Welcome to the Wire Brief. We pull the stories the job is talking about, send you to the reporters who did the work, and tell you what we think it means when the tones drop. This one covers Wednesday through Saturday, and one job sits over all of it.
Eight dead in Flatbush. The search ran through the night, in the rain, next to a wall that could go.
At 4:01 p.m. on Wednesday, November 11, the three-story apartment building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue came down into an open excavation next door at 2625 Bedford Avenue. amNewYork reports that more than 250 members responded and that workers from the construction site were among those trapped. A company returning from another run was there in about a minute, saw the dust and took it for a fire, the New York Post reports. The collapse pulled the side wall off 1323 Flatbush, and Firehouse reports that a secondary collapse of that building was the main hazard through the night. A pregnant woman was reached alive at about 6:30 p.m. after members broke through a large piece of debris. Around 1:30 a.m. a beam shifted and struck a firefighter in the head, and he was listed as stable, amNewYork reports. More victims were found before dawn. The final count is eight dead, two of them children, and 18 injured, four of them firefighters. The department ended the search Thursday afternoon and turned the site over to the Department of Buildings and the NYPD, Brooklyn Paper reports.
Fire Wire’s take
Start with the people. Eight lives, two of them kids, in a building that was standing at four o’clock on a weekday afternoon. Some of them were at home. Some were at work in the pit. Nothing we write changes that for those families.
For the job: the first company in had no assignment and a dust cloud where a building used to be. Surface victims come out first, then the voids, by hand, with buckets and saws, while somebody watches the wall next door. The chief of department said the void searches reminded him of the Trade Center. Members who were there know what he means.
A beam moved at 1:30 in the morning and a member took it in the head. Four firefighters were hurt in all. That is the cost of searching a pile that has not finished settling, and it is why the slow pace is not optional. The department said on Thursday it had not gone from rescue to recovery, and it searched like it meant that until the pile was cleared.
The pit next door: what the city has said, and what it has not
No cause has been determined. Brooklyn Paper reports that crews were excavating at 2625 Bedford when the building fell, and that a city stop-work order briefly blamed unsafe construction before the Department of Buildings called that wording inaccurate and corrected it. THE CITY reports that the site was approved for the excavation and foundation of a three-story building, that a September filing for a nine-story building with a deeper dig was still under review, and that the department is looking at whether the work moved too quickly. The city’s sweep of other sites tied to the companies involved grew from about 100 on Thursday to 160 on Friday. An outside engineering firm is being brought in, and the project’s special inspector asked to withdraw the day after the collapse. THE CITY also reports prior violations for a demolition contractor at the site and 98 open housing violations at the building that fell.
Fire Wire’s take
The city has not named a cause. Neither will we. There is a lot of paper in this story already, and paper is not a finding.
For the job: an old building beside a fresh hole is worth knowing about before the run comes in. A foundation leans on the soil around it as well as the soil under it. If there is an excavation in your first-due, look at what is standing next to it, how close, and who lives there. That is building inspection in the oldest sense of the words.
For everybody else: if there is digging next to your building and you see new cracks, doors that stop closing, or brick coming off the wall, do not wait for somebody else to report it. Get out and call 911. We do not know what anyone saw here. We know the building did not leave time to think about it.
Sunset Park: a vigil, three names, and a question about window bars
We covered the Sunset Park fire in the last brief. Here is what changed. On Wednesday night the neighborhood held a vigil outside 653 58th Street for the six people killed on November 5. Brooklyn Paper reports that police have now identified three of the six, that a church group pledged $10,000 to each victim’s family, and that members arrived at 1:39 a.m. to heavy fire in the basement and on both floors with people trapped. Lithium-ion batteries were found in the home. The marshals are still investigating and no cause has been named. A Council member at the vigil raised a second question: whether security bars on the windows kept people from getting out. She said plainly that nobody knows yet.
Fire Wire’s take
The families first, again. Six wreaths on a sidewalk in front of a boarded-up house. The community is carrying them, and that is how it should be.
On the bars: nobody with authority has said they played a part in this fire, so we will not either. As a general matter, every firefighter knows what fixed bars do. They slow the member coming in through the window and they stop the person trying to come out of it.
For everybody else: if you have bars, the ones on a bedroom window should open from the inside without a key, and everyone who sleeps in that room should know how. Try it tonight, not during the fire.
433 batteries in a box in Fort Greene
The New York Post reports that a fire on August 15 destroyed 433 e-bike batteries stored in a shipping container at Flushing and Carlton avenues. The container belonged to PopWheels, one of three companies the Fire Department and the Department of Transportation authorized in 2024 to run outdoor battery-swapping kiosks. It went as an all-hands and nobody was hurt. The department told the Post the company broke its safety agreement by charging and storing packs in unapproved cabinets, and that it could not determine whether that caused the fire. The company says nothing was charging in the container at the time and is contesting some of the summonses it has since received. The Council’s emergency hearing on battery fires is still set for Friday, November 20.
Fire Wire’s take
Last week we said the number moves when there is a safe place to charge that is not a hallway. We still think so. A steel box on the street that burns with nobody hurt is a different day than one battery by an apartment door with a family asleep behind it.
But the rules for storing these things in bulk exist because of what 433 of them do at once. For the job: these kiosks and the storage behind them are in your first-due now. Know where they are, the same way you would want to know about a battery plant going up down the block. How these fires behave is in Lithium-Ion Fires: What’s Really Going Up in Flames.
Never forget
Thursday was 134 years since the Harbeck Stores fire. On November 12, 1892, Brooklyn Firemen Wayland A. Estes and John F. Spaulding of Engine 4 were operating a hoseline on the fifth floor of a warehouse on Furman Street, on the waterfront south of the Brooklyn Bridge, when the floor gave way and the floors below followed. Firefighter Close Calls carries the account: the building was packed with baled cotton, jute and sisal, and investigators found that the stock, soaked by the streams used to hold the fire, put more weight on the upper floors than they could carry. They were recovered the next afternoon. Say their names in the kitchen this week.
Bottom line
A building that fell on a weekday afternoon, a house that burned while people slept, and a box of batteries that burned with nobody near it. The thread is what sits next to you: the hole beside the foundation, the bars on the window, the battery by the door. Look at yours. And if you want to do something for Flatbush, the YMCA at 1401 Flatbush Avenue is taking gift cards and unopened toiletries for the displaced families, as Brooklyn Paper reports.
The Wire Brief links to original reporting by the outlets named above. Facts are theirs. Opinions are ours and do not represent the FDNY or the City of New York. Got a story we should weigh in on? Send a tip.
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