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At least 23 people injured in Bronx apartment fire

[January 03, 2018] NEW YORK (Reuters) - At least 23 people, including one firefighter, were hurt on Tuesday morning after a fire tore through an apartment building in New York City's Bronx borough, days after another blaze in the area killed 12 people, a fire department spokesman said.

All of the injuries, which included adults and children, were non-life-threatening, according to Daniel Nigro, commissioner of the Fire Department of New York.

"Our units arrived and were immediately faced with heavy fire. Numerous people were brought out of the building by the firefighters on scene," Nigro said during a news conference. "They've all been transported and they will all be OK, thankfully."

The seven-alarm fire broke out at about 5:30 a.m. local time in a four-story brick structure with a furniture store on the ground floor, fire officials said on Twitter.

More than 200 firefighters battled the blaze in frigid temperatures as low as 13 Fahrenheit (minus 10.6 Celsius) for hours before getting it under control around 2 p.m. EST.

The cause of the fire was yet to be determined.

Later on Tuesday, three fire fighters suffered non-life threatening injuries as they battled a blaze in a three-story building in the borough of Brooklyn, local media reported.

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Fire Department of New York (FDNY) firemen work at an apartment building in the Bronx, New York, U.S., January 2, 2018. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

Last Thursday, 12 people, including four children, were killed in the New York City's deadliest blaze in a quarter of a century in another part of the Bronx less than 2 miles (3 km) away. That fire was caused by a 3-year-old boy playing with the burners of a kitchen stove in one of the apartments, officials said.

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien and Peter Szekely; Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus; Editing by Bernadette Baum, Lisa Shumaker and Michael Perry)

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