Fourteen people, including four firefighters, were injured after a Brooklyn apartment building caught fire early Monday morning, a spokesperson for the FDNY said.
The fire began in the second-floor kitchen of a four-story brick building on 49th Street between 12th and 13th avenues, in Borough Park, around 4:30 this morning. The blaze quickly spread throughout the building, and required 138 firefighters to work for over an hour before it was extinguished.
All of the victims are currently stable, with the exception of one woman who is in critical condition. Authorities said that the woman was trapped and screaming for help because her exit was blocked by a sukkah—a wooden structure erected as part of the Jewish holiday Sukkot. Those sukkahs were blocking many front fire escapes, CBS2 reports.
"The door was lodged. We had to force entry," FDNY Deputy Chief Peter Leicht said, according to DNAinfo. "There was a woman in the rear bedroom. She was calling for help. She couldn't escape. There was iron gates on the windows so there's no way she could get out."
That woman, identified by the Daily News as Daniella Liby, was rushed to a nearby hospital by Hatzolah ambulance service.
"She inhaled smoke," Sam Shulem, her ex-husband, told the News. "She has a few burns ... She's not conscious. She's on a respirator. They've intubated her."
On Monday afternoon, the FDNY tweeted that the cause of the fire was an accidental, malfunctioning gas heater. There were no working smoke detectors found at the scene.
