One dead, 36 injured in Staten Island shipyard explosion

A shipyard fire on Staten Island turned deadly when two explosions tore through a Mariners Harbor site near Richmond Terrace, killing one person and injuring 36 others, most of them firefighters and other first responders.

Officials said multiple calls came in around 3:30 p.m. Friday reporting smoke and two workers trapped in a confined space in the basement of a 150-foot-by-150-foot metal structure at the back of the shipyard. Firefighters and EMS crews arrived within about six minutes, but the situation escalated quickly. Officials said there were two explosions, and a firefighter and a fire marshal were inside the structure when the second blast hit. Both were seriously injured by the shock wave.

The death and the scale of the injuries put the emergency response itself at the center of the disaster. More than 200 first responders were reported at the scene as crews worked through the blaze and explosion damage in the industrial waterfront area. One civilian was reported dead at the scene, while the injury count climbed through the evening as officials accounted for firefighters, EMS workers and others hurt in the blast.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani described the incident as a “complex, fast-developing emergency situation” during a Friday evening news conference at Northwell Staten Island University Hospital in Ocean Breeze, where injured responders were being evaluated. By 8 p.m., flames were said to be under control, but the scene remained active as investigators worked to determine what triggered the fire and the two blasts.

The early timeline points to how fast the incident unraveled: smoke, trapped workers, an industrial basement space, then an explosion that injured the very crews sent to contain it. The cause remained under investigation Friday night, but the sequence raised immediate questions about conditions inside the shipyard and how a confined-space fire in a metal structure was able to become a mass-casualty emergency so quickly.