Bronx, Philadelphia fires mirror toll of deaths among Black, poor Americans

Anton Moore knew he had to help when he got the news about a fire in North Philly’s Fairmount neighborhood.

Three sisters and nine of their children perished in the early morning hours of Jan. 5, as a blaze raced through the upper floors of a perilously crowded duplex owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority. 

Among the children who died were a young ballerina, a rising basketball star and a toddler who guarded her favorite doll with the fierce instincts of a mother.

It was the city’s deadliest fire of the last 100 years. The smoke detectors in the duplex’s top unit, home to four bedrooms and 18 people, were all nonfunctional or stripped of their batteries. 

Just four days after the Fairmount fire, an even more lethal fire struck the Bronx in New York. In a federally subsidized high-rise, smoke poured through fire doors that failed to close automatically as legally required. The smoke ascended 10 floors, choking the building’s residents as they tried to flee. Eight children and nine adults died, the city’s most lethal fire in decades. Most of the victims were immigrants from the West African country of The Gambia.

Amid the unthinkable, advocates for housing and equity saw grim and familiar similarities. Both buildings were federally subsidized affordable housing meant for low-income residents. Both were older buildings in which some fire safety equipment was either defective or nonexistent. And in both fires, the victims were people of color. The horror of each has even sent cities in neighboring New Jersey to review their fire safety measures.

For the first time since the 1970s, fire deaths have risen nationally over the past decade, according to data kept by the Federal Emergency Management Administration.

The brunt of fire and other unintentional deaths has long been borne by low-income and nonwhite people, according to journalist Jessie Singer, author of the forthcoming book “There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster.” 

“It’s not only that Black people are (more) likely to die in residential fire, it is also that Indigenous people are twice as likely to die in a residential fire,” said Singer, who has tracked racial disparities in unintentional deaths stretching back to 1900.  

Among the 21 multiple-fatality fires tracked by FEMA in Philadelphia over the past five years, the victims were overwhelmingly people of color, according to an analysis by the USA TODAY Network Atlantic Region. Two thirds of these fires occurred in majority-BIPOC census tracts, and in census tracts with poverty rates above 25%. 

In New York, all 10 community districts with the highest number of structure fires over the 12 months ending in May 2021 were majority Black or Hispanic, according to nonprofit news site Documented NY.

The same is true of many other types of accidental deaths that involve public infrastructure, Singer said, whether drownings or pedestrian deaths. 

“I look back as far as 1900, and nonwhite people die by accident at a higher rate every year through 2002, when the opioid epidemic complicates the narrative a little,” Singer said. “What we’re talking about here is, no matter what, systemic racism that results in differently dangerous conditions of the built environments of our workplaces, of our homes, of our roads.” 

Calamitous fires affecting immigrants and people of color go back deep in the nation’s history. The disastrous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York, which killed 146 mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant workers, inspired mass outrage and modern worker safety regulations after it was revealed that the factory owners had locked the workroom doors to discourage theft.

In 1993, government researcher Chukwudi Onwuachi-Saunders presented a report to the Centers for Disease Control on the reasons behind racial disparities in unintentional deaths. Residential fire deaths, drownings and pedestrian accidents were all dramatically higher for African Americans than for white people. 

What she found was that the higher rate of deaths tracked to differences in income, resources and safety measures. Pedestrian deaths corresponded to a lack of cars and access to safe crosswalks. Fire deaths mirrored deficient safety equipment and substandard housing. 

“These risk factors appear to be related to socioeconomic status of the victim to a greater extent than one’s race,” Onwuachi-Saunders wrote.

Community activist Moore, who grew up in Philadelphia’s public housing, said reactions to the deadly fires in Philadelphia and the Bronx are cycling the wrong “why” questions among those who may not understand the complexities of different living situations.

It isn’t rare for people who are not immediate family to stay with you when you are living in subsidized housing, Moore said.

“When you look at people saying, ‘Oh, so many people lived in one house,’ you know that’s where we come from as African Americans,” Moore said. “That’s what we had to endure coming up living in poverty.”

In an emailed statement, Philadelphia Housing Authority spokeswoman Nicole Tillman painted the Fairmount deaths as unavoidable once the fire began.

“Unfortunately, the reality is that in this case, the tragedy was caused by the contact of the lighter to the Christmas tree, sparking a fire that spread so quickly it made escape virtually impossible for the family members who were sleeping on the third floor of the home,” wrote Tillman, citing fire investigators’ belief that a 5-year-old child accidentally ignited the blaze.

In a virtual panel in January, Philadelphia fire commissioner Adam Thiel said the root problem was the lack of safe and affordable housing, noting the lack of working smoke detectors, sprinklers or fire escape.

“It is much too simple and it’s wrong to blame a 5-year-old, or blame a family that really doesn’t have any other options, for the fire problem in the United States,” he said. “It’s much bigger than that.”

Human error will always occur, said author Singer, and so will malfunctions like the space heater suspected of starting the blaze in the Bronx. Looking to the immediate causes of each fire provides false reassurances and a person to blame, while overlooking structural inequities. What we can affect, she said, are the well-known fire safety measures that determine whether a small spark becomes a grave tragedy.

“We know why people die in fires,” Singer said. “It’s because (substandard) houses burn more quickly, because they don’t have any early warning systems, and because fire personnel might be further away … Accidental death is not rocket science. The solutions already exist. We know them. It’s just a question of where and when we’re spending the money, and the political will to give people access to them.”

Amid the anguish, Moore, who is president of nonprofit Unity in the Community, said he collected items for Fairmount fire survivors: clothes, shoes and even gift cards. The gesture was not uncommon. That particular tragedy reminded him of another instance when he rendered aid — a 2014 fatal fire in the area that killed four children and destroyed over 10 homes. 

