NEW YORK — A man was killed in a raging apartment fire on Saturday in the New York City skyscraper named for President Donald Trump and where his business is based, officials said.
Commissioner Daniel Nigro said a 50th-floor apartment at Trump Tower was “virtually entirely on fire” when firefighters arrived after 5:30 p.m.
“It was a very difficult fire, as you can imagine,” Nigro said in a briefing outside the building in midtown Manhattan. “The apartment is quite large.”
A 67-year-old man who was in the apartment was taken to a hospital and died a short time later, the New York Police Department said. His name was not immediately released.
Officials said four firefighters suffered minor injuries.
Nigso said the cause of the fire was not known.
Trump tweeted that the fire was “Very confined (well built building).”
Asked if that assessment was accurate, Nigro said, “It’s a well built building. The upper floors, the residence floors, are not sprinklered.”
Fire sprinklers were not required in New York City highrises when Trump Tower was completed in 1983.
Subsequent updates to the building code required commercial skyscrapers to install the sprinklers retroactively, but owners of older residential highrises are not required to install sprinklers unless the building undergoes major renovations.
The 664-foot Trump Tower has 58 stories, though the top floor is numbered 68.
Trump’s family has an apartment on the top floors, but he has spent little time in New York since taking office. Nigro said no member of the Trump family was in the building Saturday.
He said Secret Service members checked on the condition of Trump’s apartment.
About 200 firefighters and emergency medical service workers responded to the fire, Nigro said.
He said it was “extremely hot” in the apartment, which was “quite large.”
“It was a considerable job by our members,” Nigro said.
