By Annia Ciezadlo, Photo: Seth Wenig/AP, The Guardian, January 14, 2022
In New York, some things never change. If you die in a fire, it’s always your fault. When a fire started in a heater and ripped down the hallway of an apartment building in December 1998, killing four people in a blast of heat and smoke, city officials framed the fire as a tragedy that could have been avoided if people had only remembered to close their doors. “People should close the door behind them when leaving a [burning] apartment,” said then-fire chief Daniel Nigro – now the city’s fire commissioner.
“They would not have died if they had stayed in their apartments,” said the city’s then-mayor, the now-infamous Rudolph Giuliani, musing that it’s “easier to blame things on mechanisms rather than on what human beings understand, do or don’t do”.
When a space heater torched a Bronx apartment building on 9 January and killed 17 people, making it the city’s deadliest fire in decades, New York’s brand-new mayor Eric Adams knew exactly what to say: “Close the door, close the door,” said Adams on Monday, the day after the fire. “Muscle memory is everything, and if we can drill that in, we can save lives by closing the doors, not only in the city but across the entire globe.”
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