WILLIAMSBURG — Firefighters failed to fully extinguish an early morning waterfront warehouse fire in 2015, allowing remaining embers to spark a second blaze that burned for five days and destroyed the building and much of its contents, reports obtained by DNAinfo New York show.
The first fire broke out on Jan. 31, 2015 at the CitiStorage warehouse at 5 N. 11th St. at 4:29 a.m. and was traced back to a "lighting fixture," according to the FDNY incident report. That fire was ruled accidental, according to a FDNY spokeswoman.
But the second fire that raged into an inferno that burned for nearly a week, consuming the whole facility and the records within, began at 6:28 a.m. that day, sparked by a "brand," according to the report.
Brands are embers or sparks left over from earlier fires, said Jim Bolluck, retired FDNY chief who now runs his own fire safety consulting firm.
"Embers are being lifted up into the air by the heat of the fire," he said, though he would not go into greater detail.
The FDNY officials were unclear about the connection between the two fires.
"There's a possibility that they were [related] and there's a very strong possibility that they weren’t," said Elisheva Zakeim, a spokeswoman for the FDNY, adding that the second fire started around 15 feet away and 20 feet higher than the source of the first one. "Like I said we extinguished the first fire."
Zakeim first said that investigators were still preparing a more thorough report, even though marshals had indicated the case was closed on Jan. 8. She later said that no further report was being worked on by investigators.
While the FDNY maintains that both fires were accidental, Recall Holdings, one of the tenants of the buildings, blamed the fire department for not properly dousing the first fire and for shutting off the sprinkler system allowing the flames to spread, according to a $50 million lawsuit filed against the city on Jan. 29, the Brooklyn Paper first reported.
And for some community residents who've been waiting for a year for answers from the FDNY, the two-page document released recently, was met with frustration.
"It's something you could have written a day after the fire," said Greenpoint resident Scott Fraser, a neighborhood activist who's been lobbying for a park the city promised to the community at the scorched site of the CitiStorage facility and pushing for more information about the fire. "It's so lean in terms of what's there, we're left trying to read the tea leaves."
For days, neighbors breathed in billowing clouds of smoke, dozens of firefighters lives were on the line protecting residents all too familiar with suspicious fires along the waterfront, Fraser said, all reasons why the community deserves more facts from the FDNY.
"That's one of the largest fires since 9/11 and it just happens to [be] on land that was rezoned [in 2005]," said Fraser. "It just makes you wonder...We deserve at least an explanation."
Other community members also vowed to push for more information from the city agency.
"We need more detail," said Steve Chesler, another neighborhood activist. He wondered whether it was a lack of proper maintenance at the facility, or fire department procedures that caused the blaze to re-ignite and cause such a prolonged five-day fire.
"Those matters should be attended to and dealt with," he said. "The public has a right to know."
