An NYPD warehouse fire that sent huge black clouds of smoke billowing into the air over Brooklyn may draw an emergency response for days, according to officials, as crews monitor the charred remnants of an inferno that destroyed evidence from crimes dating back decades.
It still was not clear what may have sparked Tuesday's raging flames, which broke out around 10:40 a.m. at the Erie Basin Auto Pound in Red Hook, a sprawling warehouse on Columbia Street. Investigators said they know it started on a shelf that stored evidence; a full investigation could take some time, though.
Around 150 firefighters were seen battling the flames through the early afternoon Tuesday, and crews stayed there throughout the night. Firefighters remained at the scene Wednesday, though no active flame activity was obvious.
Get Tri-state area news and weather forecasts to your inbox. Sign up for NBC New York newsletters.
Twenty people, a mix of NYPD staffers and contractors, were said to be inside the warehouse when the inferno started. A total of eight people -- three firefighters, three EMS members and two civilians -- were hurt in the fire, but all are expected to be OK, FDNY Chief of Department John Hodgens said.
So what was destroyed in the fire? Among a slew of vehicles, an untold amount of "biological evidence" linked to New York City crimes were devoured. That includes DNA evidence from past crimes, like burglaries and shootings — some of it going back 20 or 30 years, the NYPD said. Rape kits, however, were not stored at that facility.
The evidence was linked to cold cases, stored in barrels made of cardboard, which happens to be highly flammable.
Cars linked to high-profile police murders, like the squad car Officer Ed Byrne was killed in back in 1988 and the mobile unit where Officer Miosotis Familia was killed in 2017, were at the facility.
It wasn't clear how many vehicles were in the lot at the time the fire broke out, but there appeared to be dozens of cars, trucks and motorcycles, along with ATVs, parked on the pier area. NYPD officials said the vehicles included some historic ones as well as hundreds of e-bikes and motorcycles, though a full inventory needed to be conducted to determine what was in the warehouse at the time of the fire.
Sandy property evidence was there as well. There was no estimated cost of the damage.
"This is a very serious and damaging fire. We won’t know the magnitude until we see the invoice to see what was in there and see what we can salvage," said NYPD Chief Joseph Maddrey.
Former NYPD Chief of Department Terry Monahan said that while much was potentially lost in the fire, "it shouldn’t have much of an impact on anything current. But there could be a case here or there that a defense attorney decides to reopen and that evidence will no longer be available."
Police plan to do a full accounting of the contents to determine if anything can be salvaged, and the extent of the overall damage, but the deep-seated volume of the fire, the building structure and limited access are problematic, officials say.
Firefighters were forced to withdraw from the interior early because of the intense flames and combustible material, as well as the threat of collapse. One section of the warehouse, which may have had hundreds of e-bikes in it, did fall, officials said.
"This building is not really a very sturdy type of building. It's a metal building with trust construction, which has a large collapse potential," said Hodgens.
More News
The towering black smoke plumes confused some New Yorkers, who thought the blaze had started in Manhattan. The smoke could be seen from parts of Manhattan and New Jersey.
The FDNY used fire boats as part of its firefighting effort during the worst of the fire -- and top fire department officials say drones will be used in the coming days to identify any hard-to-see hotspots.
Chopper 4 was over the scene through some of the most ferocious fire, hovering over a row of dirt bikes at one point as a nearby pickup truck burst into fire. The lot appeared to be the same one where NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell and Mayor Eric Adams crushed illegal dirt bikes as part of a crackdown over the summer.
Erie Basin is one of several lots the NYPD uses to store vehicles that have been seized for reasons other than parking violations. Those might include the arrest of the vehicle owner, investigative purposes or legal reasons, the city says.
