The woman rescued from inside the adjoining apartment also was hospitalised, and one civilian was treated at the scene for minor injuries, while one firefighter was injured along with the five police officers, an FDNY spokesman told Reuters.Īuthorities earlier in the day had reported one fatality and eight injuries. Both women, in their 60s, were found laying on the ground outside, he said, apparently blown clear of the structure by the force of the blast. One woman who was inside the apartment at the center of the explosion was killed, and her sister was hospitalised with severe injuries, Hodgens said. All the row house units were connected under a single roof. Two or three other dwellings were heavily damaged, he said. Hodgens told reporters that the apartment where the explosion occurred and the two units on either side were destroyed. A large section of the structure’s facade appeared to be missing. In footage posted on Twitter by the New York Fire Department, firefighters could be seen training streams of water on the smoking, blackened exterior of the building. Video from the scene of Tuesday’s incident posted online showed flames and plumes of smoke outside the three-story building as police officers urged bystanders to move away from the site.
Eric Adams and FDNY Acting Chief of Department provide an update from this morning’s 2-alarm explosion at 869 Fox Street in the Bronx. That blaze was believed to have been sparked by a faulty space heater. The fiery blast in the south Bronx neighbourhood of Longwood came just nine days after 17 people died and dozens were injured in a fire that sent smoke coursing through a public housing complex in the Fordham Heights area of the Bronx, a few miles away. Hodgens said there was no immediate evidence of foul play. The mayor said gas service was shut off for the entire block after the incident. The cause of the blast is under investigation, but John Hodgens, FDNY chief of fire operations, said, “we had a report of somebody who did smell gas” before the explosion. “We saved lives today,” Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer himself, told a news conference in lauding the actions of emergency first-responders.