Gair, Gair, Conason, Rubinowitz, Bloom, Hershenhorn, Steigman & Mackauf is a New York Plaintiff's personal injury law firm specializing in automobile accidents, construction accidents, medical malpractice, products liability, police misconduct and all types of New York personal injury litigation.

Articles Posted in Explosion and Fire Accidents

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the house that went on fire in Long Island5 people died in an apartment fire in Long Island NY last Tuesday night. The fire erupted around 10:40 pm in a century-old house located on East Second Street in Riverhead. The house had 3 apartments with the landlord living in one of them on the ground floor and two other families living on the second and third floor. A total of 10 people lived in the house. 5 of them who were living on the top floor died in the fire. It was a mother with her son and daughter as well as her two nephews.

According to preliminary investigations, the fire might have been started by a cigarette. The fire was discovered by a resident of the second floor who had stepped out to walk his dog. As he was returning home he smelled the smoke and then heard the neighbors screaming “Fire”.

The investigators are still trying to figure out if there were smoke alarms installed in the apartment and if there were, why they didn’t work.

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A defective moped lithium battery is at the origin of a fire that killed 9 year old Remi Fernandez in his new apartment in Queens. Remi had just moved with his parents into a new apartment located on 102nd Road near 84th Street in  Ozone Park, Queens, when a fire that was sparked by the battery of a moped charging in the apartment erupted around 2:00 am while the family was sleeping. Remi’s father suffered burn injuries as he was trying to rescue his little boy from their basement apartment. The apartment where the family had just moved in had no smoke alarm. The basement had been illegally converted into an apartment.  The rest of the building was deemed unsafe by the Department of Buildings and all residents had to be evacuated. 10 other people including a firefighter were injured and transported to the hospital to be treated.

55 fires caused by defective lithium ion batteries over the last 12 months in New York City

Fire caused by defective lithium-ion batteries are on the rise in New York City. According to the NY Daily News, there were 55 fires caused by these types of batteries in New York City between August 1st 2020 and August 1st 2021 compared to 22 for the same period a year earlier.  Sadly Remi is not the first victim to die in one of these fires. Last May in the Bronx, a 91 year old woman died and 11 people were injured in a fire sparked by a defective lithium battery in the third floor apartment of a six-story building in the Bronx. Earlier in January, a   scooter charging in the living room of a Bronx apartment was at the origin of another fire that killed one and injured 12 others.

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A man suffered severe burns in a sidewalk explosion in Queens last week.

57 year old Barry West was heading to his T-mobile store to pay his cell phone bill when a Coned underground transformer exploded sending a ball of fire through the sidewalk grate. The man was engulfed in the flames before he was able to move to safety. He suffered second degree burns in multiple areas of his face and body and was immediately hospitalized.  The man was still in the hospital a week after the accident. He told the NY Daily News that the explosion just came from nowhere. He felt he lost a lot of skin and was in so much pain that he could not work.

A similar explosion occurred at the same location exactly one day earlier and partially destroyed the front of a pizzeria next door  (read more and see video of the accident in the NY Daily News).

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The building where a lady died in a fireAn electric scooter being charged is the cause of a fire that ravaged a residential building in New York City, killing one and injuring 11. The fire started in the middle of the night, around 4;40 am on Wednesday inside an apartment on the third floor of a building located in the Bronx, on Park Ave near E. 161st Street in Concorde Village. Residents heard a loud boom and then the fire spread very quickly to the upper floors of the six-story building. Residents were woken up by the smell of the smoke or by other residents screaming about the fire and asking everybody to get out.

3 unconscious people were removed from the flames by the firefighters

The tenants of the 20 apartments located in the buildings were all forced out extremely quickly and lost everything in the fire. 10 of them were injured as well as one firefighter. Some of the tenants were critically injured and a 91 year old lady died. She was among  the 3 residents that were unconscious when the firefighters pulled them out of the flames. The tow other unconscious residents were an 80 year old man and a 54 year old man. The elderly woman died from smoke inhalation and the two other men were in critical but stable condition.

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Two houses caught on fire and 3 people were injured after a propane tank exploded in East Meadow, Long Island, NY.  A fire started in a house located on 7th Street. The flames reached two propane tanks that were located on the side of the house and caused a massive explosion. The fire was so intense that the house next door caught on fire as well. One person had to be hospitalized and two others were treated at the scene. It took 3 hours for the firefighters to extinguish the fire.

