false.
“It seems like today, they went off but the people didn’t pay attention,” Henriquez said in Spanish.
He and his family stayed, wedging a wet towel beneath the door once they realized the smoke in the halls would overpower them if they tried to flee.
Luis Rosa said he also initially thought it was a false alarm. By the time he opened the door of his 13th-floor apartment, the smoke was so thick he couldn’t see down the hallway. “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,” he said.
The children who died were 16 years old or younger, said Stefan Ringel, a senior adviser to the mayor. Adams said at a news conference that many residents were originally from the West African nation of Gambia. Many survivors were brought to temporary shelter in a nearby school.
The drab, brown apartment building looms over an intersection of smaller, aging brick buildings on Webster Avenue, one of the Bronx’s main thoroughfares.
By Sunday afternoon, all that remained visible of the unit where the fire started was a gaping black hole where the windows had been smashed.
“There’s no guarantee that there’s a working fire alarm in every apartment, or in every common area,” U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat who represents the area, told the AP. “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.”
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 former girlfriend and being thrown out of the Bronx club.
Sunday’s death toll was the highest for a fire in the city since the Happy Land fire, other than the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
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