Bronx Fire: Bronx Fire: Mayor Revises Number Killed to 17, Including 8 Children (Published 2022) (2024)

Officials are investigating if a “maintenance issue” with an apartment door may have allowed thick smoke from a fire that killed 17 people, including eight children, to spread throughout a high-rise building in the Bronx, Mayor Eric Adams and the city’s fire commissioner said Monday.

The fire was started by a malfunctioning space heater in the bedroom of a third-floor apartment on Sunday. Fire officials say the door of the apartment did not close as residents fled, and that allowed smoke to spread throughout the building.

“It appears the ability to have the smoke spread is due to the door being open,” Mr. Adams said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday.

“There may have been a maintenance issue with this door and that is going to be part of the ongoing investigation,” he added.

Officials initially said on Sunday that 19 people were killed in connection with the fire, but Mr. Adams revised the number to 17 at a news conference on Monday.

The city’s fire commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, said that “there was a bit of a double count” on Sunday. But he also cautioned that the death toll could rise, as many of those who were taken to the hospital on Sunday were still “fighting for their lives on Monday.”

Mr. Nigro said that while the fire was contained to the hallway just outside the apartment where it started, smoke that traveled through the building was what caused “the deaths and the serious injuries.” None appeared to be caused by burns.

He added that the stairwell in the building was “very dangerous” because of an open door. Both the door on the apartment where the fire started and a door to the stairwell on the 15th floor were left open and were “not functioning as they should,” Mr. Nigro said.

New York City law requires apartment doors to automatically close. Mr. Adams and Mr. Nigro said the apartments in the building did have self-closing doors.

Fire Department investigators tested most of the doors in the building in the course of their investigation on Sunday, the fire official said, and most were found to have automatically closed properly. However, the door at the apartment where the fire started — and doors at a handful of other units — did not close as designed, the official said.

The building’s owners said in an email that all of the doors were self-closing, as required. Maintenance staff repaired a lock on the door where the fire started in July, and at the time, “the self-closing mechanism” was checked and found to operate properly, they said.

At the news conference, Mr. Adams said the city planned to increase awareness efforts to make sure residents close the door to their apartments if they are fleeing a fire. The city’s schools chancellor, David Banks, said he had asked principals to distribute fire safety messages in public schools.

The fire was mostly contained to the apartment where the space heater was, as well as an adjacent hallway, but the smoke spread throughout all 19 floors in the building.

“It was the smoke that took these lives, not the fire itself,” Mr. Adams said on 1010 WINS.

Fire officials say the space heater that malfunctioned may have been running uninterrupted for several days. The heat was working in the apartment but the heater was being used as a supplement, fire officials said on Sunday.

Fifteen people remained in critical condition on Monday after an apartment fire started by a malfunctioning space heater sent smoke billowing through a Bronx high-rise on Sunday, officials said, killing 17 people, including eight children.

The city’s fire commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, warned that the death toll could rise. Many of those taken to the hospital in critical condition on Sunday were still “fighting for their lives,” he said at a news conference on Monday.

Both the deaths and the serious injuries were largely linked to smoke inhalation, Mr. Nigro said.

The fire itself was contained to the hallway outside the third-floor apartment where it started, but smoke traveled throughout the 19-floor building, darkening hallways and stairwells and shocking residents who had heard the fire alarms but did not immediately react because they had grown accustomed to frequent alarms in the building. Firefighters found victims on every floor and worked to rescue them even as their own oxygen tanks ran low, Commissioner Nigro said.

The fire’s toll was the worst in the city since 87 people died in an intentionally set fire at a Bronx nightclub in 1990 and was an early test for the city’s new mayor, Eric Adams. “The numbers are horrific,” Mr. Adams said.

He vowed that the city would provide support for the victims, many of whom are Muslim immigrants from the West African nation of Gambia.

Mr. Adams urged all of the injured and displaced victims to seek help and assured those who may be undocumented that their information would not be passed along to federal immigration authorities.

The day after a fire broke out in Stephan Beauvogui’s apartment building in the Bronx, forcing him and his family to flee, Mr. Beauvogui stood on Monday in front of the high-rise and said he could still hear people calling for aid.

Mr. Beauvogui, his wife and his two sons spent Sunday night in a Red Cross shelter in a hotel. He woke up, as he always had, and took his two children, ages 9 and 6, to school at P.S. 85 in the Bronx.

“One of the teachers said everybody was happy to see them,” Mr. Beauvogui, 67, said.

