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by ROBERT D. McFADDEN
A ferocious six-alarm fire, apparently ignited by lightning, roared through a blocklong mattress factory in Brooklyn yesterday, generating blast-furnace heat and a huge cloud of smoke that enveloped an entire neighborhood and was visible for miles. Nine firefighters were injured and dozens of nearby residents were evacuated as firefighters struggled for hours to contain the flames.
Fire officials called it the city's biggest fire of the year.
Passing witnesses saw a lightning bolt flash down in a thunderstorm, heard it strike on a rooftop and spotted the first plumes of smoke as the flames broke out shortly after 3 p.m. at the Paradise Mattress Company, a two-story red-brick building at 1209 DeKalb Avenue, between Bushwick and Evergreen Avenues in Bushwick.
The first firefighters on the scene were confronted with a cloud of gray smoke so dense that it blotted out the sky and obscured objects 10 feet away, making it difficult even to find the fire location. Within minutes the number of alarms was raised and then raised again to summon more assistance.
By 4 p.m., six alarms had been sounded, summoning 225 firefighters and 75 units of apparatus, including water-gushing tower ladders.
It was the kind of blaze that fire officials dread: one that engulfs a factory filled with materials - synthetic foam, wood for slats and piles of ticking - that generate intense heat and heavy smoke. These materials, in turn, obscure interior walls that firefighters use to feel their way blindly in unfamiliar mazes.
A rookie firefighter, Thomas C. Brick, was killed last Dec. 16 while fighting a four-alarm fire in a mattress warehouse in Upper Manhattan. He was among the first to go into the burning building, looking for victims, but became separated from comrades and did not come out when a retreat was ordered.
"These places have a lot of fuel," the chief of the Fire Department, Peter E. Hayden, said yesterday as he directed the firefighting efforts in Brooklyn. "There's stacks of mattress foam and thin flammable wood. There also tends to be chemicals for treating the mattress wood."
Any suggestion that toxic chemicals were involved was later denied by factory owners.
The factory was closed for the Independence Day holiday, and no one was in the building at the time, but firefighters had no way to know that for sure without going into the burning structure.
Chief Hayden said that 30 firefighters were sent in initially to search for potential victims and to evaluate the dangers of the fire. Within 15 minutes, they were pulled out.
Over the next five hours, as flames and smoke enveloped the building and turned the neighborhood into a surreal cloud city, firefighters used tower and aerial ladders to pour cataracts of water into the building. By 8 p.m., the main body of flames had been knocked down, but fire officials said they were prepared for an all-night effort to ensure that the fire was out.
By early evening, however, it was clear that the factory had been destroyed, along with 1,500 to 1,800 mattresses and the jobs of about 25 employees, many of them neighborhood residents, according to Felix Montanez, 62, a foreman who had worked at the factory for 24 years. "I don't know what we're going to do," he said last night.
The smoke, easily visible from the East River bridges and neighborhoods in Queens as far north as Astoria, swallowed the nearby elevated tracks of the J, M and Z lines, and billowed most heavily - held down by gusts of winds - through a three-block radius of the factory. Dozens of residents on Stockholm Street and Evergreen, Bushwick and DeKalb Avenues were evacuated. Most were allowed to return last night, but some found hopeless messes in their homes.
"My apartment is now black with smoke," said Aida Wilson, 50, who lives at DeKalb and Evergreen. She said she had opened her windows for a breath of air on a hot, humid day, and the smoke had poured in before she had a chance to do anything about it.
As large crowds gathered on surrounding streets to observe the firefighting, two owners of the factory, Bari Heron and Robert Eisenberg, watched the unfolding drama with despair.
"My whole factory is ruined," Mr. Eisenberg said, his eyes red with smoke and crying.
But he tried later to be optimistic. "We just need help to find work for the employees," he said. "It would have been devastating if people had been hurt inside."
Nine firefighters were felled by smoke and heat. Three were treated at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens and the others were treated at the scene. A woman watching the firefighting also was treated at the scene for heat exhaustion, but apparently not as a direct result of the fire.
While the fire remained under investigation, its cause officially described as undetermined, there appeared to be little doubt that a lightning strike had been responsible. Robert Ribot, 44, and his brother Tony, 40, both carpenters who live on nearby Hart Street, were walking to a bodega at Evergreen and DeKalb when they saw it happen.
"There was lightning flashing," Robert Ribot recalled. "When you heard the thud you knew it hit something. That's when we saw the smoke."
It was rising from the roof of the factory, he said.
Firefighters at the scene later confirmed that lightning had struck an air-conditioner on the roof, touching off the blaze. The Ribot brothers ran home and called 911 to report the fire. The first alarm was received at 3:08 p.m.
Six-alarm fires are rare - this was the first of 2004 - but Chief Hayden noted that 16 alarms were sounded to call 500 firefighters to battle a blaze that heavily damaged the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights in August 1995.
Ian Urbina, Janon Fisher and Michelle O'Donnell contributed reporting for this article.
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