New York’s new mayor, an African-American ex-police officer who took office on Jan. 1, spoke of a “real tragedy not just for the Bronx and the city” as a huge fire ripped through a 19-storey apartment building. floors.
At least 19 people died this Sunday, January 9 and around sixty were injured in the impressive fire of a building in the Bronx district of New York, “one of the worst” in the history of the megalopolis, announced the city’s new mayor Eric Adams. “This is going to be one of the worst fires in our history. We know we have 19 people dead along with several others in critical condition and over 63 people injured,” Eric Adams said live on the spot. According to the mayor’s office quoted by American television, nine children and teenagers are among the 19 people who died.
New York’s new mayor, an African-American former police officer who took office on Jan. 1, spoke of a “real tragedy not just for the Bronx and the city.” In images circulating on social networks, huge flames and thick black smoke escaped in the morning from a window of a multi-story building in the Bronx, a huge neighborhood in northern New York.
“Chaos”
George King, a resident of a neighboring building told AFP of a scene of “chaos”: “I have lived here for 15 years, this is the first time I have seen something like this”. He said he “saw smoke, a lot of panicked people” and that “nobody wanted to jump from the building”.
The New York firefighters, called to the scene around 11:00 a.m., had initially announced a toll of around thirty injured and had brought the disaster under control in two hours. Two hundred firefighters intervened on this 19-storey brick HLM type building.
“It’s really an excruciating day for us,” said Eric Adams, a centrist Democrat elected on a program to fight crime and economic and social inequality in New York.
BRONX FIRE UPDATE: Massive apartment complex leaves more than 60 people injured – dozens seriously. Mayor Eric Adams at the scene called it “one of the worst fires in city history.” pic.twitter.com/8am3s1xLPx
— Moshe Schwartz (@YWNReporter) January 9, 2022
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Last Wednesday, a terrible fire in an apartment building in Philadelphia had left 12 dead, 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, a megalopolis of nine million inhabitants, suffers in various neighborhoods from a huge housing crisis, with sometimes dilapidated and poorly maintained buildings.
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