Nine children and 10 adults are dead after a five-alarm fire in a residential high-rise building in the Bronx on Sunday, FDNY sources said.
The update comes after Daniel Nigro, the city’s fire commissioner, said officials expected there to be “numerous fatalities.”
Thirty-two people were transported to area hospitals with life-threatening injuries, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said at a press conference Sunday afternoon. It’s unclear if that number included some of the dead. In total, 63 people were injured, Adams said.
It was unclear how the fire started.
“This is a painful moment for the city of New York and the impact of this fire is going to really bring a level of just pain and despair in our city,” Adams said. “The numbers are horrific.”
More than 200 New York City firefighters responded to the five-alarm fire in a residential building in the Bronx on Sunday, the FDNY said.
The department said dispatchers received a call of a fire shortly before 11 a.m. on the third floor of a 19-floor high rise, and they also received calls of fire from residents on the upper floors. Nigro said the fire started in a duplex apartment between the second and third floors, and it traveled up the floors. He said the FDNY found victims in every floor in stairways.
Nigro said a fire like this one is “unprecedented” in New York City.
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