But little else was normal at the 19-story building where 17 people — including eight children — lost their lives after a fire started by a malfunctioning space heater sent smoke billowing across every floor.

About a half-dozen police officers and a fire crew were outside the building at 333 East 181st Street on Monday as residents lingered. Dozens of people in white protective suits, many with large brooms and other cleaning supplies, entered and exited the building.

Alan Hall, a security worker finishing up a 12-hour shift, said that about a dozen residents entered the building to retrieve personal items. As many as 100 workers were expected to help clean the building on Monday, he added.

Tysena Jacobs, 69, returned to get medicine. Because of the fire, she had been unable to take her regular medication for cancer, blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes, and she had been getting anxious.

After walking up the stairs to her 15th floor apartment, she would then head to a nearby urgent care center to get her lungs checked, because she had inhaled so much smoke. Ms. Jacobs had been cooking bacon and eggs on Sunday morning when her apartment, a duplex, started filling up quickly with smoke that was so thick she could not see properly.

“My mouth has a funny taste,” she said, “like my tongue feels heavy.”

“I thank God we are OK,” Ms. Jacobs said, “but it’s still a lot of pain for people who lost their children, their mothers,” adding that she had heard from a neighbor that her next-door neighbor had died Monday morning from cardiac arrest.

As she spoke, a woman passed her in the street, greeting, “Thank the Lord.”

“Thank the Lord, yes,” Ms. Jacobs replied.

When Deputy Chief Farooq Muhammad of the Fire Department’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Services arrived at the Bronx high-rise fire at around 11 a.m. on Sunday, he saw a grim scene.

The men and women under his command were whisking people out of the building as smoke billowed and treating residents for injuries as severe as respiratory failure and cardiac arrest.

Chief Muhammad, tasked with coordinating efforts to help the wounded and get them to area hospitals, began tallying up those in critical condition who needed the most intensive medical care. Within the first five minutes of his arrival, he counted three. By 11:50 a.m., the tally rose to 16. It eventually climbed to 32.

His own emotions about the fire, which left 17 people dead, including eight children, did not start to sink in until hours later.

“There were emotions, but you put the emotions in check and do your job. And the emotions, you process them after the call is over,” he said, holding back tears as he spoke.

The experience, Chief Muhammad added, was reminiscent of his work during the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I was performing triage duties on 9/11 after the World Trade Center and had to run for my life,” he said. “This reminds me of that. Just the sheer number of patients, the casualties, and the stress reminds me of that event.”

Battalion Chief Jeffrey Facinelli, who also arrived at the residential building soon after the fire was reported, said he fielded dozens of radio calls from firefighters inside the burning structure about residents, some who were trapped, unconscious, or unable to breathe in the heavy smoke.

“They’re giving me situational awareness; they’re basically painting a picture for me inside of what they have. And they give me detailed information, saying things like, ‘We have two or three people in this apartment on this floor,’ and if some of those people are unconscious, no pulse, not breathing, that they’re doing CPR,” he said. “They’re painting a picture for us outside so that we know how bad the situation is.”

Chief Facinelli surveyed the situation when he arrived and quickly called for a second alarm to bring in additional resources; five alarms were ultimately sounded.

“I have to make a rapid decision as to what we’re going to do,” he explained. Mr. Facinelli also led response efforts at a deadly 2017 fire in the Bronx that claimed 13 lives. “I drew upon the lessons I learned there,” he said. “It was an experience that helped me respond to this tragedy.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting.

— Chelsia Rose Marcius

On Monday extended family gathered together to mourn the Dukurays — Haja; her husband, Hajie; their son, Mustapha, 13; and two daughters, Mariam 10, and Fatoumata, 6 — each of whom perished in the fire a day earlier in their building in the Bronx that left at least 17 people dead.

“I’m heartbroken,” a relative, Hawa Dukuray, 21, said through tears, barely able to get the words out. “We are a close family.”

Mr. Dukuray worked at a fried chicken restaurant, and Haja Dukuray was a home health aide, she said. The children were joyful and bright; Mustapha, she said, received top marks in school. The parents had emigrated from the West African nation of Gambia, in 2007.

The apartment at Twin Parks North West on East 181st Street was for the Dukurays a place of celebration, where relatives would gather to celebrate Muslim holidays, eating Gambian dishes the couple served, like jollof rice, Hawa Dukuray said.

Victims of the fire have not been officially identified. But on Sunday, family members were informed that each child had been taken to a different hospital, where they were identified and pronounced dead, according to another cousin who did not share her full name to protect her privacy. For the rest of the day, and into the next, she said, relatives held out hope that the parents were alive and well. On Monday afternoon, though they had not yet received official word of the couple’s death, she said, they began to mourn their passing.

