Packrat inferno may yield tenant lawsuits

Neighbors had feared the worst long before Vycheslav Nekrasov’s packrat habits obstructed firefighters’ attempt to douse a three-alarm blaze that began in his Sunnyside apartment on July 3.
Nekrasov’s neighbors in 43-25 43rd Street were so concerned that they had repeatedly called the Health Department, which was scheduled to visit the dangerously crammed apartment on Wednesday, July 5 – two days after the fire.
&#8220We called the super; we called 3-1-1,” said Julian Constantin, who lives on the first floor of the apartment building. &#8220Unfortunately, this could have been prevented.”
Now tenants are considering suing the building’s management for punitive damages. They held a third meeting with lawyer Howard Rubin on Monday, July 10, but the residents have not yet decided on a course of action.
&#8220The management never listens. There are a lot of problems,” Constantin said, pointing to the lock on the building’s front door, which he said had been broken for weeks allowing anyone who walked by to enter the building.
Constantin, who said that he often physically stopped Nekrasov, 68, from entering the building with junk whenever he caught the older man hauling in handcarts of clothing, books, and furniture, said that the management should have done more to curb Nekrasov’s habits or to evict him if they could not stop his collecting.
On Monday, July 3, 14 firefighters and five residents were hurt, and Nekrasov was critically injured when the fire – believed to have been started by a candle – was fueled by the vast quantity of junk in the second-floor apartment. Nekrasov remained in critical condition at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan as of Tuesday, July 11.
An eccentric Russian writer, Nekrasov often squirreled away books, chairs, magazines, and newspapers in the apartment. According to published reports, Nekrasov’s wife, who asked not to be identified, said that her husband was collecting the materials to plug a leak in the ceiling, as well as books as references for an encyclopedia that he was writing on the famed Russian author Aleksandr (CQ) Pushkin.
When firefighters had tried to enter Nekrasov’s apartment, they were met with floor to ceiling debris, which firefighters often call &#8220Collyer Mansions,” after the famous 1947 junk filled Fifth Ave. brownstone where two brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer both died amid 100 tons of debris that they had collected. Langley had taken care of brother Homer who died of starvation after Langley became trapped under debris.
Firefighters in Sunnyside were forced to cut a hole through the apartment above Nekrasov’s and spray water downward onto the blaze.
On Tuesday, July 10, an official from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development posted vacate orders on three apartments in the building that were also ruined by the fire.