@FDNY/Twitter (NEW YORK) — One resident is dead and six firefighters injured after a four-alarm blaze on the 50th floor of Trump Tower in New York on Saturday evening.
Todd Brassner, 67, was unconscious when pulled from his apartment in the Midtown skyscraper and rushed to Mount Sinai Roosevelt Hospital. He was initially listed in critical condition, but pronounced dead later in the evening, according to the NYPD.
Flames and smoke were spotted billowing and debris raining down from the 50th floor of the Trump Tower around 5:30 p.m. Brassner lived in 50C.
Besides the one fatality, six FDNY firefighters suffered nonlife-threatening injuries — two of them burn-related, FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro said during a press conference.
They were part of 200 other fire and emergency workers battling the four-alarm blaze at the 58-story Fifth Avenue Trump Tower skyscraper at 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, fire officials confirmed.
Brassner was a friend of the late artist Andy Warhol and is mentioned several times in the legendary New Yorker’s 1989 autobiography The Andy Warhol Diaries.
Nigro said the fire broke out at around 5:30 p.m. Fire engines and ladders were there within five minutes.
It was knocked down in approximately an hour, he said. The FDNY declared the fire under control around 8 p.m.
At its peak, flames raged from the window panes as crumbling pieces of ashen materials could be seen falling from the glass skyscraper onto the pavement below.
Firefighters were sweeping adjacent apartments and stairwells to determine the source of the blaze in one of the skyscraper’s residential apartments, according to fire officials.
There were no evacuations, though some residents left on their own, Nigro confirmed. The residential floors in Trump Tower do not have sprinklers, Nigro said.
Multiple street closures slowed foot and car traffic surrounding the tower, from East 55th Street to East 57th Street from Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue, according to officials.
President Trump was not in New York City this weekend.
Trump Tower, named for the 45th president, is also the headquarters of the Trump Organization and was the campaign nerve center for Donald Trump when he ran on the Republican ticket in the 2016 presidential election.
The president maintains the building’s top three floors as his residential home.
He was in the White House on Saturday, far removed from the fire incident. The U.S. Secret Service was made aware of the incident, ABC has learned.
Trump praised the building’s construction on Twitter as a “well built building” and lauded firefighters who managed to put out the blaze on Saturday.
During a press conference, Nigro also noted that the tower “sure stood up quite well.”
Trump’s son Eric Trump hailed the first responders as “truly some of the most incredible people anywhere” for extinguishing a fire “in a residential apartment.”
The fire on Saturday was the second at Trump Tower this year. A fire broke out in a rooftop heating and cooling unit at the skyscraper on Jan. 8, sending black smoke billowing over the skyline. One firefighter and two building employees suffered minor injuries in that fire.
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