“We were crying yesterday for the children who passed away, we were praying and crossing our fingers: ‘Let the mom and dad make it,’” she said. “But — none of them.”

Hawa Dukuray said officials told the extended family that the Dukurays appeared to have left their apartment on the top floor in an effort to flee to safety, only to be overcome by smoke.

“I wish I could do anything to tell them not to come out from the house,” Ms. 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.

“All the power went off,” Ms. Dukaray said.

The family of five never made it out.

“If I was in their situation, I would try to escape, too,” said Ms. Dukaray.

Federal authorities are investigating a devastating Bronx fire that city officials have said was caused by an electric space heater that malfunctioned in an apartment bedroom.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission opened an investigation on Monday into the circ*mstances surrounding the fire on Sunday that killed 17 people, including looking into whether the space heater had been defective, said Patty Davis, a spokeswoman for the commission. “We plan to be on site today,” Ms. Davis said.

The commission, which oversees the safety of consumer products, including portable heaters, has the authority to work with companies to recall hazardous products and can issue fines to companies if they violate any laws, including failing to report hazards to the agency.

Portable heaters are not a leading cause of residential fires nationally, according to fire safety experts who said cooking and electrical system problems, for instance, were more common culprits.

Still, portable space heaters have been linked to about 1,700 residential fires a year, resulting in about 80 deaths and 160 injuries, according to a 2021 report by the commission.

In New York City, a 2007 fire that killed 10 people in a community of Malian immigrants in the Bronx was sparked by the frayed cord of a space heater.

Glenn Corbett, an associate professor of fire safety and public management at John Jay College, said that space heaters typically cause fires when they malfunction. This can be caused by overheating because they were left on too long, and older models may not have newer safety features such as an automatic shut-off.

Fire officials have said the space heater that led to the fire in the Bronx may have been operating for multiple days. Investigators have not released any details about the space heater, such as the model and how old it is, nor have they explained how it might have touched off the fire. Fire officials said on Monday that it remained under investigation.

Mr. Corbett said that space heaters that are run for extended periods of time can have components, including plastic parts and wiring, that can break down and ignite. The heater then catches on fire but does not usually explode.

Heaters also cause fires when they are placed too close to combustible materials such as bedding, which then come into contact with a heater’s exposed heating coils or elements, sparking a fire, Mr. Corbett said.

Heaters plugged into overloaded extension cords can also ignite because the heaters draw a significant amount of electrical current, he said.

“They do very often have disastrous results because they’re a significant source of energy to start a fire,” Mr. Corbett said.

Many manufacturers of space heaters have made safety improvements in recent years, including automatic shut-off devices and built-in thermostats that warn when a unit is overheating, said Prabodh Panindre, a senior research scientist and faculty member at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, who specializes in fire safety.

There have also been improvements to the design of some heaters so that they will automatically turn off if they fall over, Mr. Panindre said.

But the problem is that many people still rely on outdated heaters with minimal safety features, or they do not know how to use heaters safely, fire experts said.

“It’s like any equipment: If you use it properly and follow the instructions, it’s safe, but if you don’t, it’s not,” Mr. Panindre said.

Safety guidelines for using portable heaters include keeping flammable materials such as bedding, curtains, clothing or furniture at least three feet away, according to the commission.

Portable heaters should also be plugged into a wall outlet instead of an extension cord or power strip that can become overloaded and start a fire, and they should be turned off before going to bed, the commission said.

Another safety measure is to designate a three-foot “kid-free zone” around a space heater, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

Some fire safety experts and advocates said that government agencies and companies should do more to educate the public about how to safely use space heaters, including running television and mobile phone ads.

Mr. Corbett added that state and local governments could target public safety campaigns about space heaters to poorer neighborhoods where many residents rely on them.

Many neighborhoods in the Bronx and northern Manhattan have a higher percentage of homes that rely on supplemental heating sources, according to a New York City housing survey.

Over the past 25 years, New York City has implemented a host of fire safety requirements in the city’s buildings, but not all of them applied to Twin Parks North West, which opened in the early 1970s.

But the most recent mandate — self-closing apartment doors — did apply to Twin Parks and is now an early focus in the investigation into how smoke from the third-floor fire on Sunday quickly spread beyond one unit and overwhelmed residents on other floors. At least 17 people, including eight children, were killed in the fire.

