“We know that we have 19 people who are confirmed dead, as well as several others in critical condition,” Adams, who has been mayor for just a week, told CNN, the AFP agency reported.
Adams confirmed on Twitter the loss of “nine young innocent lives”, among which children and adolescents, among the 19 dead.
The mayor added that 63 people were injured in the incident and noted that “this will be one of the worst fires in our history.”
According to Adams, “many” of the building’s residents were Muslims who had come from the Gambia to this New York municipality, as well as Dominicans and other Central Americans, such as the Guatemalan, Marta Sánchez, who told AFP that her family is safe and sound.
The injured were taken to five hospitals and many of them suffered cardiac and respiratory arrests, the New York Times reported.
In New York it is feared that the number of victims will increase, added AFP.
At least 200 firefighters participated in extinguishing the fire, which was declared around midmorning on the second and third floors of a 19-story building in the heart of the Bronx, according to the New York Fire Department (FDNY).
“Sheriffs determined through physical evidence and first-hand accounts from residents that this fire started in a bedroom by a portable electric heater,” New York City Fire Department Commissioner Daniel Daniel told reporters. Nigro.
Neighbors recounted seeing desperate residents waving, apparently trapped and unable to escape.
“It was chaos,” Goerge King, who lives in the adjacent building, told AFP. “I have lived here for fifteen years and this is the first time I have seen something like this.”
“I saw the smoke, a lot of people were panicking. You could see that no one wanted to jump out of the building. People were waving their arms from the windows,” King added.
The fire, which “spread to the top of the building,” left “victims on every floor, on the stairs,” added Nigro.
Images released on the FDNY Twitter account show flames topped by a thick column of black smoke rising from a second-story window of this brown brick building.
The Dominican Miguel Enrique, asthmatic, only had time to take his jacket, and go down from the 13th floor by elevator. “I was going to go down the stairs, but you couldn’t see anything and I hit the elevator,” she says with her brother José at the reception center, which she believes “saved her life.”
Nigro explained that the door to a duplex apartment, where the fire originated, had been left open, allowing the fire and smoke to spread.
Buildings like this, he continued, have no emergency exits.
The flames quickly engulfed much of the structure, and Nigro said the smoke was so dense as to be called “unprecedented.”
“The last time we had loss of life, such as this horrible (incident), was 30 years ago, also in the Bronx,” Nigro was quoted as saying by NBC News.
In December 2017, 13 people died in an apartment building fire in the Bronx, the city’s deadliest in 25 years.
The incident comes just four days after a fire in Philadelphia killed 12 people, including eight children, in a three-story social building, in what was one of the deadliest recent fires in the United States.
New York, with 9 million inhabitants, suffers in several neighborhoods from an immense housing crisis, with properties that are sometimes old and in poor condition, AFP concluded.
Source From: Ambito
David William is a talented author who has made a name for himself in the world of writing. He is a professional author who writes on a wide range of topics, from general interest to opinion news. David is currently working as a writer at 24 hours worlds where he brings his unique perspective and in-depth research to his articles, making them both informative and engaging.
