Northeast Wildfires Turn Deadly, And Spread, And Screw Up Air Quality

Satellite photo from Saturday shows wildfire smoke
blowing into New York City, prompting air
quality alerts. Several wildfires are still
burning in the Northeast today. 

The brush and wildfires in the Northeast are starting to become more western style.

They're now extensive enough to cause air quality problems in some areas. They've come close to mowing down houses. And sadly, a firefighter died in while battling a large wildfire in  northern New Jersey. 

Some rain might tamp down the fires temporarily on Monday, but the precipitation does not look like a blockbuster. 

At least nine fires were burning within the broad New York City metro area. At least two wildfires started in New York City itself over the past couple of days. One of them was in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the other in Van Cortland Park in the Bronx.

The largest fire affecting New York is the so called Jennings Creek Wildfire in and near West Milford, New Jersey. As of late yesterday, it had covered 2,000 acres and had spread into neighboring Orange County New York.

The Jennings Creek Wildfire resulted in one death, as a tree fell on a firefighter as we was trying to battle the blaze.  The fires across the Northeast are burning on land that is so dry that flames are reaching underground into tree roots, making those trees unstable and prone to toppling. 

This fire, and to a lesser extent other fires, drove smoke into New York City, prompting air quality alerts in that region on Saturday.

The wind shifted today, and smoke from that Jennings Creek Wildfire could make its way all the way up to us here in Vermont today. 

The National Weather Service office in South Burlington says some of the smoke from New Jersey will probably make its way into Vermont today.  They don't anticipate any air quality alerts, but you might notice a little haze and a little bit of a smell of smoke, especially in southern and western Vermont. 

There have been air quality problems in and around Boston as well from several fires burning in that city's western, northern and southern suburbs.

Vermont isn't immune from the fires either. A large forest fire was burning in West Brattleboro over the weekend.  The fire had spread across ten acres as of late Friday night and its as not contained, despite the efforts of numerous fire departments. 

A downed power line is believed to have started that fire. 

Today, the fire danger is regarded as very high in most of Vermont, and "merely" high in the Champlain Valley and Northeast Kingdom. Any brush fire that starts anywhere in Vermont today would spread quickly and be hard to contain. 

Forecasted rainfall, as mentioned, doesn't look all that impressive, with maybe a quarter to as much as a half inch in some areas of the Northeast this week. To extinguish the fires once and for all, the region needs a steady, long lasting, soaking rain that can get deep into the ground and moisten the earth far below the surface.