In 2018, the City Council approved legislation requiring landlords of buildings with three or more apartments to install self-closing doors on interior corridor doors, including apartment doors, and on doors to stairwells. The city set a deadline of installing them on all such properties by the end of July 2021.

The Fire Department commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, said on Monday that two doors at the property did not close automatically during the fire: the door to the third-floor unit where it started, as well as a door to the stairwell on the 15th floor.

Kelly Magee, a spokeswoman for the property owners, said on Monday that all the building’s doors had self-closing mechanisms and that a maintenance person repaired the lock on the third-floor unit’s door in July. At that time, the spokeswoman said, the self-closing mechanism was working.

Another major change in local fire safety rules — sprinkler systems — did not apply to Twin Parks. Elected officials in the city have debated for decades about whether to require residential buildings to have sprinkler systems, but they are only required in mid- to high-rise commercial buildings under legislation approved in 2004. The city gave commercial landlords 15 years to comply with the law.

As recent as 2020, City Council members have proposed a similar sprinkler mandate in residential buildings, but such legislation has always been met with intense pushback from landlords who say that the sprinkler systems are expensive and that they are costly to install in older buildings. Other safety features, such as public address systems in residential buildings, have been proposed over the years but not approved.

Ms. Magee said that Twin Parks did not have sprinklers throughout the building but they were in the laundry area and compactor room. The building’s smoke alarm system was working on Sunday, she said.

Residents said that the smoke alarms went off all the time, leading them to often ignore the signals. Ms. Magee said that the building owners had received complaints about residents smoking in the stairwell and setting off the alarms. The Fire Department said that they responded to two calls over the last two years that turned out to be false alarms.

Twin Parks did not have exterior fire escapes, a feature of many apartment buildings in New York City that were built before the mid-20th century. In 1968, New York City barred the construction of fire escapes on the outside of buildings, instead requiring properties to have interior stairwells for use during an emergency.

Dozens of firefighters ran low on their air supply on Sunday while wading deeper into Twin Parks North West, the building in the Bronx where a fire killed at least 17 people, including eight children.

Inside the 19-story building, firefighters groped their way down hallways and stairwells searching for residents, many of whom were trapped in apartments quickly becoming filled with smoke.

They found many families were unable to escape through smoke-clogged stairwells.

“It was absolutely horrific — I talked to many veteran firefighters who said it was the worst fire they’ve ever been in, in their lives,” said Andrew Ansbro, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, the union for New York City firefighters.

As firefighters approached the end of their 45-minute air supply, many risked their lives by continuing to search, Mr. Ansbro said.

“At that point, they’re just tolerating an intolerable condition to get the job done,” he said.

Lt. James McCarthy, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association in New York City, said that the roughly 200 firefighters who responded to the blaze helped rescue hundreds of residents from the building.

At a news conference on Sunday evening, Mayor Eric Adams praised the firefighters’ efforts.

“Some of these firefighters, their oxygen tanks were empty and they still pushed through the smoke,” he said, referring to their compressed air tanks.

Mr. Adams added, “You can’t do this if you don’t feel attached to this city and this community.”

Mr. McCarthy said that some of the firefighters rushed out of the building with small children in their arms. Others tried to resuscitate injured residents, once outside.

“They really operated above and beyond the call of duty,” Mr. McCarthy said in a call with reporters on Monday morning. He added that firefighters “followed their training and saved as many lives as they could.”

Annalee Wallace, 45, of Hunts Point, who rushed to the building on Sunday to check on her cousins living there, also lauded the response.

“A lot of times when things happen in these neighborhoods, we don’t get a great response,” she said. “But this time it seems they got an outstanding response. Everybody came together. You got your F.D.N.Y., your N.Y.P.D., different volunteers, Red Cross — the response time is awesome.”

Mr. McCarthy said that since the building followed federal fire guidelines, it did not have to adhere to New York City fire codes. The weaker protections exposed city firefighters “to a more dangerous atmosphere,” he said.

Mr. Ansbro said he spoke to numerous department members and that “this fire is something that will live with our members forever.”

Sean Piccoli contributed reporting.

Around a dozen people gathered on Monday at Masjid-Ur-Rahmah near the Bronx apartment building where a fire killed at least 17 people, waiting for information about missing loved ones that felt like it may never come.

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

At least 10 of the mosque’s members were still missing by midday, said Mr. Kabba. He said “many” of its members had died in the blaze, but he did not have a firm estimate.

The slow pace of identification efforts introduced a religious worry, Mr. Kabba said. According to Islamic tradition, a person’s body should be buried as soon as possible after death, usually within 24 hours. That window may have effectively closed for many of the victims in the Bronx.

