A huge fire tore through a Chinatown restaurant building for hours Sunday morning, May 1, injuring five firefighters, according to the Fire Department.
The flames erupted around 11:45 p.m. Saturday night on the ground floor of the four-story house at Chatham Square near Mott Street, which is home to Dim Sum Palace, and spread throughout the structure escalating to a five-alarm fire.
FDNY sent 39 units and 170 firefighters to the scene and it took more than six hours bring the raging inferno under control just after 6 a.m., according to FDNY officials.
Five firefighters suffered minor injuries and were brought to nearby hospitals, but no one else was hurt.
“There was just a tremendous amount of volume of fire throughout the building,” said FDNY Assistant Chief Tom Currao.
“A lot of these older buildings, there’s a lot of concealed spaces that fire can travel,” Currao added. “It can be very difficult to open up and to extinguish.”
There are apartments above the eatery and some residents had to be relocated by the Red Cross, Currao said.
The cause of the fire is under investigation, and the city’s Office of Emergency Management was on scene Sunday morning, along with the Department of Buildings to check on the structure’s stability, the FDNY chief said.
The dramatic incident comes just over two weeks after a deadly apartment fire around the corner on Mulberry Street which killed an elderly woman and her son on April 15.
“Another terrible blow to Chinatown,” wrote Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine on Twitter Sunday.
