WASHINGTON: Twelve people, including eight children, were killed early on Wednesday when flames swept through a public housing apartment building in Philadelphia in one of the city’s worst such fires in recent years.
Philadelphia fire officials revised the death toll down to 12, from the 13 they reported earlier.
“Keep those babies in your prayers,” Mayor Jim Kenney told reporters, after First Deputy Fire Commissioner Craig Murphy told a news conference that eight children were killed in the blaze.
The blaze broke out around 6:30 a.m. on the second floor of a three-story row house in the city’s Fairmont neighborhood. The building is owned by the federally funded Philadelphia Housing Authority, the fourth-largest housing authority in the United States.
