A fire tore through the fifth floor of a five-story apartment building in Washington Heights on Tuesday morning, prompting a massive FDNY response that swelled to a second alarm within minutes and left one civilian hospitalized. The blaze was reported at 11:17 a.m. at 598 W. 178th St., between West 178th and West 179th streets near St. Nicholas Avenue.
Firefighters escalated the call to a second alarm by 11:32 a.m., according to ABC7 New York, which reported that 46 units and 141 fire and EMS personnel ultimately responded to the scene. Patch reported that all patients were taken to NewYork-Presbyterian-Columbia Hospital. Fire marshals were notified to look into the blaze, ABC7 reported.
Conflicting Reports Muddy the Picture
Not every outlet described the same incident the same way. Patch reported six people injured, including five firefighters, in a two-alarm Tuesday-morning fire in Washington Heights, with all patients taken for treatment.
But other reports describe a far more severe and differently timed incident at what they say was a six-story building. Fox 5 reported that firefighters arrived around 1:44 a.m. at a six-story apartment building on West 178th Street between Broadway and Fort Washington Avenue, and that the blaze grew to three alarms with roughly 135 firefighters responding. That station reported two people killed and six others injured, including three civilians and three firefighters, citing FDNY officials.
Gothamist offered yet another version, reporting that the fire began around 1:45 a.m. on the top floor of a six-story building at West 178th Street and Broadway. According to that account, a 77-year-old woman and a 74-year-old man were taken to Harlem Hospital in critical condition and pronounced dead upon arrival, while three other residents, one firefighter and two EMS workers were treated at the scene for minor injuries. It remains unclear whether these accounts describe the same fire as the Tuesday-morning blaze reported by ABC7 or a separate incident altogether.
A Neighborhood With a History of Fast-Moving Fires
Washington Heights has seen its share of serious multi-alarm fires in recent memory. In February, a two-alarm fire broke out on the third floor of an apartment building on West 162nd Street after a call came in around midnight, according to News 12 Bronx. Two people were injured in that fire, one hospitalized in critical condition and the other in serious but stable condition, and the cause was not immediately determined.
Months earlier, a five-alarm fire at a Washington Heights apartment building injured three firefighters and six civilians, according to a CBS News report. The repeated multi-alarm incidents underscore the potential severity of apartment fires.
What Investigators Still Don't Know
Fire marshals had been notified about the blaze at 598 W. 178th St.; its cause remained under investigation. The scale of injuries, and whether separate reports of an overnight six-story fire are connected to the daytime incident on the same stretch of West 178th Street, remain unresolved questions for Washington Heights residents watching the block recover.
