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Tens of thousands of Staten Island residents face a nightmare of a commute this morning after a fire of suspicious origin yesterday severely damaged the Municipal Ferry Terminal at Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan.
"First the train, now the boat," said Staten Island resident Hector Ruiz, referring to the Union Square subway derailment on Aug. 28 and yesterday's fire. "How are we supposed to get around? By airplane?"
Rush-hour ferries will run every 20 minutes rather than every 15 minutes and cars will not be allowed on the boats until further notice.
The first alarm was reported at 8:12 a.m., though several workers and ferrygoers said they smelled smoke a half-hour earlier. The blaze and alarm calls escalated rapidly, with the fire finally brought under control at 11:45 a.m.
Sources said the fire appeared to have started in some offices on the third floor, directly above the terminal's main waiting room.
"We saw smoke about 10 minutes before we saw flames," ferry supervisor Arthur Cordiano said. "Sparks started coming from the walls. That's when the ceiling collapsed."
Cordiano said ferry employees and police evacuated 60 to 70 people from the waiting room. Had the fire occurred during a weekday rush hour, he said, the evacuation could have involved up to 2,000 people.
More than 200 firefighters battled the fire as it raged through the morning, with flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air and smoke blanketing the area with an acrid haze. Eight people were sent to hospitals for treatment of smoke inhalation and released. Eleven others were treated at the scene.
"This was a very difficult fire, very inaccessible, and there was a tremendous volume of fire," said Fire Commissioner Carlos Rivera. He said the fire was deemed suspicious because of the "volume of fire on arrival."
"The advanced fire could have been caused...