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A horrific fire struck New York City on Sunday when at least 19 people, including nine children, were killed after flames tore through an apartment building in the Bronx.
It was the deadliest fire in the city in more than three decades.
More than five dozen people were hurt, and most of the victims had severe smoke inhalation, city fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said.
Mayor Eric Adams called the fire’s toll “horrific” and 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.”
“There were bodies being carried off every floor,” a firefighter told the New York Post. “It was the worst fire I saw in 30 years.”
The first FDNY team to respond was Engine 48, but apparently it was short-staffed, the Post reported.
“They only had four firefighters instead of the five they are called for because of people out sick because of COVID,” FDNY Uniformed Firefighters Association President Andrew Ansbro told the Post. “We feel this is an absolute case where staffing would have made a difference.
“If there was adequate staffing, the fire could have been put out faster, and people would have received medical aid sooner,” he said.
Sunday’s fire happened less than a week after 12 people, including eight children, were killed in a house fire Wednesday in Philadelphia. The deadliest US fire prior to that was in 1989, when 16 people died at a Tennessee apartment building.
Approximately 200 firefighters responded to the building on East 181st Street in the Bronx around 11 am Sunday. Initial reports said the fire was on the third floor of the 19-story building, with flames blowing out the windows.
News photographers captured images of firefighters entering the upper floors of the burning building on a ladder.
Numerous children overcome by smoke were being given oxygen after they were carried out, and evacuees’ faces were covered in soot.
Dilenny Rodriguez, 38, who lives in the building, told the Post she could hear children’s screams as she fled with her own children.
“I heard a lot of kids yelling, ‘ Help! Help! Help!’ It was dark. The smoke was really bad. Those kids crying for help,” she said.
Resident Vernessa Cunningham, 60, said she raced home from church after getting an alert on her phone that the building was ablaze.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was in shock,” Cunningham said from a local school where some residents had gathered. “I could see my apartment. The windows were all busted out.”
The fire started in a duplex apartment spanning the second and third floors, Nigro said. Firefighters found the door to the apartment open, he said, which apparently allowed the flames to quickly accelerate and spread smoke upward.
The fire is not believed to be suspicious and is under investigation, officials said.
Building resident Cristal Diaz, 27, told the Post she started putting wet towels at the bottom of her door after smelling smoke.
“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 120-unit building in the Twin Parks North West complex was built in 1972, according to The New York Times.
“There’s no guarantee that there’s a working fire alarm in every apartment, or in every common area,” US Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat who represents the area, told The Associated Press.
The congressman and commissioner compared the tragedy to a 1990 fire at the Happy Land social club in the Bronx, when 87 people were killed when a man set fire to the building after an argument with his former girlfriend and after being thrown out of the club. Sunday’s death toll was the highest for a fire in the city since that arson incident.
The deadliest fire in the city’s history was in 1911, at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co factory in Lower Manhattan, where 146 people died after flames spread from a scrap bin. More than 120 of the victims were young women, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants, who worked in the building.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.