“This is going to be one of the worst fires in our history”, said New York City Mayor Eric Adams at the scene of a fire that devastated a building in the Bronx neighborhood. At least 19 people died and 63 injured, according to the mayor’s toll. Among the dead are 9 children, according to an anonymous official source, cited by The Associated Press.
The new mayor of New York, a former African-American policeman who took office on 1is January, mentioned a “Real tragedy not just for the Bronx and the city”.
Intoxicated by smoke
In footage circulating on social media, huge flames and thick black smoke billowed in the morning from a window of a multi-story building in the Bronx, a huge neighborhood in upstate New York. Most of the victims suffered from smoke poisoning.
George King, a resident of a nearby apartment building, told AFP about a scene from « chaos » : “I’ve lived here for 15 years, it’s the first time I’ve seen something like this”. He said he had “Saw smoke, a lot of people panicked” and “Nobody wanted to jump from the building”.
New York firefighters, called to the scene around 11:00 a.m. (4:00 p.m. GMT), had initially announced a toll of around thirty injured and had brought the disaster under control in two hours. Two hundred firefighters intervened on a 19-story brick HLM building.
Another fatal fire Tuesday in Philadelphia
Last Wednesday, a terrible fire in an apartment building in Philadelphia killed 12 people, including eight children.
And in this same district of the Bronx, in December 2017, a fire had killed twelve people including four children, the most serious in twenty-five years in the city. It had been provoked by a three-and-a-half-year-old child playing with a gas stove.
New York, a megalopolis of nine million inhabitants, is suffering in various neighborhoods from a huge housing crisis, with buildings that are sometimes dilapidated and poorly maintained.