New York bereaved by a major disaster. At least 19 people died Sunday, January 9 and around 60 were injured in a building fire in the Bronx neighborhood, the city’s new mayor, Eric Adams, announced on the spot. “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 said live on television.
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.
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200 firefighters mobilized to control the flames
George King, a resident of a neighboring building spoke to Agence France Presse regarding a scene of “chaos”: “I have lived here for 15 years, it is the first time that I see something like that”. He said he “saw smoke, a lot of people panicked” and “nobody wanted to jump out of the building”. The New York firefighters, called to the scene around 11 a.m. (5 p.m. French time), had initially announced a toll of around thirty injured and had brought the incident under control in two hours. Two hundred firefighters intervened on a 19-story brick HLM building.
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According to New York Fire Chief Daniel Nigro, the fire started in a duplex apartment. The investigators “determined on the basis of material evidence and the first testimonies of residents that the fire started from a bedroom and an auxiliary heating, he explains, on the second and third floors. “. The firefighters “found themselves facing the fire in the corridors: a lot of smoke, a very heavy fire,” he said. Daniel Nigro explained that “the smoke spread over the entire height of the building, which is totally unusual” and that his firefighters “found victims on each floor and evacuated them in a state of cardiac and respiratory arrest” .
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. New York, a megalopolis of nine million inhabitants, is suffering in various neighborhoods from a huge housing crisis, with buildings that are sometimes dilapidated and poorly maintained.
