NEW YORK (AP) — Doctors worked Monday to save the lives of multiple people gravely injured when smoke from a fire knocked them out or trapped them in their apartments in a New York City high-rise building. Nineteen people, including nine children, died in the blaze.
Dozens of people were hospitalized, and Mayor Eric Adams said Monday morning that several people were in critical condition after Sunday’s fire in the Bronx, already the city’s deadliest in three decades. A somber mayor told CNN that the death toll could rise.
“We pray to God that they’ll be able to pull through,” he said.
Investigators determined that a malfunctioning electric space heater, plugged in to give extra heat on a cold morning, started the fire in the 19-story building.
The flames damaged only a small part of the building, but smoke escaped through the apartment’s open door and turned stairwells — the only method of flight in a building too tall for fire escapes — into dark, ash-choked horrors.
Some people could not escape because of the volume of smoke, said Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro. Others became incapacitated as they tried to get out. Firefighters found victims on every floor, many in cardiac and respiratory arrest, said Nigro.
Limp children were seen being given oxygen after they were carried out. Some who fled had faces covered in soot.
Firefighters continued making rescues even after their air supplies ran out, Adams said.
“Their oxygen tanks were empty and they still pushed through the smoke,” Adams said.
Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said an investigation was underway to determine how the fire spread and whether anything could have been done to prevent or contain the blaze.
Adams said it appears the smoke spread due to a door that was supposed to automatically close being open.
Large, new apartment buildings in the city are required to have sprinkler systems and interior doors that swing shut automatically to contain smoke and deprive fires of oxygen, but those rules don’t apply to thousands of the city’s older buildings.
The building is equipped with smoke alarms, but several residents said they initially ignored them because alarms were so common in the 120-unit building.
The fire was New York City’s deadliest since 1990, when 87 people died in an arson at the Happy Land social club, also in the Bronx. The borough was also home to a deadly apartment building fire in 2017 that killed 13 people and a 2007 fire, also started by a space heater, that killed nine.