A malfunctioning space heater sparked a fire that filled a high-rise Bronx apartment building with thick smoke Sunday morning, killing 19 people including nine children in New York City’s deadliest blaze in three decades.

The trapped residents broke windows for ventilation and stuffed wet towels under the doors, because the low-rise apartment where the fire started was emitting dense smoke. The survivors said they walked through the dim corridor in panic, almost unable to breathe.

Several limp children were seen being given oxygen after being lifted out. The faces of the evacuees were covered with soot.

Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said firefighters found victims on every floor, many in cardiac and respiratory arrest. Some were unable to escape because of the smoke, he said.

Some residents said they initially ignored the crying smoke alarms because false alarms were common in the 120-unit building built in the early 1970s as affordable housing.

More than 50 people were injured and 13 were hospitalized in critical condition. Most of the victims had inhaled severe smoke, the fire commissioner said.

Mayor Eric Adams said firefighters continued to rescue even after their air supply ran out.

“Their oxygen tanks were empty and they were still smoking,” Adams said.

Investigators said the fire started by electric heaters began in duplex apartments on the second and third floors of the 19-story building.

The flames didn’t spread very far – just charred one unit and the adjacent hallway. But the door to the apartment and the stairwell door remained open, allowing the smoke to spread rapidly throughout the building, Nigro said.

New York City fire codes typically require apartment doors to be spring-loaded and self-closing, but it’s unclear whether the building is protected by those regulations.

Building resident Sandra Clayton said she saw the hallway filled with smoke and heard people scream: “Get out! Get out!”

Clayton, 61, said she fumbled down the dimly lit stairs, mocha in her arms. The smoke was so dark she couldn’t see, but she could hear the cries of nearby neighbors.

“I was just running down the steps as best I could, but people fell on top of me, screaming,” Clayton recalled at 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 they 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 building looms over an intersection of smaller, aging brick buildings overlooking 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,” US 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. It was also the deadliest fire at a US residential apartment building in years. In 2017, 13 people died in an apartment building, also in the Bronx, according to data from the National Fire Protection Association.

That fire started with a 3-year-old boy playing with stove burners and also spread because the door to an apartment that lacked a closing mechanism had been left open. It led to several changes in New York City, including having the fire department create a plan for educating children and parents on fire safety.

Sunday’s fire happened just days after 12 people, including eight children, were killed in a house fire in Philadelphia. The deadliest fire prior to that was in 1989 when a Tennessee apartment building fire claimed the lives of 16 people.

Complete News Source : Hindustan Times