“We aren’t able to do any arrangements of the funerals until we get information,” he said. “The funeral should happen right away according to our religion. Today is the last day. The city has to help us with that.”

He said he believed some children were confirmed as deceased, but he said the mosque still did not know the whereabouts or status of their parents. “I don’t have any idea about anything, and neither do the families that are here in the center. They should not be treating us like this,” Mr. Kabba said of the city.

Twin Parks North West, the site of the fatal fire in the Bronx on Sunday, opened in the early 1970s to tremendous fanfare, a progressive experiment by New York State at the time that was meant to reimagine modern subsidized affordable housing in a square-mile area of New York City.

The 120-unit building, constructed atop a rock escarpment in the Fordham Heights neighborhood, towers over a scattered site of public-housing buildings. Instead of clustering the properties together, the buildings were set apart on purpose across 12 locations, each designed by an architectural firm to create a sense of community for the residents. The buildings had a total of roughly 2,000 units.

The hope was that buildings of architectural quality, breaking away from the mold of uninspiring public-housing complexes throughout the city, would produce a happier, healthier and safer neighborhood of people with mixed backgrounds and ethnicities.

Just years after the Twin Parks complex opened, however, it was considered a failure as violence and gangs took over and it did not become a model for future public housing until after the federal government in the early 1970s adopted a different approach, through the use of rental vouchers.

A year after North West opened, a top executive at the state’s Urban Development Corporation, which developed the sites, said the idea of social integration there had become “hopeless.” The state had set aside 69 apartments at two buildings for white residents but few people signed up for them and many who did moved out within the first years.

Of all the buildings at Twin Parks, North West was considered the most thoughtfully designed and innovative. Designed by the firm Prentice and Chan, Ohlhausen, Twin Parks North West was built as an angular structure that stood in contrast to the surrounding curved buildings and opened up to a park area with terraced play areas.

The North West building and the park were the most effective examples of trying to blend the affordable-housing complex into the neighborhood, critics said. A review in a 1973 edition of Architectural Forum praised the architects of Twin Parks North West for creating the “most successful” designs of all the buildings.

When it opened, the 120 units at North West included 20 unique layouts for the residences, which ranged from studio apartments to five-bedroom units in duplexes.

A review of Twin Parks in 2013, roughly four decades after it opened, said the celebration of the complex was an “opening-day phenomenon.” The project received much attention when it opened and became a case study of modern public housing, but the luster faded long ago, according to the 2013 review.

“While it is occasionally cited as a precedent for its innovative unit typologies, Twin Parks goes unnoticed as a case study of high-rise housing for neighborhood revitalization,” the authors wrote. “Why? Perhaps because, shortly after its completion, the buildings were deemed to be a failure: they had not slowed the rapid change in their neighborhoods; stories of gang violence dominated coverage from the start.”

An examination of city records shows several complaints and violations at the Bronx building over the years.

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 violations and complaints had been resolved.

There have also been complaints over a lack of adequate heating, including three in 2021. Those were also resolved, according to city records.

And most of the problems appear to be unrelated to issues associated with Sunday’s deadly fire.

An online database of violations maintained by the housing department, for example, lists an infestation of mice and co*ckroaches in a 12th floor apartment, a water leak in the kitchen of a sixth floor apartment and mold in a unit on the third floor.

A separate set of records maintained by the buildings department, which stretches back to the mid 1990s, faulted the building owners for not filing proper paperwork about energy efficiency and lists several problems with elevators, which were subsequently fixed.

In general, the complaints and violations do not seem to amount to a long list of egregious problems with fire safety.

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.

She said the Bronx building was also relatively newer by New York City standards: Most of the city’s housing stock was built before World War II, while the Bronx high-rise was built in 1972.

“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. But any reports of those inspections have yet to be made public.

The high-rise in the Bronx where 17 people died in a fire on Sunday was home to many African immigrants who chose their apartments for the close-knit community and proximity to local mosques.

A significant number of the building’s residents were practicing Muslims and originally from Gambia, Mayor Eric Adams said at a news conference on Sunday.

He spoke about respecting cultural and religious needs, especially related to burial rites, and emphasized that support would be provided regardless of immigration status.

Gov. Kathy Hochul reassured residents of the building, on East 181st Street, that she would not forget them. She announced plans to establish a victims’ compensation fund to help secure new housing and pay for burials and other costs.

“Tonight is a night of tragedy and pain, and tomorrow we begin to rebuild,” she said. “We rebuild their lives and give them hope. Especially those who came all the way from Africa. Gambians in search of a better life right here in this great borough, the borough of the Bronx. They’re part of our family.”

