The Chain of Failures That Left 17 Dead in a Bronx Apartment Fire (Published 2022) (2024)

The main fire safety system failed disastrously in a blaze at a Bronx apartment building in January, killing 17 people, The New York Times has found.

The deaths were preventable, experts said. No one died from the fire itself, which was largely contained in the two-story apartment where it started, Apt. 3N.

But when multiple self-closing doors did not close properly, deadly smoke escaped the apartment and rapidly filled the building’s 19 stories, according to interviews, witness videos, analysis of 911 calls and a 3-D smoke simulation. A majority of the people who died had been at least a dozen floors above the fire.
Video via Citizen

A mattress in the bedroom had caught on fire, and smoke filled the lower level of the apartment.

Smoke quickly traveled to the apartment’s upper level. Residents described hearing fire alarms sometime before 11 a.m., but they did not take them seriously, given the history of false alarms in the building. “There’s an alarm that always goes off in our building,” said Desireth Melo, a sixth-floor resident. “To us, that’s normal.”

First compartmentation failure As the Wague family fled the fire in their apartment, the door never closed properly, creating the initial opening for smoke to enter the third-floor hallway.

The door to Apt. 3N, like most doors in the building, had relied on simple mechanisms to close automatically in case of a fire: spring-loaded hinges and a latch.

Interviews with residents and complaints lodged with the city indicate that, before the fire, doors routinely malfunctioned. Still, James Yolles, a spokesman for the building’s ownership group, Bronx Park Phase III Preservation LLC, said it had “no knowledge of self-closing-door issues prior to the fire.”

As the volume of smoke intensified, the building’s complex configuration only added to the confusion and made it even more difficult for residents trying to escape.

On the third floor, for example, eight units were duplexes with lower levels on the second floor. But the building stairwells and elevators were accessible only through hallways on the third floor — the second floor did not have hallways.

Four units on the third floor were single-story apartments.

The first 911 call came at 10:54 a.m., from Apt. 3M, next door to where the fire started.

In the next four minutes, calls were made from four other apartments on the third floor, all reporting smoke. One of them came from a resident from Apt. 3N, who cried, “Fire is in the bedroom!”

Among the most tragic calls came from Apt. 3J, directly across from where the fire started. A man yells into the phone for help as children are heard screaming. The apartment had been breached by smoke, as a video later confirmed. A city official said two people from the apartment died; public records indicate both were children.

Down the hall from the fire, a resident from Apt. 3E told a 911 dispatcher that she could not see outside her apartment door.

Smoke continued to pour out of Apt. 3N and into the hallway, trapping some residents as it seeped through gaps under their apartment doors.

As soon as she opened the door, the 3E resident said, a thick wall of smoke charged toward her, and it was pitch black. She went back in and put wet towels under her door, advice dispatchers gave to many residents to block the inflow of smoke. She survived.

Second compartmentation failure By now, smoke had infiltrated the building’s two stairwells. “If you lose the apartment door, you lose the floor, but losing the stairwell door, you lose the building,” Professor Simeoni of Worcester Polytechnic said.

Housed in a single central core, Stairwell A and Stairwell B were physically separated by a wall, with access on only certain floors.

Residents said the door to Stairwell B on the third floor often malfunctioned. That morning, it remained open for long stretches of time, along with Stairwell A.

When firefighters arrived shortly before 11 a.m., they left the door to Stairwell B open and designated it as the “attack stairwell.” A standard operating procedure, the move allowed them to run a hose to put out the fire. A city official said that the door had been opened before the firefighters’ arrival and had not closed properly, simply “burping,” or swinging partially open and closed, as large amounts of smoke escaped.

Third compartmentation failure There’s evidence that the stairwell doors on higher floors malfunctioned. A city official confirmed that the doors to Stairwell B on Floors 15 and 19 appeared to be open or partially open for a majority of the fire.

Video captured by a witness that morning shows thick smoke gushing out of the 15th floor, confirming that compartmentation failed on the top floors, experts said.
Source: Video via Citizen

“That shows that everybody in the building is under threat,” Charles Jennings, an associate professor in the department of security, fire and emergency management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said after reviewing the video.

When the smoke rushed out of Apt. 3N, it initially pressed against the ceiling of the third-floor hallway as it spread from end to end, the simulation showed.

Within 20 minutes of the start of the fire, smoke shot up the stairwells, entering hallways on higher floors.

“It seems pretty clear that the stairwell shaft was the most likely source of smoke migration,” said Brian Meacham, a fire safety engineering consultant at Meacham Associates outside of Boston.

Paradoxically, the top floors were among the most dangerous. Of the 17 people who died, 14 had been on the 15th, 18th and 19th floors.

The hot air and combustion products of the fire — including deadly gases like carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide — made the stairwells and many hallways untenable. In addition to the deaths, which included eight children, more than 60 people were injured, according to the Fire Department.

A number of frantic calls came from the 15th floor, where video captured smoke rushing out of two apartment windows and a stairwell door was stuck open even before the fire started.

“If I was to put my hand in front of my face, I wouldn’t have been able to see it,” Leslie Casanova of Apt. 15K told The Times.

Next door in Apt. 15J, smoke breached the apartment of a family of four, who later perished. Ms. Casanova had heard the family banging on the walls and screaming for help. Then, “one by one, the voices started silencing,” she said.

Four floors above, five residents from Apt. 19W and three people visiting Mabintou Tunkara — a 19V resident, according to public records — were among those killed. Two others from the 18th floor also died.

In the end, for those who decided to make a run for it, the only way out was through passageways that had become blinding: the stairwells.

These interlocking “scissor stairs” are legal under the New York City building code in residential buildings, but fire safety experts have criticized them.

Despite being the sole means of escape, they were not directly accessible from some floors.

“The reason why scissor stairs don’t work is you’re making the assumption that if you have access from two sides, there are two means of egress,” Professor Torero said. “It relies fully on the fact that the shaft is fully protected from smoke. In a way, you’ve created a single-point failure mode.”

An in-person inspection by Times reporters revealed narrow stairwells with little to no ventilation and no pressurization or smoke-extraction system on the roof.

Walter Williams, one of the evacuated residents, described what it was like. “I stepped on people that was passed out in the stairwell. People were already dead, laying there,” he said. All the fire victims died from smoke inhalation, but it is unclear where they were found.

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