“We have 17 dead, nine adults and eight children,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said of the fire in the Bronx building.
The New York authorities revised down the balance of victims of the deadly fire that devastated a residential building in the Bronx on Sunday, taking the deceased from 19 to 17, among which there are eight minors.
“We have 17 deceased, nine adults and eight children”, said New York Mayor Eric Adams at a press conference in front of the building where the fire occurred, caused by a heater in a room on the second floor of the 19-story building on 182nd Street in the Bronx, a neighborhood with strong presence of immigrants.
Adams, accompanied by a Dominican and Gambian representative, defined the incident as “indescribable tragedy” and “global” due to the presence of people of different origins, particularly Dominicans, Central Americans and Gambians.
However, according to the Gambian ambassador to the United States, “Most of the victims had their roots in the Gambia.”
Also, dozens of people were affected, some extremely seriously, mainly by the inhalation of smoke that spread throughout the building shortly after the fire started at around 11 a.m. (4:00 p.m. GMT) on Sunday.
The fire commissioner, Daniel Nigro, attributed the initial balance to a “double count”, and warned that the current one is not definitive due to the severity of some hospitalized people.
“Unfortunately, the balance may increase again,” he told reporters.
The fire originated in a duplex located on the second and third floors, whose entrance door was left open, facilitating the spread of the fire throughout the rest of the building, according to the authorities.
No family was able to sleep in their homes last night, announced the American Red Cross, which hopes that throughout the week some will be able to return to their apartments progressively. However, those most affected by the flames will have to wait.
This fire is one of the worst to hit New York City since the incident at the Happy Land nightclub, also in the Bronx in 1990, in which 87 people died.
In December 2017, 13 people died in a fire in an apartment building also in the Bronx.
New York, with almost 9 million inhabitants, suffers in several neighborhoods from an immense housing crisis, with properties that are sometimes old and in poor condition. (I)
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