Last Wednesday, the city woke up to a nightmare, but it cannot be called unimaginable.
Philadelphia's deadliest single residential fire in at least a century consumed a three-story row house in Fairmount. The blaze took the Philadelphia Fire Department nearly an hour to place under control. At least 12 people, including eight children, were killed.
"This is without a doubt one of the most tragic days in our city's history," Mayor Jim Kenney said during a news conference at the scene hours after the blaze.
The death of the most vulnerable Philadelphians is harrowing, but with so much loss occurring in our city on a daily basis, it is anything but unimaginable. The fire might have started around 6:30 a.m., but the injustices that made the blaze so catastrophic were long in the making — and are the story of families all over Philadelphia grasping for a place to live.
The two-unit row house was owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority and at least 26 people called it home — overcrowding that Deputy Fire Commissioner Craig Murphy called "a tremendous amount of people." The Housing Authority told the Inquirer that 15 people were living in a single unit of the building as of last year. At least four smoke detectors in the building were not working and there were no fire escapes on the upper floors, according to officials.
It is essential that what comes next is a swift, thorough and public investigation — both into what caused the fire and into the overcrowded housing conditions that drove the death toll. It's also critical that the Housing Authority provide a full accounting of its inspection routines, occupancy regulations, and the resources it needs to provide not only housing to more people but more adequate housing to the tenants it serves.
The fire in Fairmount needs to be a wake-up call about the living conditions of Philadelphians — a city in which an estimated half of rental units are unlicensed, meaning that there is no way to know if they are up to code and safe for habitation.
Wednesday's fire should also serve as a reminder of the unrelenting levels of resilience that Philadelphians — particularly Black Philadelphians — are forced to endure. Yes, a dozen people died in a fire. On a typical Wednesday over the last year, at least three people have died of overdoses and one or two others were murdered. And that does not begin to take into account the daily death toll from COVID-19. All told, it is an unbearable level of loss.
