Seven children among 13 killed in Philadelphia apartment fire By Reuters

By Katharine Jackson and Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) -At least 13 people, including seven children, were killed in one of the worst fires seen in Philadelphia in years after smoke detectors failed to go off in a public-housing apartment building, the Philadelphia Fire Department said.

Firefighters arrived around 6:40 a.m. (1140 GMT) and fought for about 50 minutes to control the blaze on the second floor of the three-story row house in the city’s Fairmount neighborhood. The building is owned by the federally funded Philadelphia Housing Authority, the fourth-largest housing authority in the United States.

Eight people managed to escape the building through one of the two exits, and seven children were among those killed, First Deputy Fire Commissioner Craig Murphy told reporters at a nearby news conference. Officials did not give the children’s ages.

“Keep those babies in your prayers,” Mayor Jim Kenney told reporters.

Fire officials said the cause of the fire was still being investigated.

Neighbors told local news crews they were jolted awake by the sound of screams and a smell of burning, before they ran out to see flames licking the windows of the second floor. Nearby, fire trucks were still parked outside the red-brick building, its facade blackened, its windows smashed out and dark.

“It was terrible,” Murphy told reporters. “I’ve been around for 35 years now and this is probably one of the worst fires I’ve ever been to.”

A child and an adult were taken by paramedics to nearby hospitals. The smoke detectors in the building failed to activate, fire officials said.

There were conflicting accounts about the building’s smoke detectors. The fire department said there were four detectors, and they were last inspected in 2020. Dinesh Indala, executive vice president at the Philadelphia Housing Authority, told reporters there were six, and the last annual inspection was in May 2021. He said he did not know why the detectors did not go off.

At least one resident told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the housing authority should replace battery-powered smoke detectors with hard-wired detectors because some tenants removed the batteries to cook or smoke inside.

Jenna Collins, a housing attorney at Philadelphia’s Community Legal Services, said she had also heard tenants’ requests for hard-wired smoke detectors over the years, but that the U.S. Congress did not appropriate enough money for such renovations. She added the housing authority appeared to have installed enough detectors and inspected them frequently enough to comply with the housing code.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has offered assistance to Philadelphia officials, Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge said.

The building was converted to house two families and 26 people were in the building, officials said, though it was unclear how many residents and how many were visiting.

Collins said it was not unusual to see overcrowding in public housing. “It’s a symptom of the fact that there’s not enough habitable, affordable housing,” she said.

“Especially right now, when we’ve had so many people in the city lose income.”