Smoke traveled throughout the 19-story building and victims suffered from severe smoke inhalation, said Daniel A. Nigro, the city’s fire commissioner. More than 60 residents were injured.

Hassane Badr’s family, a total of 11 people from Mali, including his parents and siblings, lived in a three-bedroom apartment on the third floor. Two siblings, both children, were killed, he said, adding that a 25-year-old cousin remained unaccounted for.

At Jacobi Medical Center, Mr. Badr waited for news about his 12-year-old brother, who was suffering from serious smoke inhalation. A 5-year-old sister, who was also injured, was at another hospital.

He said there was no time yet to grieve or even think about burials.

“I’m thinking like I’m dreaming, this is not true. You hear people crying, my goodness,” said Mr. Badr, 28. “To be honest, I’m not believing it right now.”

He said his family had lived at the high-rise for at least six years, drawn to it in part for its African connection and the availability to nearby mosques.

Ahouss Balima, 20, who lived on the ninth floor with his parents and three younger sisters, who are all from Burkina Faso, said that the building’s community was “very close.”

“We meet up all the time, apartment to apartment,” said Mr. Balima. “We all know each other.”

At St. Barnabas Hospital, Musa Kabba, a local imam, said he was waiting with anguished relatives for victims to be identified. Several residents attended his mosque on Webster Avenue, the Masjid-Ur-Rahmah, he said. The mosque is a four-minute walk from the building.

“We know that people died,” Mr. Kabba said. “We don’t know who they are.”

Salim Drammeh, the president of the Gambian Youth Organization, said that the nonprofit’s center was blocks away from the apartment building and had opened to collect donations and provide emotional support to the community. He said that contributions, both in person and to an online fund-raiser, just started “flooding in.”

“This is how our community is; we love this community,” said Mr. Drammeh, 26. “Every time anybody is in trouble, we show up for each other.”

Ana Ley, Eduardo Medina and Sean Piccoli contributed reporting.

A fire at a Bronx apartment building on Sunday that killed 17 people, including eight children, started in a duplex apartment on a low floor but sent heavy smoke throughout the building, which likely prevented residents from escaping.

Daniel A. Nigro, the fire commissioner of the New York City Fire Department, said at a news conference on Sunday evening that the cause of the fire started from a malfunctioning electric space heater. But officials were working to investigate why the smoke spread so rapidly throughout the 19-story building and how it traveled.

The fire started just before 11 a.m. in a duplex apartment on the second and third floors of the building, on East 181st Street, according to the Fire Department.

Commissioner Nigro said that the fire consumed the apartment with the space heater and part of the hallway. When the residents of the apartment fled, the door to the building was left open, and it did not close by itself, he said.

Leaving the door open likely helped fuel the fire and quickly send smoke throughout the building, preventing residents from escaping, said Daniel Madrzykowski, a director of research for the Underwriters Laboratories’ Fire Safety Research Institute.

Dr. Madrzykowski said when a door is left open, like in Sunday’s fire, it provides a source of air that can help fuel a fire, which “essentially acts as a pump.”

“So as people open up the building in trying to escape, the smoke keeps blocking their path, blocking their egress,” Dr. Madrzykowski said. “The smoke is hot. The smoke is toxic. Limits visibility. It’s irritating to the eyes. It will sting your eyes, and make your eyes water. It’s a very difficult situation.”

Commissioner Nigro said the building did not have fire escapes, only interior stairways, leaving the residents with only a short window to flee as smoke made its way throughout the building.

“The smoke spread throughout the building, thus the tremendous loss of life and other people fighting for their lives right now in hospitals all over the Bronx,” Commissioner Nigro said. “I think some of them could not escape because of the volume of smoke.”

According to the Fire Research Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, when oxygen mixes with heated gases in a building, energy levels can increase, which can cause a fire to grow rapidly.

When the oxygen level in a structure drops or is depleted, a fire decays, and heat from the fire and temperatures drop, according to the research division.

“Closing the door limits smoke spread and limits the oxygen that is available for combustion,” Dr. Madrzykowski said.

A fire and choking smoke inside a 120-unit apartment building in the Bronx killed at least 17 people, including eight children, on Sunday and injured more than 60 others. New York City officials said the blaze, which drew roughly 200 firefighters and was among the city’s deadliest in decades, was likely caused by a malfunctioning space heater.

