One man is dead after a fire in a residential portion of Trump Tower, in New York; six firefighters were also injured. The building houses Donald Trump's own family apartment, though none of the family was in residence at the time.
The Times reports that despite the spread of smoke through multiple floors and the dispatch of 200 firefighters to battle the fire, residents were not told to evacuate.
[76 year old Lalitha Masson] said that she did not get any announcement about leaving, and that when she called the front desk no one answered. [...]
[Dennis Shields] said there were no orders to evacuate but he received a text message from Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael D. Cohen.
Mr. Shields, who said he grew up with Mr. Cohen, continued: “He said, ‘Are you in the building?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You better get out ASAP.’ That’s how I knew to get out, otherwise I’d still be in there.”
While the tower is touted as a "luxury" building, the residential floors of the high-rise are not equipped with sprinkler systems. The New York Daily News reports that Trump was instrumental in ensuring he and other large building owners not be required to install them, arguing it would be too expensive.
Nearly two decades ago, Trump, then one of the Big Apple’s most prominent real estate moguls, lobbied against Mayor Rudy Giuliani-era legislation that considered whether sprinklers should be installed in all residential buildings after two fatal fires in Brooklyn and Manhattan. [...]
Trump called city officials like famed Queens politician Archie Spigner, whose council committee compiled the bill, to argue that sprinklers were too expensive — at $4 per square foot — to install throughout an entire building, the New York Times reported at the time.
Trump won an exemption; even decades later, the apartments still contain no such devices.
None of this was mentioned by Trump himself, who took to Twitter to specifically echo the fire commissioner's declaration to the press that his was a "well built building."