What you should know
- At least 17 people have died and many others are still fighting for their lives after a fire caused by a failed electric space heater. The incident occurred on Sunday in a 19-story building in the Bronx. The medical examiner confirmed that the cause of death for all victims was smoke inhalation.
- Smoke alarms went off, but apparently many did not pay attention because there were frequent false alarms. Authorities said most of the deaths were people found dead in hallways from smoke inhalation.
- The fire was the deadliest in New York City since 1990, when 87 people died in an arson at the social club Happy LandAlso in the Bronx. The county was also home to a deadly apartment fire in 2017 that killed 13 and a 2007 fire, also started by a space heater, that killed nine.
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First glimpses inside the charred Bronx apartment building where 17 people died in a fire on Sunday showed charred remains and blackened hallways that filled with smoke as people desperately tried to escape.
The medical examiner’s office confirmed Tuesday that the cause of death for all fire victims was smoke inhalation and that the manner of death was an accident.
Photos of the interior of the unit where the fire is said to have started show all living space destroyed, the skeleton of the structure exposed and broken with a window blown out.
Through a partially collapsed wall, another room can be seen, but instead of walls blackened by fire and smoke, there are walls painted white, a sign that the fire retardant material inside the walls was effective in stopping the spread. of the fire and perhaps could have mitigated the tragedy if the door had been closed.
Not closing the door when escaping from a fire means that the flames and smoke spread more easily, thus increasing the magnitude of the accident.
However, rising smoke escaped the apartment and turned the hallways of the 19-story building on 181st Street into clouds of ash that choked the lives of most of the people who died in the fire.
That apartment door should have closed on its own according to city code and fire safety protocol, but it didn’t, Fire Commissioner Dan Nigro said Monday. Instead, the door remained ajar after the unit’s occupants escaped.
Glenn Corbett, a professor of fire sciences at John Jay College in New York City, said closed doors are vital to containing fire and smoke, especially in buildings that don’t have automatic sprinkler systems.
“It’s pretty remarkable that a door failure could cause the number of deaths that we had here, but that’s the reality,” Corbett said. “That door played a critical role in allowing the fire to spread and the smoke and heat to spread vertically through the building.”
There was a working smoke alarm. Many heard blaring smoke alarms in the massive apartment building that deadly day. They thought they were false alarms.
A similar problem happened with a door on the 15th floor. Both were wide open even though they should have closed automatically. It was not clear if there was a malfunction or if the automatic closing mechanism had been manually disabled.
As for the other fire doors throughout the building, the I-Team found that, in March 2017, an HPD inspector issued a violation and ordered the building to “fix and make self-closing doors…near third-floor hallway stairs.”
It was unclear if the doors the inspectors were referring to were one of the open doors letting smoke through the building.
A spokesperson for the building owner said all doors in the building were self-closing to help contain smoke, and the apartment where the fire started was last serviced in July 2021.
As many as 13 people remained in critical condition Monday, with many more hospitalized after what is now the deadliest fire in New York City in three decades. There was no immediate update on his conditions early Tuesday.
Seventeen people died, eight of them children. The youngest was only 5 years old.
Investigators determined that a malfunctioning electric heater, plugged in to provide extra heat on a cold morning, started the fire.
A fire department official said the heater had been running for an “extended period” before the fire started. It quickly spread to nearby furniture and bedding.
The cause of the malfunction remains under investigation.
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