by THOMAS J. LUECK
A 35-year-old man trying to flee a fast-moving fire in a Bronx apartment building was badly injured yesterday afternoon when he slipped from a fire escape and fell several stories, the authorities said.
Fire marshals said the man had climbed out a fifth-floor window of 2185 Grand Concourse, at the corner of 181st Street, and fell while he was at that height, or close to it.
The man, whose name was not disclosed, was in critical condition with broken bones and other injuries at St. Barnabas Hospital yesterday, according to a hospital spokesman.
Nine people who had been inside the apartment building were treated for smoke inhalation, fire officials said. The blaze, which was reported at 3:04 p.m., was under control at 3:55 p.m., firefighters said.
The cause of the fire was unclear last night, but officials said it started in a sofa in the building's lobby and moved quickly upstairs when it ignited flammable paint on the walls of a stairwell.
Flames and smoke reached each floor of the six-story walkup, they said.
"The paint on the stair corridor flashed pretty quickly," said Lee Decker, one of the first firefighters on the scene.
He said he had entered the lobby with a hose when he received word over his radio that someone had fallen from a high floor, and was believed to have jumped.
Several people fled down the same rear fire escape. "I think the reason he fell was that people were panicking," said Margaret Moffett, a fire marshal supervisor who was on the scene last night.
Rhina Nunez, 19, who had climbed out on the fire escape from a second-floor apartment, said she saw the man fall. "He tried to grab a big cable, but it fell with him," she said.
The use of flammable paint was once common.
It has been blamed for similar fast-moving fires in stairwells, including one in a Bronx housing project in 1996 that roared up 11 floors, and two others in public housing buildings in 1995, each resulting in a fatality.
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