OREANDA-NEWS. A fire in an apartment building in the Bronx (one of New York's five boros) has killed 19 people. Mayor Eric Adams said this, Reuters reported.

"We have 19 confirmed deaths so far and several others are in critical condition,"- he said.

He said children were among the victims. Adams specified that the fire took place in a 19-storey building. The mayor described the fire as one of the deadliest in the city in decades.

According to The New York Times (NYT), nine children were among the victims of the fire. New York authorities say more than 60 people were injured, most of them taken to five Bronx hospitals.

About 200 firefighters were called in to put out the blaze. City Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro did not name the cause of the fire during a briefing. He said smoke spread across all floors of the building, probably because the door to the flat where the fire started was left open. "Firefighters found victims on every floor in the stairwells,"- Nigro said.

He later said the probable cause of the fire was a faulty heater that had been installed in the bedroom of one of the flats on the third floor. The NYT writes that the fire occurred in the 1972-built building. There are 120 flats in the building.

Local officials speaking to the paper said the incident reminded them of the 1990 Happy Land nightclub fire in the Bronx that killed 87 people.

The publication notes that the deadliest fire in New York history occurred in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in Lower Manhattan, which killed 146 people. More than 120 of them were young women.