“We have to find a way to see how we help these families on the ground going through one of the most traumatic experiences that they’ve ever been through,” Moore said.

Sandwiched between Pennsylvania and New York is, of course, New Jersey, which has seen its share of mass casualty fires in multifamily housing over the years where the victims were persons of color. 

In July 2018, five Latino children died from injuries in a blaze in a three-story apartment building in Union City. According to a NorthJersey.com report, the children were ages 2 to 13 with two dying in the fire, two more dying later in the hospital and one three days later. Investigators determined the cause of the fire was a malfunctioning power strip on the first floor with sparks setting fire to flammable materials.

A blaze that burned through a Paterson rooming house in 2010 killed four people, all African Americans. Those who survived contended that faulty wiring in the building sparked the fire. The building’s owner, Florence Brown, pleaded guilty in 2013 to a third-degree charge of causing widespread injury by failing to make necessary electrical repairs.

In some of the Garden State’s largest cities, fire inspectors are starting to recheck high-rise structures and public housing in response to the ones in Philadelphia and the Bronx.

Paterson and Fort Lee have already embarked on these additional inspections.

Fire inspectors in Paterson, the state’s third most-populated city with over 159,000 residents, are doing a special round of Fire Department safety inspections, as reported by NorthJersey.com.

Those inspections of the city’s 39 high-rise buildings will encompass fire alarms, self-closing fire protection doors, smoke barriers and standpipes. These buildings, which are seven stories or higher, are already subject to annual inspections under state law.

Paterson Fire Chief Brian McDermott said in an interview that very few of Paterson’s high-rise buildings have state-of-the-art sprinkler systems. That’s because they were built before that requirement was added to state law in 1977. 

Fort Lee, a town of 35,000 residents that is a 15-minute drive from the site of the Bronx fire, also does additional inspections of its high rise buildings.

There are 20 buildings in the borough that are higher than the 19-story Bronx building where the fatal fire occurred. Eleven of them were built before 1977.

However, at least one city is not going the route of Paterson or Fort Lee.

New Jersey’s second-largest city, Jersey City, does not have any plans to do additional inspections. This in a city with at least 120 high-rise buildings, including 40 buildings at the same height or higher than the Bronx apartment building.

Jersey City Fire Chief Steven McGill told NorthJersey.com recently that a deputy chief and battalion chief are assigned not to do actual inspections, but to make visits to high-rise buildings as what he called “high-rise coordinators” to make sure they have trained fire safety managers on staff in accordance with local ordinance. This is a longtime practice, McGill said, due in part to the lack of manpower to check all of the high-rise buildings in the city.

“What my chiefs do is they go out and they talk to [the fire safety managers]. Make sure they are following up on everything they’re supposed to do,” McGill said. “They’re supposed to submit a fire safety plan for that whole building so people in the building are aware of what to do when there’s a fire. How to protect in place or evacuate and track people that are in there.”

McGill said the fire department also visits smaller buildings and residential homes to do free fire safety surveys and install free smoke detectors. He noted that state laws do not allow for inspections for one- and two-family homes, where he observed most fires in Jersey City occur.

Meanwhile, the mass loss of life hangs heavy, immediate resolutions elusive. 

“Our hearts are bleeding right now and we’re really sorry and saddened by this incredible, unimaginable tragedy,” said Philadelphia Housing Authority CEO Kelvin Jeremiah at an emotional media conference Jan. 6 about the Fairmount fire.

The PHA — Philadelphia’s largest landlord at nearly 14,000 units — had racked up a more than $1 billion backlog of capital and deferred maintenance needs, Jeremiah said, and needed federal assistance to make upgrades.  

Jeremiah noted that the Fairmount duplex had no outstanding fire code violations. The century-old building was not required to be updated with fire escapes or sprinkler systems, even as its only exit doors were located on the ground floor. The most recent inspection in May 2021 reported functioning smoke detectors.  

That call for funding was both familiar and frustrating, said Jenna Collins, an attorney with nonprofit Community Legal Services, which works with low-income tenants. 

“It does feel like it’s been a little bit of a throw-up-our-hands approach: ‘You know, we need the $1 billion to make the repairs,'” Collins said. “And don’t get me wrong, I want the billion dollars from the federal government…. But the solution (otherwise) can’t be ‘Well, then we just have to put low-income people in substandard housing.'” 

Fire safety is a problem throughout low-income rentals, Collins said, not just in federally subsidized housing. 

She noted that space heaters were a common solution by renters when a building’s heat is insufficient — and that other tenants have resorted to using their ovens for heat in frigid winter temperatures. 

“We see tenants that have issues with smoke detectors that are malfunctioning or not working. With old housing stock and rowhomes with narrow stairways, it’s the ability to get in and out of buildings,” Collins said. ”As has been pretty heavily reported, the Philadelphia code doesn’t require sprinklers or fire extinguishers. And fire escapes: Most units don’t have those things.”  

Since fire code doesn’t require modernization of many older buildings home to low-income workers, her clients have little legal recourse even if they believe their homes to be unsafe, Collins said.   

“It’s about a society that is willing to say, ‘Here’s the standard that we’re going to allow for poor people’s housing. If you have more market power, then yeah, we’re going to get you a sprinkler system and we’re going to get you a wired-in smoke detector, and maybe your landlord will provide you with a fire extinguisher.’” Collins said. 

“It certainly says something about a society that is willing to tolerate that.” 

Kelly Powers contributed to this story. Matthew Korfhage, Ricardo Kaulessar, Jasmine Vaughn-Hall and Powers are reporters for the USA TODAY Network’s Atlantic Region How We Live team. For unlimited access to the most important news, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

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