Firefighters rescued 21 people yesterday, some unconscious and in critical condition, from an Upper West Side building that was filled with potentially deadly carbon monoxide fumes, officials said.
Investigators last night were focusing on the boiler inside the five-story building at 159 W. 80th St. as the source of the fumes.
Two of the most seriously injured were taken to Jacobi Hospital in The Bronx for treatment in a hyperbaric chamber. Their condition was upgraded from critical to stable last night. Fire officials said most of the 19 other residents taken to local hospitals were released.
The initial calls for help came at about 8 a.m., with some tenants complaining of suffering “seizures,” fire officials said.
The first firefighters at the scene didn’t see anything unusual in the building, said Dan Nigro, chief of operations for the Fire Department. The poisonous gas is colorless and odorless.
But as more residents fell ill, officials evacuated the five-story building, as well as buildings on either side – at 157 and 161 – while air samples were taken, revealing dangerously high levels of carbon monoxide.
Zaida Diaz, 48, and her two children, Alan Cordoba, 16, and Elsa Cordoba, 20, were overcome by the fumes.
Doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital told Diaz her son registered a carbon-monoxide level equivalent to having smoked two cartons of cigarettes.
The air inside 159 W. 80th St. was tested at 400 parts per million carbon monoxide – dangerously high, compared with a normal exposure of the gas deemed to be no more than 35 to 50 parts per million.
Residents were allowed back into the three buildings late yesterday, but the heat was turned off. Fire investigators ordered the buildings’ boilers to remain shut until the cause of the fumes can be pinpointed and fixed.
Con Edison spokesman Michael Clenendin said gas was shut off to the five-story structure and the two adjacent buildings last night as a precaution.