Firefighters check a floor of 80 North Moore Street during a smoke condition in the building caused by fire in a compactor container. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
Acrid smoke from a fire Tuesday morning in a first-floor compactor container filled the upper floors of 80 North Moore Street, a 39-story Tribeca high-rise building, sending many tenants out of their apartments and down dozens of flights of stairs.
The FDNY reported no injuries.
Wendy Most and Nathan Weber had just turned on the stove to make breakfast in their 39th-floor apartment when they heard the smoke detector go off. “All of a sudden, from one minute to the next, there was so much smoke in our kitchen and I thought, it’s got to be our oven,” Most said. Then they looked in the hallway and saw it filled with smoke.
“I opened the terrace door because I couldn’t breathe,” she continued. But because the smoke in the apartment “got worse and worse,” the couple (she’s 78, he’s 84) decided to walk down the 39 flights of stairs.
Building personnel said that as flames shot up from the compactor room on the first floor, firefighters sent water down from the 39th floor garbage chute. The smoke set off sprinklers on the third, second and ground floors, the personnel said.
The fire was “immediately extinguished by the building’s sprinkler system,” according to a statement by the building’s management. The compactor container, where the fire began, was connected to the garbage chute, the management said.
The fire was reported at 7:43 a.m. and about 45 minutes later firefighters allowed tenants, assembled in the lobby, to use elevators to return to their apartments. The FDNY reported the incident closed at 9:43 a.m. One engine and two ladder trucks responded to the scene.
The building is one of three towers in the Independence Plaza complex. Weber said this is the first serious fire incident he has seen in the building since he and his wife moved there in 1991. “I think there was once smoke in the building,” he said, “but nothing anywhere compared to this.”
