If only so many seemingly minor factors had not aligned, then 17 people, including eight children, might now be alive.
“I dropped on my knees and started to pray to God and said, ‘Please help me. Please help us,’” said Tysena Jacobs. 68, who was making breakfast in her 15th-floor apartment when acrid smoke started billowing under the front door. “It was like a nightmare.”This one, all too real, was endured by hundreds spread over 19 floors — taxi drivers and teachers, the elderly and newborns, many of them west African immigrants.
Investigators say an electric space heater set up in one of the bedrooms of a duplex on the third floor of the building had been on for a “prolonged period” when an unspecified malfunction set off a fire around 11 a.m. Soon, flames began billowing from the unit’s windows. By that point, smoke was spreading fast. When residents of 3N fled, the door to the unit was left open and stayed that way, investigators say, despite New York City law that requires entrances to apartments and stairwells be spring-loaded so they close automatically. The company that owns the building said in a statement Monday that maintenance workers repairing a lock on that door recently had inspected the self-closing mechanism and found it working.
When firefighters arrived a few minutes after the blaze was reported, they broke down her door and rushed all three family members out a window onto a waiting ladder. “In a building that doesn’t have sprinklers in it, that has very little fire safety in it, this door became literally life and death for hundreds of people,” he said.
“I didn’t move from there for at least seven hours because I didn’t know where the fire was,” she said.
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