Daniel A. Nigro, the commissioner of the New York Fire Department, said smoke conditions in the building were “unprecedented,” and that victims, some of whom were pulled out of windows, had suffered from severe smoke inhalation. Those with life-threatening injuries were taken to five Bronx hospitals, officials said.

Here are some ways to help the victims:

The Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, in partnership with Mayor Eric Adams and the City of New York, is accepting donations, which will help the distribution of emergency relief supplies.

The Gambian Youth Organization, a local nonprofit that said some of its members had been affected by the fire, has started a GoFundMe campaign to support families of the victims. By Monday afternoon, more than $520,000 had been raised. The organization was also collecting physical donations, including food and clothing, at its community center at 214 East 181st Street in the Bronx.

The Bronx Democratic Party said it was collecting donations and relief supplies, including clothes, gift cards, baby items and toiletries, through Friday at various locations.

The Anthony Avenue Community Garden said it would be accepting donations of personal protective equipment, socks, underwear and coats on Monday.

BStrong, a charity started by the TV personality Bethenny Frankel that provides emergency assistance to people in crisis, said it would distribute survival kits and cash cards to help families rebuild. Donations were encouraged.

SAR Academy, at 655 West 254th Street in the Bronx, said it would be collecting water, canned goods, packaged food and other items during school hours on Monday. The school was also asking for cash donations through Venmo.

The fire that killed 17 people in a Bronx high-rise apartment building on Sunday shared two attributes with many other residential blazes: It was likely caused by heating equipment, and it was smoke, not flames, that proved most deadly.

New York fire officials said that it appeared the fire was caused by a malfunctioning space heater that had been running continuously for several days. According to the National Fire Protection Association, heating is second only to cooking as a cause of residential fires in the United States, responsible for about 50,000 fires and 500 deaths every year.

Officials said the fire on Sunday consumed the third-floor apartment where the heater was located, but not much else. But smoke from the fire poured out through a door that remained open after the occupants fled, and quickly spread through the 19-story building.

Doors can provide an effective barrier to flames and smoke for a time, which is why New York City requires that apartment doors in any building with three or more units be self-closing. The self-closing feature in the burning apartment did not work, perhaps because of a maintenance problem.

Once the smoke escaped, it quickly spread outward and upward through the building.

“It behaves like a fluid would,” said Jeff Kimble, assistant professor of fire safety at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. “It’s affected by buoyant forces.” Because the smoke is hot and therefore lighter than the surrounding air, he added, “it has a propensity to want to rise.”

Newer high-rise buildings are often required to have features to reduce the spread of smoke. These can include stairwells with higher air pressure so smoke-filled air cannot enter, and dampers that shut down parts of heating and air-conditioning systems so smoke can’t use them as a pathway to other floors.

But most older buildings don't have such safety features, Mr. Kimble said. In the Bronx building, the smoke appeared to spread quickly through stairwells and hallways, choking residents who tried to escape.

In some apartments, residents broke windows, thinking the fresh air would help. But breaking or fully opening a window can actually result in more smoke being drawn into the space, Mr. Kimble said.

Some residents remained in their apartments, using towels or fabric around doors to keep as much smoke out as possible. Mr. Kimble said such sheltering in place, although counterintuitive, is usually the best option.

“That’s still the best advice unless you know you have a clear path out,” he said. “And most of these people did not. When they opened the doors, they found out the hallways were completely dark and filled with smoke.”

The 19-story apartment building in the Bronx where a devastating fire erupted on Sunday had 120 units and was built in 1972, according to city records.

The building, at 333 East 181st Street near Tiebout Avenue, has a range of apartments, from studios to four-bedrooms. The apartment where the fire started was a two-story duplex on the second and third floors.

It had internal stairwells, not external fire escapes, and residents should have known the location of escape routes, Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro of New York City Fire Department, said.

Residents said fire alarms were often heard in the building.

Several residents said that the fire alarms were heard so frequently in the building that they were often ignored.

Kelly Magee, a spokeswoman for the property owners, said that the fire alarm system was working and that there were no known problems with the smoke alarms.

At a news conference on Sunday evening, Mayor Eric Adams said a preliminary review revealed that there had been two violations in the building, but that they were not related to the heat.

Many residents depend on Section 8 rental assistance.

The building, named Twin Parks North West, is home to working-class families, many of whom depend on Section 8 rental assistance.

The high-rise was home to many African immigrants who chose their homes for the close-knit community and short distance to local mosques. A significant number of the building’s residents were practicing Muslims and originally from Gambia, Mr. Adams said.

The building was bought in 2020.

