Six dead and seven injured. This is the dramatic outcome of a violent fire that broke out in a two-story house in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn in the early hours of today, Thursday 5 November. The number of victims has been confirmed by the New York firefighters: they are six adults, whose details have not yet been released. Four of them died at the scene, while two others died after hospitalization at NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn.
Fire in Brooklyn
The alarm went off around 2am for a large fire in a house on 58th Street. First responders arrived in three minutes and eighteen seconds, finding the basement and two upper floors already completely engulfed in flames. A total of over 230 emergency workers intervened to put out the fire and it took almost three hours of work to bring the situation under control.
Among the injured there are three firefighters, whose conditions however do not cause concern. The causes of the fire are still under investigation: the intervention of a team specialized in hazardous materials was also necessary on site due to the presence of a lithium ion battery, although it has not yet been established whether this was the one that triggered the flames.
New York, fatal fire in a two-story house in Brooklyn (Photo LaPresse)
Mamdani’s words
“It was a devastating fire – declared Mayor Zohran Mamdani in front of the building blackened by the flames -. It will take a long time for this neighborhood to mourn the neighbors it lost this morning and recover from this immense pain”.
In an interview with MS Now, Mamdani raised the importance of fire safety, saying that e-bike-related fires have surpassed 400 this year in the city. On October 28, four members of a family, including an eleven-year-old boy, died in the Bronx after the battery of an electric bike caught fire, engulfing an apartment in flames.