As told by one of the first firefighters to respond to alarms at 331 E. 181 St. in the Bronx just before 11 am on Sunday, they were met by impenetrable smoke when they stepped from the stairwell into the main hallway on the third floor of the 19-story building.
“It gets real, real quick,” the firefighter later told The Daily Beast.
They knew from too many other fires that this likely meant the door to one of the apartments was open, feeding the flames with oxygen and allowing smoke to fill whatever parts of the building it can reach.
“It’s blacked out… hot… we gotta find the doorway,” the firefighter later said.
The most immediate problem was to find their way in absolute blackness. They had seen when they arrived a man perched in a third-story window that suggested the possible location. Firefighters from Ladder 56 started down the hallway, feeling their way forward in the darkness, the heat forcing them to crawl.
They encountered an unconscious body. And then, sure enough, they came to an open doorway.
An officer from Ladder 56 took a position at the door for the few moments before firefighters from Engine 48 reached there with a hose.
The firefighters entered, the ladder company sweeping their hands in search of victims and encountering several unconscious people as the engine company directed water in the likely direction of the fire. The water steamed, but the heat did not abate and the smoke became only thicker, if that was possible.
“The fire’s not going out,” the firefighter later told The Daily Beast.
Firefighters hoist a ladder to rescue people through their windows.
Theodore Parisienne/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via GettyThe mystery was solved the next moment when a firefighter from another company found an open doorway to a second duplex apartment, down the hall and to the right. The members of Engine 48 shifted to that apartment and battled their way into a raging fire that had reportedly been started by a space heater in the lower half of the residence and spread to the upper.
The blaze was so intense the firefighters from Engine 48 suffered burns despite their protective bunker gear. They kept on, pushing toward the source of the fire beyond the bottom of an interior stairway, to the lower level that had no exit or entrance. They were battling the equivalent of a dreaded cellar fire. Firefighters usually ascend to a fire, as its heat and smoke are rising. Here they were descending into an inferno that was roaring up toward them.
“A cellar fire in a high-rise building,” a firefighter later remarked.
The members of Engine 48 stopped only when the Scott VibraAlerts in their masks signaled that they were running out of air. Another company took over.
When the fire was out, the firefighters wanted the door open to allow smoke to escape from the hallway and out the apartment windows. They moved to accelerate the venting by knocking down some of the hallway walls, which in a city-funded housing project would have been cinder blocks but in this privately owned and federally subsidized building were two layers of sheetrock. There was a four-inch gap between the layers and one firefighter suggested this might have afforded the smoke an added route to rise up through the building. Residents of the upper floor would suspect that smoke had also reached them via vents in the kitchen and bathrooms.
Other residents blindly fleeing the thick smoke on high were collapsing as they reached the third floor. The firefighters would remove a person and return to find another slumped there. They would remove that one only to find yet another. Many of those still ambulatory were dazed.
Meanwhile, 200 other firefighters had responded, raising ladders, assisting everyone they could to safety and carrying out the dead, nine children among them. FDNY dispatcher Jimmy Raffery was on his last day before retiring after 25 years and by all accounts he did a masterful job summoning the many units.
Broken windows and charred bricks mark the exterior of the building.
Scott Heins/GettyUp on the 12th floor, Saudi Hammed was spending a quiet Sunday morning with her two children, 8 year-old Deborah and 5 year-old Memsah, when they told her they smelled smoke.
“I didn’t believe them and go to take a shower” she later told The Daily Beast. “Then I hear sirens going crazy.”
Down below, one emergency vehicle after another was arriving. She now could see smoke was coming into the apartment even though the door and windows were closed. She opened the door slightly and gazed out.
“You can’t see anything,” she said. “It’s all smoke. That’s all you can see. Black smoke. Is this real?”
She quickly shut the door, then began pounding on it to summon anybody who might be out there.
“I need help! I need help!” she remembered calling out.
There was no reply and she returned to the window. Memsah stood with her, holding the family Bible.
“He said, ‘Mommy, how are we going to be OK?” she remembered.
She feared she would not be able to get her children through the blackness outside and down to safety.
“They will die,” she remembered telling herself.
She would recall a flurry of wild thoughts.
“So should I jump?… Should I throw the kids?... Should I hide them under the bed?”
She decided that their only possible chance, however remote, lay beyond the door.
“Keep praying [but] leave the Bible,” she told her son. “Let’s go and have faith.”
Hammed had them put on the mask they use at school to ward off COVID, figuring it might offer some slight protection as they ventured out. They blindly found their way to the stairwell. She instructed them to hold onto the banister which served as a steadying guide as they started down.
“They are crying, they are scared,” she later recalled. She says that she told them, “Calm down, everything’s gonna be alright.”
Residents take refuge at a school cafeteria after a fire erupted at their 19-story apartment building.
Scott Heins/GettyFirefighters ascended past them. She and her children continued their descent into darkness, still conscious as they passed the third floor landing, finally reaching the outside paramedics frantically working on the less fortunate. Other mothers were screaming over unresponsive children.
“Mommy, our house is gone,” Memsah told his mother. “How are we going to survive?”
Hammed and her children spent the night on a friend’s sofa.
“They didn’t sleep,” she said.
She returned to the building on Monday morning, hoping to find some assistance. She stood across the street, chilled by an icy wind.
“This morning, when I blow my nose, I still have a little black,” she said.
A man in a wheelchair arrived at the building, He proved to be Rick Gropper, one of the owners. He was paralyzed in an automobile accident when he was in his early teens. He is now a paralympic skiing champion and a member of Mayor Eric Adams’ transition team, as well as a real-estate investor. He and his partners only acquired the building two years ago, and it was built in 1972, so he had no part in the construction. But he may well face questions about why two doors that legally required to be self-closing may have remained open after the fire broke out. He could not be reached for comment.
The tenant of the apartment where the fire began told the New York Post on Monday that he may have pushed the door so far open in his panic to get his daughter to safety that it did not function. The FDNY said the door may have “malfunctioned.”
The rigs for Ladder 56 and Engine 44 pulled up to inspect the aftermath. A mural painted on their firehouse door shows a firefighter with a bowed head flanked by two angels.
“The Day the Angels Cried.
September 11. 2001”
The firefighters had done their fallen predecessors proud racing into danger on Jan. 9, 2021, when the Angels cried for at least 17 people who perished after a space heater started a fire in a duplex whose door then remained open.
