by Natasha Anderson, Jennifer Smith and Andrea Blanco at The Daily Mail
Fire experts said the design of a nearly 50-year-old Bronx building and its older fire safety features likely contributed to the blaze caused by a faulty space heater turning the complex into a smoke-filled chimney on Sunday morning.
The inferno erupted in a third-floor duplex in the 19-floor Twin Parks North West building, which was built in 1973.
Andrew Ansbro, president of the FDNY Uniformed Firefighters Association Union, said the ageing building was poorly equipped to deal with a fire.
‘It was at a building that was built under federal guidelines way back when, so it’s not up to New York City fire codes,’ he told the New York Daily News.
It has no fire escapes, as they weren’t a requirement when the building was constructed. At the time, the city had banned exterior fire escapes. However, as Sunday’s inferno burned the stairwells, which are meant to be used as emergency exits, quickly filled with smoke.
Fire officials cited the system of ‘scissor stairs’ inside the complex as a design that makes it more difficult to feed a hose through in the building.
Twin Parks North West is equipped with self-sealing fire doors, but it is unclear how many of them were open. Investigators said at least one, located on the 15th floor of the high-rise, was not shut, allowing smoke to spread.
Per city law, Unit 3N – where the fire originated – had a self-closing door, however, New York City Mayor Eric Adams confirmed Monday the door failed to completely shut, likely the result of a ‘maintenance issue’.
‘We’re looking to determine if there was some form of malfunctioning of the door,’ Adams told CNN Monday morning.
‘We have a law here that requires doors to close automatically. We are looking at [that] through the investigation with the fire marshals, who will be extremely thorough with the investigation.’
Fire investigators tested most of the doors in the complex on Sunday and found a handful of other units had doors that did not close automatically, as designed, a fire official confirmed to the New York Times.
The complex also has a sprinkler system, but only in its laundry and contractor room. Large, new apartment buildings in the city are required to have sprinkler systems and interior doors that swing shut automatically to contain smoke and deprive fires of oxygen, however those rules don’t apply to older buildings.
Additionally, many residents ignored the fire alarms when they went off on Sunday because they sound so frequently as false alarms.
‘First we heard the fire alarm go off. Numerous times,’ said Michael Joseph, 32, who lived on the sixth floor with his uncle. But we didn’t think nothing of it, because normally people in the building, they smoke and tend to set it off. So we thought it was probably just people playing.’…