The Bronx building is owned by a group of investors, LIHC Investment Group, Belveron Partners and Camber Property Group, who bought it as part of a $166 million deal in 2020 for eight rent-regulated buildings.

Camber Property Group, which operates affordable housing properties across New York City, most of which are in the Bronx, is one of the fastest-growing developers of affordable housing in the city.

The Bronx fire that killed 17 people on Sunday was the deadliest fire in New York since 1990, when a fire at a Bronx nightclub left 87 dead.

That fire, which was set by an arsonist after he had fought with his girlfriend, occurred at the Happy Land Social Club, an unlicensed club that lacked sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits. It had been ordered to close for fire hazards and building code infractions 16 months before the fire, but it continued to operate. The nightclub was on the second floor of a run-down building and was crowded with mostly Honduran immigrants celebrating Carnival.

The arsonist, Julio Gonzalez, a Cuban refugee, had gotten into an argument with his on-and-off-again girlfriend about her quitting her job as a coat checker at the club, before a bouncer ejected him at around 3 a.m. He walked three blocks to a gas station and filled a one-gallon container with $1 worth of gasoline from an attendant there.

At about 3:30 a.m., he went back to the club, splashed gasoline at the bottom of the staircase and lit it on fire, cutting off the only open door and filling the club with smoke. As the blaze grew, he went home.

It was one of the worst mass murders in U.S. history. Most of the people at the club suffocated from the smoke, and only six people survived, including Mr. Gonzalez’s girlfriend. She told the police about her argument with him, and when the police got to his apartment, he confessed. “I got angry, the devil got to me, and I set the fire,” he told detectives.

It was the deadliest fire in New York City since the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911, which occurred 79 years to the day before the Happy Land fire. After the Happy Land fire, the city stepped up its investigations of illegal clubs.

Mr. Gonzalez was convicted the next year and received 87 concurrent prison sentences of 25 years to life. After having served 25 years, he died in 2016 at 61 at a hospital in upstate New York, where he had been taken from prison after an apparent heart attack.

Survivors of the Bronx fire that killed at least 17 people, including eight children, on Sunday said that thick black smoke filled the building’s hallways and stairwells, making it difficult to see and breathe.

This smoke proved to be deadlier than the flames themselves, leading to all the deaths in the tragedy.

According to the National Fire Protection Association, most fire deaths nationally are caused by smoke inhalation, not burns. Toxic smoke can quickly overcome people, preventing them from reaching an otherwise accessible exit.

Smoke kills primarily by displacing the oxygen that people need to stay conscious. Victims of severe smoke inhalation experience a lack of oxygen similar to suffocation, and once their bodies are deprived of oxygen for more than a few minutes, they can experience permanent brain damage.

“It can be very fast, within a small number of minutes you can become disoriented,” said Dr. Adam Blumenberg, a medical toxicologist and emergency physician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He was speaking generally and was not directly involved in treating the victims in the Bronx fire.

Smoke poses numerous dangers: It produces particles so small they can penetrate the respiratory system’s protective filters and lodge in the lungs. The synthetic materials common in modern homes produce especially dangerous substances when they burn, according to a report by the National Fire Protection Association.

Smoke also contains several toxic gases. The most common is carbon monoxide, which can be deadly even in small quantities, because it replaces oxygen in the bloodstream. When plastics, such as PVC pipes, burn, they produce hydrogen cyanide, which interferes with cellular respiration. And phosgene is formed when household products, such as vinyl, burn: At high levels, it can cause fluid to collect in the lungs and can lead to death.

In addition to producing smoke, fire can incapacitate or kill simply by reducing oxygen levels in the air. When oxygen levels drop from 21 percent — a normal level in air — to 17 percent, coordination and judgment are impaired. When they drop to 9 percent, a person will become unconscious. At 6 percent, victims will begin to experience cardiac and respiratory arrest, and some may die, the National Fire Protection Association report said.

When victims arrive at an emergency room with severe smoke inhalation, they are typically given an antidote to the cyanide poisoning they most likely experienced. Sometimes this can even be administered in an ambulance. Patients are also flooded with oxygen in an attempt to reverse their hypoxia, or low oxygen in their tissues, Dr. Blumenberg said.

They may have throat burns or brain damage severe enough to require intubation. Sometimes, oxygen is delivered in a pressurized hyperbaric chamber, which research shows can reduce brain damage down the line. Recovery becomes a matter of “testing and time,” Dr. Blumenberg said.

Children, especially infants and babies, are particularly sensitive to hypoxia, because low oxygen affects them more quickly. That’s one reason children are often victims in residential fires.