Residents of the Twin Parks apartment complex in the Bronx borough of New York City are returning to the building on Tuesday in hopes of retrieving their belongings.
Seventeen people, including eight children, were killed on Sunday when a fire erupted in the building. Although the fire did not spread, smoke and soot traveled throughout the 19-story structure, filling rooms and stairwells. The building has been cleared for return, although residents are not allowed to relocate to their apartments. Some are still reeling from the images they saw.
"I saw the firefighters taking the children out. Their lives have been snatched away in a second," said resident Renee Howard, who remained inside her apartment and near windows. "I don't want to go back there. It's such a heartache."
As many decide to return to their homes to retrieve important items, they continue to be haunted by the faulty safety measures that plagued the building. Many residents recall frequently hearing fire alarms go off due to them being broken, which they thought was the case on Sunday until it was nearly too late.
In addition to the faulty fire alarms, the complex also does not have any fire escapes for residents to safely climb out of, so many people attempted to escape the building in narrow stairwells.
The door of the apartment where the fire began also did not have a properly functioning self-closing mechanism, despite such mechanisms being mandatory for all New York City buildings.
Additionally, the building did not have sprinkler systems installed outside of the compactor and laundry rooms.
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"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."
Most nightmares, though, are solitary.
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. From the outside, their brown block building set on a cement corner appeared anonymous. But inside it was a community, only vertical. That amplified the damage and the grief.
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.
Glenn Corbett, a fire science professor at John Jay College in New York City, said closed doors are vital to containing fire and smoke, especially in buildings without systems to douse a blaze.
"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.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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