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At least 19 people died Sunday and about sixty were injured in a building fire in the Bronx district of New York, announced on the spot the new mayor of the city Eric Adams. About 200 firefighters were mobilized on site in the middle of the day.
At least 19 people have died and around 60 injured in a huge fire that broke out on Sunday, January 9 in the New York neighborhood of the Bronx, city firefighters announced.
“This is going to be one of the worst fires in our history. We know that we have 19 people dead as well as several others in critical condition and more than 63 people injured,” Eric Adams, the mayor, said live on television. from New York.
About 200 firefighters were mobilized on site in the middle of the day. Firefighters identified “31 serious injuries to civilians,” they tweeted around 12:30 p.m. local time.
According to the mayor’s office quoted by American televisions, nine children and adolescents are among the 19 people who died.
The new mayor of New York, a former African-American police officer who took office on January 1, spoke of a “real tragedy not just for the Bronx and the city”.
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.
The city’s mayor attended, according to his official Twitter account, where photos of him alongside firefighters were posted.
“A terrible day for us”
George King, a resident of a neighboring building told AFP about a scene of “chaos”: “I have lived here for 15 years, this is the first time I see something like this”.
He said he “saw smoke, a lot of people panicked” and “nobody wanted to jump out of the building”.
New York firefighters, called to the scene around 11 a.m. (4 p.m. GMT), had initially announced a toll of around thirty injured and had brought the disaster under control in two hours.
“It’s really an atrocious day for us,” said Eric Adams, centrist Democrat elected on a program to fight crime and economic and social inequalities in New 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 provoked by a three-and-a-half-year-old child playing with a gas stove.
A megalopolis of nine million inhabitants, New York is suffering in various neighborhoods from a huge housing crisis, with buildings that are sometimes dilapidated and poorly maintained.
With AFP
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