NEW YORK — Two men and a 6-year-old girl died when a fire swept through the second floor of a residential home in Queens on Wednesday afternoon, fire officials said. A woman and a baby boy were also critically injured.
“It’s a sad afternoon here in East Elmhurst,” Daniel A. Nigro, the city’s fire commissioner, said, standing in front of the burned-out building.
The Fire Department said it received a call at 4:09 p.m. that a fire was raging at a two-floor home at 2349 93rd St. in East Elmhurst, Queens. The call came from a person living on the first floor of the building, who said a smoke alarm was going off upstairs.
Firefighters arrived four minutes later and carried the two men and young girl from the still-burning home but were unable to save them, according to fire officials. The woman and a 1-year-old boy had already gotten out but were badly injured.
The victims of the fire were not immediately identified. One was pronounced dead on the scene. The four others were transported to the Elmhurst Hospital Center and the NewYork-Presbyterian Queens hospital, where two later died. The woman and the baby boy were in extremely critical condition, officials said.
The blaze was so intense and the outside temperatures so high that more than 100 firefighters from 25 units were required to put it out, fire officials said.
“A hot, humid day like this, you want to keep the firefighters fresh and rotate them in on a quicker turnaround as they operate,” Jim Long, a department spokesman, said.
The cause of the fire was still under investigation Wednesday evening. Fire marshals dug through the second-floor rubble as neighbors stood behind a caution tape and watched.
Nigro said the circumstances of the fire were puzzling.
“It’s quite unusual at that time in the afternoon to have a fire trap five occupants in a private dwelling,” Nigro said. “Without an obvious accidental cause, the department treats it as a suspicious fire, which doesn’t mean we treat it as an arson fire. It means that there’s nothing obvious yet that points to the cause of the fire.”
The ravaged interior of the home could be seen from the street, whose traffic was cut off by a number of fire trucks.
Willie C. Martin Jr., 82, who has lived on the street since 1985, said the firefighters were unable to push through the front door of the house and instead broke open the second-floor window with a ladder. “That’s when I saw the flames,” he said.
Firefighters then pulled out two men and for a short time tried to revive them with CPR on the front lawn. Martin said he did not see the 6-year-old girl. “It all seemed like a blur,” he said.
Martin, a retired social worker, said that he knew occupants of the apartment informally and believed they belonged to one family.
“Living in a city, we all have that innate terror inside of us that we don’t know until it happens,” said Martin, as he sat on his stoop, eyeing the fire marshals entering and leaving the home. “This is when that comes to the forefront.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.