Village blaze displaces hundreds

Hundreds of residents were displaced and 19 firefighters injured, none critically, by a five-alarm fire in a six-story building on East Ninth Street near Broadway Wednesday evening, FDNY officials said.

The building, at 60 East Ninth Street, was extensively damaged by fire, smoke and water, a department spokesman said. “It was a long operation, a lot of water,” he said.

Fire crews were on scene at 5:48 p.m., three minutes after the first call came in, he said, and worked for about three hours to extinguish the blaze. The fire might have sparked in a ground-floor deli, FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro said, although no definitive cause has been determined.

No residents were injured by the fire, although one person did have a medical emergency during the blaze the spokesman said

A 36-year-old woman who asked to be identified only as Melissa lives in an apartment on the third floor of the building. She was at work at Credit Suisse but learned of the fire when a friend who lives in Spain saw social media posts of the fire and alerted Melissa.

Melissa headed home, sidestepping her way around the mass of onlookers watching the smoke billowing out of the building’s windows.

Although no people were trapped inside the building, Melissa’s four-year-old dog, Finnegan, was.

A half an hour or so later, a firefighter came out of the building with his arms cradled around the pup. Finnegan had made it.