How Smoke From One Open Door Turned a Bronx High-Rise Into a Death Trap

The 17 people killed in a Bronx fire this week all died from inhaling smoke that poured through a single malfunctioning door and billowed to the top of the 19-story building, New York City officials said on Monday, as they investigated how a fire that barely spread beyond one unit became the city’s most lethal in three decades.

The fire’s origin appeared straightforward: A space heater that had been left running continuously burst into flames, officials said. A day later, though, residents remained stunned by the speed with which the smoke inundated the building, killing and critically injuring so many people in broad daylight, even as firefighters arrived within minutes.

The tower, considered a model affordable housing project when it was constructed in 1972, did not have a building-wide sprinkler system, as was allowed under the law. But it was deadly smoke sucked into an internal stairwell, not flames, that overcame residents as they fled the building.

As the fire burned, the smoke was drawn through the broken door on the third floor toward an open stairwell door high above on the 15th floor.

“If you have that door on the upper floors open, that’s really going to give you a flue effect, like a chimney, and that’s what occurred,” said Jim Long, a spokesman for the Fire Department.

Fifteen people remained in critical condition on Monday, officials said. Mayor Eric Adams revised the official death count, saying that the city now believed that 17 people had died as of Monday afternoon, eight of them children, down from the 19 initially reported on Sunday.

“It was the smoke that took these lives, not the fire itself,” Mr. Adams said in a radio interview on 1010 WINS. He added that any maintenance issues related to the self-closing door remaining wide open would be part of the investigation into the fire.

With fire marshals and cleaning crews in white protective suits still combing the singed and smoke-stained tower, brutal images of the scene rippled from East 181st Street through the Bronx and New York City, and as far away as Gambia, the small West African nation from which many of the victims had emigrated.

Most of the deceased had not yet been publicly identified, as the city medical examiner labored to contact grieving relatives who could confirm their identities virtually because of ongoing health concerns around the coronavirus pandemic.

Shocked neighbors, family members and friends hunted for those still missing after the fire, with some traveling from hospital to hospital. Schoolteachers mourned the children missing from their classrooms, and the dozens of families displaced from the tower, Twin Parks North West, fanned out across the Bronx into temporary shelters uncertain when — or if — they would be able to return.

“We are calling 311, we are calling the hospital, we are calling the police department,” said Musa Kabba, the imam of Masjid-Ur-Rahmah, a storefront mosque on Webster Avenue, which serves a largely Gambian population. “We have no information, nobody is giving us nothing since yesterday.”

He feared that several members of the mosque had died.

Dawda Docka Fadera, Gambia’s ambassador to the United States, traveled from Washington to New York to see the site for himself.

“We are a very small country of about less than two million people, and we are all related,” he said. “Everybody knows everybody, so our country is currently in a state of shock.”

City, state and federal leaders said they were moving as quickly as they could to provide an accurate accounting. At a news conference just outside the tower Monday afternoon, they vowed to provide immediate financial support and housing for those affected by the fire, and to look at possible legal changes to address any deficiencies in the city’s fire code uncovered by investigators. President Biden called Mr. Adams to offer assistance.

The mayor, in only his second week on the job, vowed to “double down” on a decades-old campaign by the city to raise awareness about the importance of closing doors during a fire, starting in schools.

“Muscle memory is everything and if we can drill that in, we can save lives by closing doors not just in New York City but across the entire globe,” Mr. Adams said. He also began raising money for victims through a city fund.

Even with the revised death count, the fire was believed to be the deadliest in New York City since 1990, when 87 people died amid a fire intentionally set at a Bronx nightclub.

The city’s fire commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, blamed the numeric error on “a bit of a double count” by authorities trying to locate missing residents who had been scattered around the city. He cautioned that the fatality count could yet rise again based on those evacuated from the building still in hospitals “fighting for their lives on Monday.”

Space heaters, particularly older models, are a well-known risk. Nationally, the use of space heaters has been linked to about 1,700 residential fires a year, resulting in roughly 80 deaths and 160 injuries, according to estimates by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The commission opened an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Bronx fire, including looking into whether the space heater had been defective, said Patty Davis, a spokeswoman for the commission. Officials did not name the model of the heater.

