Five people are dead and three others were hospitalized after a fire broke out early Wednesday in a Minneapolis public housing high-rise building, authorities said. The cause of the fire is under investigation.
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s office released the names of four of the five victims: Amatalah Shadam, 78, Maryan Mohamed Mohamud, 69, Nadifa Mohamud, 67, and Jerome Stuart, 59. They all died from smoke inhalation.
According to CBS Minnesota, the building was set to be inspected on Monday. Housing and Urban Development officials told CBS Minnesota the building had its last inspection in 2015, which it passed.
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The building, owned by Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, houses many seniors and people with disabilities. The building is located in a part of Minneapolis known as Little Mogadishu, named for the capital of Somalia as a result of the many Somali immigrants who live there, according to the Associated Press.
“We don’t know what the cause of the fire was and why it unfolded beyond one apartment which was very unusual in our buildings. They are made of concrete so fires do not tend to spread in that way so we will have to learn about why that was,” said Jeff Horwich, director of policy and external affairs with the Housing Authority.
Crews said four of the five people who died were found on the 14th floor, CBS Minnesota reported. A fifth victim was located in a stairway, and later died at the hospital. One firefighter was taken to the hospital for an evaluation and was later released, according to CBS Minnesota. It was unknown if any of them were related or came from the same unit.
City Council member Abdi Warsame said he knew one victim was a Somali grandmother, and her children and grandchildren were at the building on Wednesday trying to track down more information.
Fire Chief John Fruetel said the fire had been burning for a while and had blown out windows before firefighters arrived. The open windows, combined with strong winds from an overnight storm, caused “an extreme environment of heat and wind-driven fire,” Fruetel said.
“I can’t express more about how precarious that scenario was to those firefighters,” Fruetel said. “They encountered a lot of heat … It was very similar to a blast furnace.”
The chief called it “a very chaotic scenario,” and said firefighters had to climb multiple flights of stairs while people were coming down. He said residents on floors above the fire were told to shelter in place.
Warsame toured the floor that burned and expressed amazement that more people weren’t killed.
“It was absolutely gutted,” said Warsame. “It was horrendous.”
The fire broke out around 4 a.m. on the 14th floor of the Cedar High Apartments. Fruetel said firefighters found heavy smoke on the 16th and 17th floors as residents were evacuated through the stairwells.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, in a Facebook post in English and Somali, called the fire “devastating.”
The building is part of a complex known as The Cedars. Horwich said Cedar High has 191 apartments, all one-bedroom or studio units. There were 198 residents living in the building at the time of the fire.
Abdirahman Shire, 53, of Minneapolis, said his 74-year-old mother lives alone on the 13th floor. She told him that she was alerted to the fire by the smell of smoke, and that she ran down the stairs to escape.
When she reached the lobby, only six other people were there.
“She said, ‘I open the door and I smelled, and I hear the noise and I run,'” Shire said.
Hours later, Tracey Scott, the interim executive director of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, said most residents had been allowed back into their apartments. Fewer than nine units were deemed uninhabitable and those residents were temporarily placed into other public housing units. The Red Cross was also on hand to help victims.
Several family members streamed into the building on Wednesday to check on loved ones, some of them in tears.
Though the building sits in a heavily Somali section of Minneapolis, it’s a melting pot of new arrivals in the city. When residents gathered after the fire for a meeting, organizers arranged Somali, Korean, Spanish and Oromo interpreters.
Casper Hill, a city spokesman, said the main floor and lower mechanical rooms had partial sprinkler coverage but the rest of the building did not have a sprinkler system. Horwich said the building was built in 1969 and wasn’t required to have a sprinkler system due to its age. He referred follow-up questions to another Housing Authority official who did not immediately respond to messages.
City officials said public housing inspections are handled by federal agencies, and that the city inspects the building only to respond to specific complaints. They said their records showed just a few inspections in recent years. The most recent, in 2016, was for failure to clean exhaust hoods “contaminated by grease-laden vapors” every six months; the inspector’s report said the last record of maintenance was four years earlier.
Calls to the Housing and Urban Development office in Minneapolis were referred to Chicago, where a message was not returned. According to the most recent data posted on HUD’s website, the building received a physical inspection score of 95 out of 100 in February of 2015. The data doesn’t say what the score means or provide any details.
