(New York) At least 19 people died Sunday and around 60 were injured in an impressive building fire in the Bronx district of New York, “one of the worst” in the history of the megalopolis announced the new city mayor Eric Adams.
“This is going to be one of the worst fires in our history. We know that we have 19 people dead as well as several others in critical condition and over 63 people injured, ”Adams said live on the spot.
According to the mayor’s office quoted by American televisions, nine children and adolescents are among the 19 people who died.
The new mayor of New York, a former police officer who took office on 1er January, referred to a “real tragedy not just for the Bronx and the city”.
PHOTO YUKI IWAMURA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
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.
“Chaos”
George King, a resident of a nearby building spoke of a scene of “chaos”: “I have lived here for 15 years, this is the first time I see something like this”.
He said he “saw smoke, a lot of people panicked” and “nobody wanted to jump out of the building”.
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.
PHOTO YUKI IWAMURA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
The new mayor of New York, a former police officer who took office on 1er January, referred to a “real tragedy not just for the Bronx and the city”.
Two hundred firefighters intervened on a 19-story brick HLM building.
“It really is an excruciating day for us,” said Mr. 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.