“This is going to be one of the worst fires in our history,” fears Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York. At least 19 people died on Sunday and around 60 were injured in an impressive building fire in New York’s Bronx neighborhood. “Several others are in critical condition and more than 63 people are injured,” Eric Adams said live.
Nine children and adolescents among those who died
According to the mayor’s office quoted by American televisions, nine children and adolescents are among the 19 people who died.
Eric Adams, 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.
George King, a resident of a neighboring building told AFP about a scene of “chaos”: “I have lived here for 15 years, this is the first time I see something like that”.
He said he “saw smoke, a lot of people panicked” and “nobody wanted to jump out of the building”.
A 19-storey brick HLM building
The New York firefighters, called to the scene around 11 a.m. (4 p.m. GMT), had initially announced a toll of around thirty injured and had brought the disaster under control in two hours.
Two hundred firefighters intervened on a 19-story brick HLM building. “It’s really a terrible day for us,” said Eric Adams, a centrist Democrat elected on a program to fight crime and economic and social inequalities in New York.
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.
