A mass fire broke out at the Dim Sum Palace restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown on Sunday night, officials said, leaving half a dozen firefighters injured and many families displaced.
The fire was first reported shortly before midnight on Saturday at the back of the restaurant on the ground floor, before spreading to the four-story mixed-use building and turning into a five-alarm fire, officials said. Approximately 170 firefighters spent more than six hours battling the “huge volume of fire,” according to FDNY Assistant Chief Tom Curao.
Half a dozen firefighters were hospitalized with minor injuries, authorities said. No residents were injured.
A Red Cross spokesman said two households were receiving temporary accommodation, while two other families had moved on their own.
While the cause of the fire is still being investigated on Sunday afternoon, officials said conditions in the building – located in Chatham Square 6 – may have played a role in exacerbating the blaze.
“Many of these older buildings have many hidden spaces where fire can travel,” Kurao said on Sunday. “As much as the amount of water we brought into the building was difficult to open and extinguish.”
The blaze comes just two weeks after another fire early in the morning killed two people – a 52-year-old man and his 91-year-old mother – in an apartment on nearby Mulberry Street.
May Lum, owner of the nearby Wing on Wo, said she woke up early Sunday from thick clouds of smoke over her apartment on Mott Street and immediately thought about the recent hell.
“It’s just devastating to think about the short period of time [since the last fire] and the kind of displacement that is happening to small business owners and residents, ”Lum told Gothamist.
“There’s something really intense about watching your neighborhood burn like that,” she added. “It’s really hard to recover when one thing happens after another.”
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