A large fire tore through a four-story building in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, leaving 14 people without a home and destroying two ground-floor businesses. Despite the scale of the blaze and the thick smoke that poured from the structure, the Fire Department says no one was hurt, and investigators are now working to determine what sparked it.
The fire broke out on Fulton Street near Throop Avenue, where video shared on the Citizen app captured thick black smoke billowing from the building. According to the FDNY, the flames erupted shortly after 1:30 in the afternoon on Monday, taking hold inside a business on the ground floor before climbing through the upper stories of the building.
Deputy Fire Chief Patrick Sheridan said the ground floor was a split storefront, with the flames starting in the clothing store on the right side and then spreading behind the cell phone shop on the left. Both of those businesses were destroyed, leaving the commercial heart of the building gutted and the apartments above it uninhabitable.
The response was substantial, with more than 140 fire and EMS personnel rushing to the scene. Crews fought the flames for a little over an hour before bringing the fire under control, working to keep it from spreading to neighboring buildings on the busy Brooklyn block.
With the building no longer safe to live in, the American Red Cross stepped in to help those forced out. The organization registered eight adults and six children, 14 people in all, for emergency assistance, providing support to the families suddenly left without a place to stay heading into the holiday week.
Neighbors described a frightening scene as the fire took hold, recalling how they looked out their windows, could see nothing but black smoke and ran outside as alarms sounded. The cause of the fire remains under investigation, and officials had not said what may have ignited it inside the ground-floor storefront.