In interviews, residents of the tower said such devices were a fixture in many units during cold snaps, like the one currently gripping New York, to supplement built-in radiators. A New York City housing survey found that low-income neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and northern Manhattan that are historically home to communities of color have a higher percentage of residences that rely on supplemental heating sources.

“Every winter we would always have space heaters or use the oven or boil water,” said Fatiah Touray, 38, whose family was among the first Gambian immigrants to move into the building in 1983.

Commissioner Nigro said that the fire that broke out on Sunday from the “faulty” heater did not spread much beyond the unit itself. But, crucially, when the residents in the unit fled the flames, they did not shut the door to the hallway behind them. And though the door had a self-closing mechanism required by New York City law, it did not function properly.

“The door was not obstructed,” Commissioner Nigro said. “The door when it was fully opened stayed fully opened because it malfunctioned.”

Smoke spread quickly into the hallway and then into the building’s internal stairwells, the main means for residents to evacuate. Commissioner Nigro said that another door was also left open to the stairwell on the 15th floor, pulling “dangerous” fumes up through the building. He noted that the 15th floor in particular “became quite untenable.”

Fire alarms in the building went off immediately, but false alarms were routine, and many residents said they had become accustomed to ignoring them. In the end, the commissioner said, people would have been safest if they had stayed in their apartments themselves, rather than seeking to evacuate.

City officials have not yet said where residents died in the building, but residents and their family members suggested in interviews that the stairwells had proved particularly lethal.

“There were people that I understand, from talking with my neighbors, they were trying to go down the stairs, and they were tripping over bodies,” said Renee Howard, 68, who was sheltering Monday afternoon at nearby Monroe College in the Bronx after evacuating her home of 30 years. “Oh! Jesus. Help us, God.”

One family of five appeared to have left their apartment on the top floor in an effort to flee to safety, only to be overcome by smoke, officials told the family’s relatives. The family, the Dukurays, had three children between age 5 to 12, and the relatives said they now believed all five were dead.

“I wish I could do anything to tell them not to come out from the house,” one of the relatives, Hawa Dukuray, said. “I think they maybe tried to escape.”

She said she was told that by the time they reached “the middle,” they could not see through the smoke.

Problems with the self-closing doors do not appear to have been an entirely new issue for the building. Between 2014 and 2019, the city housing department had issued violations for problems with self-closing doors to four different apartments and one stairway. Records show another complaint about a problem with a self-closing door to an apartment in 2021. All had been resolved.

There had been complaints over a lack of adequate heating, including three in 2021. Those were also resolved, according to city records, and Mr. Adams said on Monday that there had been no outstanding complaints about heating.

The building has been owned since early 2020 by a trio of investors: LIHC Investment Group, Belveron Partners and Camber Property Group. One of Camber’s executives, Rick Gropper, served as a housing adviser to Mr. Adams and contributed $400 to his mayoral campaign, the maximum amount allowed for those doing business with the city. He and other business associates have donated to other Democrats as well.

Judith Goldiner, attorney in charge of the civil law reform unit at the Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit that is helping some tenants of the building find new homes, said that deadly fires in New York City have generally occurred in older buildings with many problems, such as a lack of smoke detectors or blocked fire exits.

But whereas most of the city’s housing stock was built before World War II, the Bronx high-rise was only built in the early 1970s and was said to be in a state of relatively good repair.

“That’s why it’s so surprising that this happened,” she said. “That makes you think there’s something that happened here that you would not have expected.”

Ms. Goldiner said there may have been other problems identified in state and federal inspections of the building, which have not been made public.

Reporting was contributed by Ali Watkins, Ana Ley Ashley Southall, Jeffery C. Mays, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Matthew Haag, Lola Fadulu, Sarah Maslin Nir, Michael Gold, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, Sean Piccoli, Jazmine Hughes, Corey Kilgannon, Mihir Zaveri and Winnie Hu.