The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Fire broke out in a doctor’s seventh-floor office at Mount Sinai Medical Center on Wednesday, injuring six people and forcing the staff to move more than a dozen patients, officials said.
“The flames were coming out the windows, but the fire was basically in the office,” Assistant Fire Chief Michael Weinlein said.
Hospital President and CEO Ken Davis said nurses on the eighth floor saw smoke and transferred the 13 patients there to other units. That floor houses a neurosurgical intensive care unit. There were no injuries among them, but four medical staff members were treated for smoke inhalation.
Two firefighters also were hurt, Weinlein said.
The fire was reported around 8 a.m. at the hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Firefighters had it under control about an hour and a half later, department spokesman John Mulligan said. The cause was under investigation.
The hospital resumed its normal schedule after the fire was contained, except for a few changes to the eighth floor.
Mulligan said 106 firefighters responded to the scene. Two fire truck ladders were propped up against the seventh floor windows, and dozens of fire trucks and other firefighting vehicles ringed the hospital, stalling traffic around the complex.