In the US it is estimated that there are approximatively 60 million propane-fueled devices.  While the usage of propane tanks is restricted in New York City, their usage is common in the rest of New York State for heating water, heating houses and grilling.  Propane explosions and propane deaths are not that common. Explosions are rare but when they occur they are extremely destructive. Injuries resulting from propane tank explosions are often severe burns.

Gas leak or BLEVE?

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A school bus caught on fire after a violent collision with a car in Airmont, Rockland county. No information was released in regards to potential injuries and if the bus was carrying children or not at the time of the accident. The crash occurred last Thursday on Saddle River Road around 3:30 pm.

How safe are my children in a school bus?

A school bus accident is the worry of every parent. How safe is it for children to be transported by bus everyday from their house to their school? Would it be safer for parents to drive them to school?  According to statistics by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), transporting children in school buses is 70 times safer than transporting them by cars.  In New York State, 2 million students ride 18,000 school buses every school day. New York is indeed the State that has the biggest school bus fleet among all States in the US.

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apartment building that got on fire in Queens NYC21 people were injured in a massive NYC apartment fire last week.  The fire started around 1:00 pm last Tuesday in an apartment  on the 6th floor of a large building located on 34th Avenue near 89th Street  in Jackson Heights, Queens. While escaping, the resident of the apartment left the door open, allowing the fire to spread through the hallways of the building that housed 150 apartments and 90 families.

No life threatening injuries but more than 200 people displaced

Up to 350 firefighters fought for 12 hours to get the blaze under control. 16 of them were injured. Two of them suffered burns and the 14 others suffered minor injuries such as strains and sprains. Among the 5 residents who suffered injuries, 4 declined to be treated and 1 was sent to the hospital. No one was reported missing. More than 200 people living in the building lost their homes and were displaced.

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location of the gas explosion accidentA  gas explosion injured 10 people including several children in the Bronx, NYC.

The explosion blasted a three story multi-family residence located at 1520 Paulding Avenue in Morris Park, yesterday afternoon around 3:30 pm.  A gas leak on the building’s second floor  seemed to have been at the origin of the explosion according to preliminary investigations.

A tenant who  was watching television on the first floor had all his windows blown out. His kitchen cabinets were thrown outside taking down the kitchen wall. Above him a mother and a baby were stuck on a balcony. The mother had to throw her baby down to her neighborgh before others helped her get down the balcony. Another mother and her two kids were stuck on the seconf floor. The blast was so powerful that even the window guards flew off and the front door of one of the appartment units got stuck in the power lines across the street.  The building looked like it had been devastated by a tornado.

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There is always an uptick in fire accident injuries in New York during the coldest days of the year.  Last night a fire that erupted in an apartment building under renovation  located at 283 Monroe in Bed-Stuy and spread to adjacent buildings is the last of multiple fire accidents that occurred last week in New York. One firefighter was injured after the floor collapsed under him.

In Queens, 6 people were injured in a fire that erupted Monday early morning on 108th Street in Corona.

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Burn Injury victim Alonzo YanesThis week, in an unusual decision, New York State Supreme Court Justice Alexander Tisch upheld a jury verdict for  $60 million. Our partners New York personal injury attorneys Ben Rubinowitz and Richard Steigman tried the case before Justice Tisch last July. See Prior Blog. This is one of the largest awards for  pain and suffering ever affirmed by a trial court in New York State.

The case was one that sparked national attention. A 10th grade student, Alonzo Yanes, was severely burned in his 10th grade chemistry class due to the negligence of his teacher Anna Poole and the New York City Board of Education.  The teacher, who had been performing the “rainbow experiment,” failed to take necessary safety precautions to protect the students in her class. In the experiment the teacher was using methanol, a highly flammable substance, and failed to ensure that the students were kept at a safe distance from the demonstration table, failed to provide goggles to the students, failed to ensure there was a fire blanket was in the classroom and conducted the experiment in a classroom which did not have proper ventilation or showers.

Alonzo was burned alive. As the teacher poured the methanol from a gallon jug into a beaker a large  fireball erupted and coated this young student with millions of droplets of burning methanol. Alonzo was screaming in agony —  but because there was no protective equipment in the classroom and no shower or fire blanket he kept burning while a teacher from another classroom finally entered the classroom with a fire blanket to smother the flames.

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