“Children were crying out for help! “: at least 19 people, including nine children, died on Sunday and around 60 were injured in a terrible accidental fire at a building in the Bronx in New York, “one of the worst” in the recent history of the megalopolis .
Victims were found “on each floor” of this brick building which has 19, the smoke rising to the top of the building. The fire started because of a space heater in a duplex apartment on the 2nd and 3rd floors, according to the New York fire department.
Arrived very quickly on the spot at the beginning of the afternoon, the new mayor of New York Eric Adams announced a provisional assessment of “19 people died as well as several others in critical condition and more than 63 people injured” at the total.
He later confirmed on his Twitter account the loss of “nine innocent young lives”, nine children and adolescents among the 19 people who died.
It is, according to the city councilor, “one of the worst fires in our recent history”, a “real tragedy not only for the Bronx and the city” of New York, a megalopolis of nine million inhabitants with economic inequalities and glaring social situations between the very posh island of Manhattan and the Bronx or Queens.
In the first images that circulated Sunday morning on social networks, huge flames and thick black smoke escaped from a window of a multi-story building in the Bronx, a huge working-class neighborhood in northern New York.
“We were suffocating”
Dilenny Rodriguez, a 38-year-old resident of the building, is safe with all of her family, but is “devastated” by what she has seen and heard.
“A lot of children were crying and screaming for help, help, help! “, she told AFPTV, after hearing them from her own window which she had opened to avoid asphyxiation from the fumes.
The smoke from the fire was “so thick that we could not breathe, as if we were suffocating”, also testified Michael Joseph, a thirty-year-old from the building,
Another resident on the 11th floor, Miguel Enrique, “asthmatic”, told AFP and that he had barely had time to “take a coat and go down the elevator” because the corridor was dark with smoke.
George King, living in a neighboring building, saw a scene of “chaos” across the street on this gray and icy Sunday morning, with “many panicked people” at their windows and “no one (who) wanted to jump off the building”.
” Auxiliary heating “
The 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. Before the provisional toll jumped to 19 dead.
Two hundred firefighters intervened on this HLM type building.
According to New York Fire Chief Daniel Nigro on the spot, the investigators “determined on the basis of material clues and the first testimonies of residents that the fire started from a bedroom and a heating. supplementary”.
After the fire took in an apartment located “on the second and third floors”, the firefighters “found themselves facing the fire in the hallways: a lot of smoke, a very heavy fire”, explained Mr. Nigro.
The smoke extended over the entire height of the building, which is totally unusual” and the fire soldiers “found victims on each floor and evacuated them in a state of cardiac and respiratory arrest”, detailed Mr. Nigga.
“Horrible day”
“It really is an awful day for us,” insisted Mayor Eric Adams, an African-American former Democratic Party policeman who was elected on a center-left platform to fight crime and economic and social inequality in New York. York.
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 12 people including four children, the most serious in 25 years in the city. It had been caused by a three-and-a-half-year-old child who was playing with a gas stove.
New York suffers in various neighborhoods from a huge housing crisis, with buildings and apartments often dilapidated and poorly maintained.
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