A 78-Year-Old Woman Dies and 21 Firefighters Are Hurt as a Five-Alarm Fire Tears Through Three Flushing Homes

A 78-year-old woman died and nearly two dozen people were injured Saturday after a five-alarm fire swept through a row of century-old wood-frame homes in Flushing, Queens, the New York City Fire Department said. The woman was taken to New York-Presbyterian, where she later died. Her name has not been released.

The fire was reported just before 10 a.m. on 41st Road near College Point Boulevard, in a dense residential block a few minutes' walk from downtown Flushing. It began on the first floor of a two-story home that sits in a row of five attached buildings, all of them built in 1930. By the time the first companies arrived, two of the structures were fully involved, and flames had begun extending into a third. At least one resident was trapped on the second floor of the building where the fire started and had to be carried out by firefighters.

Twenty-one FDNY members were transported to area hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, most of them heat exhaustion, smoke inhalation and minor sprains and strains sustained pulling hose lines and cutting through the roofs of adjoining buildings on a hot July morning. A second resident was treated for minor injuries.

Chief of Fire Operations Kevin Woods described a building type that gives firefighters almost nothing to work with once a fire gets past the room of origin. "The walls are wood, the floors are wood, the roof is also made of wood, so fire travels very, very rapidly," Woods said. Homes of that vintage in Queens frequently share common cocklofts, the open space between the top-floor ceiling and the roof, which allows fire to run laterally across attached buildings above the heads of crews working inside.

By noon the fire had extended to two more buildings on 41st Road between College Point Boulevard and Frame Place, prompting the escalation to five alarms and drawing more than 200 firefighters and EMS personnel to a block that is only a few hundred feet long. Companies got the blaze under control shortly after 1 p.m. Video from the scene showed a column of black smoke visible from Citi Field and the Van Wyck Expressway.

Several of the buildings sustained heavy structural damage, and multiple families were displaced. The Red Cross was called to assist residents who could not return home. Flushing is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in Queens, and the affected block is a mix of older single-family homes that have been subdivided over decades into multiple units, a pattern that complicates head counts during evacuations because the number of occupants in a building is often unknown to the department when it arrives.

Fire marshals are investigating the cause, which had not been determined as of Saturday evening. The department said the origin was on the first floor of the initial building but released no further detail while the investigation continues.