A four-alarm fire fanned by fierce winds killed four people, including one child, in Queens on Monday afternoon and injured 12 others, at least one of them critically, the authorities said.
Three people tried to escape the fire by jumping out windows on the upper floors of the three-story brick building at 44-49 College Point Boulevard in Flushing. It was not clear if they were among the dead. Two firefighters were injured when a staircase inside the building collapsed, the Fire Department said. The other people’s injuries were not serious.
Brian Zhang, an employee at a kitchen design store four doors down, said a man ran into his store asking for a ladder. “He said there were people trying to jump from the third floor,” Mr. Zhang said.
Then, as the wind whipped gray smoke and flames, Mr. Zhang heard a woman screaming in Mandarin, “My kid is still in the apartment!” The woman said her child was 3 years old. Mr. Zhang said he wanted to cry. “It was very desperate,” he said. “I have a kid, too, but at that moment there’s nothing we could have done.”
Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore said, “This is a difficult and tragic day.”
The fire was called in at around 12:30 p.m., Ms. Bonsignore said. When firefighters arrived four minutes later, the building was heavily engulfed in flames, officials said.
In a dramatic scene, emergency medical workers performed C.P.R. on victims in the street, said Kevin Woods, the Fire Department’s chief of fire operations.
Yibo Wang, who lives in a building connected to the one that burned, had gone out shopping earlier on Monday and returned to chaos.
“I leave home and go to the grocery store, and a few minutes later the firemen come,” she said. She said they smashed a hole through the wall of her third-floor apartment to reach the building that was on fire. “I’m not allowed to go back to my apartment,” Ms. Wang, 28, said.
On the sidewalk, she saw firefighters rescuing people inside. “One of the persons passed out and one of the firefighters carried him down,” Ms. Wang, a stylist, said. Then they brought out an older man who was bleeding from his head. A weeping woman was lying down on the sidewalk, she said, and firefighters climbed a ladder to a second-floor window to pull out another woman.
Howie Yu, who lives across the street, saw firefighters take out a man on a stretcher and heard another man yell to firefighters, “There’s a baby missing!”
More than 230 firefighters and paramedics responded to the fire. “The Fire Department did an extraordinary job under difficult circumstances putting this fire out and saving people,” Ms. Bonsignore said.
The fire broke out as a storm moved across the city, bringing wind gusts of more than 20 miles an hour to the area. “The fire travels with the wind,” Chief Woods said. The cause of the blaze is still under investigation.
Mohammed Wadud, who works at a gas station diagonally across from the building that caught fire, said he saw smoke rising from it shortly after noon and figured it was a kitchen fire. But then the flames started rising high into the sky. “I called my boss because the gas tank is close,” Mr. Wadud, 59, said. “Maybe something happens and we’re gone. I was scared.”
The ground floor of the building holds the Queens office of ABCPOS, a company that sells point-of-sale equipment, like payment systems, to stores.
Lillian Luo, a marketing specialist for the company, said no one there was injured. “We were in the office, and we called the police,” she said, adding that she believed the fire started on the second floor.
There are also five apartments in the building, which is on a corner of a commercial block lined with home-improvement stores.
Andy Newman has reported from the New York region for The Times for more than 30 years.
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