At least 19 people died and about sixty were injured this Sunday in a building fire in the Bronx district of New York, announced on the spot the new mayor of the city Eric Adams. “This is going to be one of the worst fires in our history. We know we have 19 people dead along with several others in critical condition and over 63 people injured.”Adams said live on television.
The new mayor of New York, a former African-American policeman who took office on January 1, spoke of a “real tragedy not just for the Bronx and the city”. On images circulating on social networks, 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 nearby apartment building, told AFP about a scene from “chaos” : “I have lived here for 15 years, this is the first time I see something like this”. He said he had “saw smoke, a lot of people panicked” and “nobody wanted to jump from the building”.
The New York firefighters, called to the scene around 11:00 a.m. (5:00 p.m. in France), had initially announced a toll of around thirty injured and had brought the incident under control in two hours. Two hundred firefighters intervened on a 19-storey 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. The megalopolis of nine million inhabitants suffers in various districts from an immense housing crisis, with buildings that are sometimes dilapidated and poorly maintained.