Fire safety : 515 Edgecombe Cooperative

If you fol­low local news, you will have heard about the cat­a­stroph­ic fire at 775 River­side Dri­ve on 8th Jan­u­ary, which injured over a dozen peo­ple and dis­placed the own­ers and res­i­dents of 131 units in the build­ing. The full extent of the dam­age to the build­ing is still under eval­u­a­tion.

Fire mar­shals believe that the fire began with an over­heat­ing toast­er and quick­ly over­took the build­ing by trav­el­ing through a dumb­wait­er shaft and up under the build­ing’s roof. What began as a small kitchen acci­dent quick­ly turned into a cat­a­stro­phe.

This tragedy serves as a reminder to all of us about fire safety–the safe oper­a­tion of elec­tri­cal appli­ances and equip­ment, nev­er leav­ing open flames unat­tend­ed, keep­ing well-main­­tained fire extin­guish­ers in our apart­ments, and assur­ing that smoke and car­bon monox­ide detec­tors are work­ing through­out the build­ing. It is also imper­a­tive that fire escapes remain com­plete­ly unim­ped­ed, so noth­ing of any sort should ever be stored on fire escapes. We are all depen­dent upon one anoth­er for dili­gence in pre­vent­ing a fire in our build­ing and in edu­cat­ing our­selves about what to do should a fire break out. Please be dili­gent!

The FDNY has a help­ful web­site with a lot of infor­ma­tion about fire safe­ty. You can find it here.

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