A fire broke out on the sixth floor of St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx early Sunday, prompting a massive FDNY response that had the blaze under control within roughly an hour. No injuries were reported at the nine-story hospital building in Belmont, though the cause of the fire was not immediately clear.
Firefighters were called to the hospital at 4422 Third Avenue around 3 a.m., and the FDNY responded with 120 fire and EMS personnel across 38 units, according to ABC7 New York. Citizen app video captured fire trucks and firefighters massed outside the hospital as crews worked to knock down the flames. Per News 12, dispatch received the initial 911 call at 3:04 a.m., and fire crews brought the sixth-floor blaze under control at 4:16 a.m., meaning the fire was contained in about an hour and 12 minutes.
The cause of the fire had not been determined as of Sunday morning, and it remains unclear which specific department or unit on the sixth floor was affected, or whether patient care was disrupted or redirected during the incident. FDNY reported no injuries in connection with the blaze, per the same account.
A 150-Year-Old Safety-Net Anchor for the Bronx
St. Barnabas Hospital is a 422-bed non-profit acute care teaching facility and state-designated Level II Trauma Center operated by SBH Health System, according to Marit Health. Founded in 1866 as the Home for the Incurables in West Farms, the hospital is the oldest continuing healthcare facility in New York City and was the nation's first chronic disease hospital before relocating to its 10-acre Belmont campus in 1874, the American Hospital Association notes.
The hospital serves as a primary safety-net institution for central and West Bronx residents, logging over 200,000 outpatient visits annually, with most patients living within a one-mile radius of the Third Avenue campus, the AHA reports. Hoodline has previously identified St. Barnabas as a key trauma receiving facility for the surrounding neighborhood, and as an anchor institution for the Belmont corridor.
How Hospitals Handle Fires Without Full Evacuations
Under FDNY emergency protocols and NYC Fire Code standards, hospital fires typically rely on horizontal compartmentation and defend-in-place strategies, moving non-ambulatory patients to adjacent smoke-barrier zones rather than executing full vertical building evacuations during upper-floor blazes, according to Patient Safety Tip of the Week. That structural design is meant to let patient care continue safely in unaffected sections of a building even as crews battle a fire elsewhere in the facility.
Separately, under Local Law 47 of 2022, the NYC Fire Code requires high-occupancy facilities to maintain active fire safety plans and to initiate dedicated fire watch monitoring if building fire alarms or sprinkler systems become impaired during an incident or repair, according to NYC.gov. It is not known whether that provision was triggered at St. Barnabas following Sunday's fire.
Part of a Busy Stretch for Bronx Fire Crews
The Belmont neighborhood is served primarily by FDNY Engine Company 48 and Ladder Company 56, with Engine 48 ranking among New York City's busiest engine companies in 2025 after logging 6,597 dispatch runs, Hoodline has previously reported. St. Barnabas has also featured recently as the receiving hospital for other Bronx emergencies, including a ninth-floor apartment fire on Webster Avenue in Claremont last month that sent a seriously injured occupant to the hospital after a roughly 120-person FDNY deployment.
Sunday's blaze also comes just a day after a basement fire displaced families in Pelham Parkway, underscoring a recent run of multi-unit residential and institutional fires across the borough. SBH Health System refinanced its six-property, 898,000-square-foot Bronx campus in September 2025 with a $59.1 million loan from Wells Fargo, according to Bisnow, and the hospital previously contracted Bellet Construction in 2022 for facade restoration work required under Local Law 11, per Connect CRE. Fire investigators have not yet released findings on what sparked Sunday's fire.
