NEW YORK — No one deliberately set fire to the New York Police evidence store that caught fire in Brooklyn late last year, fire officials said Thursday in revealing the cause.
An electrical explosion in a conduit leading to an exit sign sparked the three-alarm Columbia Street fire Dec. 13, which sent huge clouds of black smoke over Red Hook, fire chiefs determined.
More than 100 firefighters spent hours on site, at the Erie Basin Auto Pound, that day.
Twenty people, a mix of NYPD employees and contractors, were said to have been inside the warehouse when the inferno began. A total of eight people, three firefighters, three EMS members and two civilians, suffered minor injuries.
The fire destroyed an untold amount of “biological evidence” including DNA from past crimes such as robberies and shootings, some going back 20 or 30 years, the New York Police said. However, the rape kits were not stored at that facility.
The evidence was linked to cold cases, stored in cardboard barrels, which may have fueled the flames.
Cars linked to high-profile police killings, such as the squad car in which Officer Ed Byrne was killed in 1988 and the mobile unit where Officer Miosotis Familia was killed in 2017, were stored there. Evidence of Sandy’s ownership was also there.
There was no estimated cost of damage.
The Erie Basin is one of several lots that the NYPD uses to store vehicles that have been impounded for reasons other than parking violations. Those could include the arrest of the vehicle owner, investigative purposes or legal reasons, the city says.
