Multiple people were seriously injured by smoke in a fire that killed 19 people, including nine children, in a Bronx apartment building on Monday, as hospitals worked to save their lives.
After Sunday’s fire, which was already New York City’s deadliest in three decades, dozens of people were hospitalized, with up to 13 in critical condition.
The fire in the 19-storey structure was caused by a defective electric space heater that had been plugged in to provide extra heat on a cold morning.
The flames only burned a tiny portion of the building, but smoke escaped through the open door of the apartment and billowed through the stairwells and halls, trapping many people in their homes and rendering others unconscious as they left.
After being brought out, multiple limp toddlers were spotted being given oxygen. Soot covered the faces of the evacuees.
According to Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro, firefighters discovered fatalities on every floor, many of whom were in cardiac and respiratory arrest. He claimed that several people were unable to flee due to the volume of smoke.
Even when their oxygen supplies ran out, firefighters continued to make rescues, according to Mayor Eric Adams.
“Even though their oxygen tanks were empty, they pushed through the haze,” Adams explained.
An investigation is underway, according to Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro, to investigate how the fire spread and whether anything could have been done to prevent or control the flames.
Smoke alarms are installed in the building; however, some residents claim they were first disregarded because alarms were so ubiquitous in the 120-unit building.
New apartment buildings in the city are obliged to have sprinkler systems and inside doors that swing shut automatically to limit smoke and deprive fires of oxygen, but thousands of older structures are exempt from these requirements.
Stairwells – the sole means of escape in a structure too tall for fire escapes — became gloomy, ash-choked monsters as a result of the smoke.
When Sandra Clayton saw the hallway fill with smoke and heard people yelling, “Get out!” she grabbed her dog Mocha and escaped for her life. “Get the hell out of here!”
Clayton, 61, claimed she stumbled down a dark stairway while carrying Mocha. She couldn’t see since the smoke was so thick, but she could hear neighbors sobbing and crying nearby.
Clayton recalled from a hospital where she was treated for smoke inhalation, “I just rushed down the steps as fast as I could but people were falling all over me, screaming.”
Her dog slipped from her clutches during the excitement and was later discovered dead in the stairway.
Jose Henriquez, a Dominican immigrant who resides on the 10th floor, said the building’s fire alarms would go off frequently but would always be false.
“It appears that they went off today, but no one paid notice,” Henriquez stated in Spanish.
When he and his family realized the smoke in the halls would overwhelm them if they tried to exit, they wedged a wet towel beneath the door.
Luis Rosa claimed he initially mistook it for a false alarm as well. The smoke was so heavy that he couldn’t see down the hallway as he opened the door to his 13th-floor apartment. “So I said, OK, we can’t race down the stairs because we’ll end up suffocating if we run down the stairs.”
He explained, “All we could do was wait.”
The fire was the deadliest in New York City since arson at the Happy Land social club in the Bronx killed 87 people in 1990. A deadly apartment building fire in 2017 killed 13 people, and a fire in 2007 killed nine people, both of which were sparked by a space heater.
