NEW YORK — A community in the Bronx and New York City remember that a year ago, on January 9, 2022, The historic fire that claimed the lives of 17 people occurred in the apartment complex Twin Parks, among those eight children. The sinister it was described by the city authorities as one of the worst in more than 30 years.
In memory of the victims and the first anniversary of this devastating date for the community, the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, ordered that all flags be flown at half mast on all buildings in the city, as well as on the fixed ones of the five counties.
“One year ago, a devastating fire claimed the lives of 17 people at the Twin Parks apartment complex in The Bronx. On that day, our city lost 17 of our neighbors and friends: they were our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our children and spouses,” Mayor Eric Adams said Monday. “Since that day, our city has passed critical legislation to educate and protect New Yorkers from fire to help prevent another tragedy. Today, we honor and remember the lives lost.”
During the fire, which occurred at regarding 11:00 am on January 9, 2022, people between the ages of 2 and 50 died. Entire families died, including a family of five. Others left orphaned children. Most had connections to the small country of The Gambia and other African countries.
“This is a sad situation. But it all comes from God. Tragedies always happen, we just thank Allah that we can all come together,” said Haji Dukuray, the uncle of Haja Dukuray, who died with three of her children and her husband.
Authorities said the cause of the fire was a faulty portable electric heater in a third-floor apartment that sent plumes of sweltering smoke rising rapidly up the stairwell of the 19-story building.
A door was left open in the apartment, fueling the spread of the flames and ultimately the devastating loss of life and property.
The flames damaged only a small part of the building, but smoke escaped through the open door and spread up the stairs and hallways, trapping many people in their apartments and incapacitating others as they fled. Most of the deaths were due to smoke inhalation, and many of those victims were found in hallways.
New York City fire codes generally require apartment doors to be spring-loaded and automatically slam shut.
“Unfortunately, the door to that apartment when the residents left was left open, not closed. The smoke spread throughout the building, so there was a tremendous loss of life,” the former commissioner said at the time. New York City Fire Department (FDNY), Daniel Nigro.
Smoke detectors inside the building were working and alerted a neighbor to the smoke and made the initial call to 9-1-1, the commissioner said. He also said that the heating in the building was working.
SEE HERE THE IMAGES OF THE DAY OF THE INCIDENT.
In the wake of the deaths, a coalition of officials, including federal, state and city lawmakers, announced a legislative agenda they hoped would tighten fire codes and building standards to prevent similar tragedies from happening.
The proposals range from requiring heaters to turn off automatically to requiring federally funded apartment projects to install self-closing doors on units and stairwells that would have to be inspected monthly.
THROUGH WINDOWS AND STAIRS: THIS WAS THE RESCUE
Firefighters rescued countless residents from the high-rise structure through windows and down stairs. Several of the members, former Commissioner Nigro said at the time, ran out of oxygen while conducting rescues and continued operations without oxygen.
Karen Dejesus said she was making breakfast in her third-floor apartment when she began to see smoke.
“We just stand in the back room…and the next thing we know, we’re seeing flames coming out the back windows and stuff,” he told our sister network. News 4 New York. “We smelled smoke and the next thing we knew, the whole upstairs and my apartment was dark and the fire department was breaking down the door to come get us. We had to climb out the window and everything.”
The woman said her home was “filled with smoke” following the fire broke out in a third-floor apartment.
Nigro and Adams qualified Sunday’s disaster as one of the worst fires in New York City in at least three decades. In 1990, the fire of Happy Land claimed 87 lives in the Bronx.
FIRE RULES
Large new apartment buildings in the city are required to have sprinkler systems and self-closing interior doors to contain smoke and starve fires of oxygen, but those rules don’t apply to thousands of the city’s older buildings.
The fire was the deadliest in New York City since 1990, when 87 people died in an arson attack at the Happy Land social club, also in the Bronx.. The county was also home to a deadly 2017 apartment building fire that killed 13 people and a 2007 fire, also started by a heater, that killed nine children and one adult.
Fire in the Bronx listed as one of the worst tragedies in recent decades in NYC
