US: 9 children among 19 dead in NYC apartment fire

New York, Jan 10 (AP) A malfunctioning electric space heater caused a fire that killed 19 people, including nine children, at a New York City apartment building in the Bronx, the fire commissioner said on Sunday.
FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro said the fire quickly consumed the duplex unit spanning the second and third floors where it started.
Mayor Eric Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul and US Sen. Charles Schumer, all Democrats, spoke at the evening news conference near the scene.
Flames shot from apartment windows as smoke filled the building. One resident rescued by firefighters said he’d become numb to fire alarms because of frequent false alarms.
Stefan Ringel, a senior adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, confirmed the death toll. He said the children killed were 16 years old or younger.
Thirteen people remained hospitalised in critical condition, Ringel said. In all, more than five dozen people were hurt. Most of the victims had severe smoke inhalation, fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said.
Adams called the fire’s toll ?horrific” and said ?this is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times.”
Firefighters ?found victims on every floor and were taking them out in cardiac and respiratory arrest,? Nigro said. ?That is unprecedented in our city.?
Approximately 200 firefighters responded to the building on East 181st Street around 11 am on Sunday. Initial reports said the fire was on the third floor of the 19-story building, with flames blowing out the windows.
News photographers captured images of firefighters entering the upper floors of the burning building on a ladder, multiple limp children being given oxygen after they were carried out and evacuees with faces covered in soot.
Building resident Luis Rosa said he was awakened on Sunday by a fire alarm, but dismissed it at first, thinking it was one of the building’s periodic false alarms.
But when a notification popped up on his phone, he and his mother began to worry. By then, smoke began wafting into his 13th-floor apartment and he heard sirens in the distance.
He opened the front door, but the smoke had gotten too thick for an escape, he said.
?Once I opened the door, I couldn’t even see that far down the hallway,? Rosa said. ?So I said, OK, we can’t run down the stairs because if we run down the stairs, we’re going to end up suffocating. All we could do was wait,? he said.
Another resident, Vernessa Cunningham said she raced home from church after getting an alert on her cellphone that the building was on fire.