Hundreds of firefighters from dozens of fire departments in both states were battling the blaze.
Credit...Dakota Santiago for The New York Times

Wildfire Grows in New Jersey and New York, Despite Modest Rainfall

The Jennings Creek fire is currently burning across 3,500 acres, officials said, and is expected to grow to over 5,000 acres.

by · NY Times

A wildfire consuming a vast stretch of hilly forest along the New York-New Jersey border continued to grow on Monday despite the first significant rainfall in nearly six weeks, fire officials said. Bone-dry weather and gusts of up to 40 miles per hour are expected to sweep through the region on Tuesday, raising the risk that the fire will continue to spread.

More than 3,500 acres were burning in New Jersey and New York as of Monday night, and the fire was expected to grow to more than 5,000 acres, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection said.

About 20 percent of the New Jersey portion of the fire was contained, according to the state’s Forest Fire Service. It was not clear how much of the New York portion of the fire was contained.

The rain on Sunday night, measuring just a quarter of an inch across the region, only temporarily slowed the fire’s growth, said Christopher Franek, an assistant division fire warden for the Forest Fire Service.

“We’re throwing everything we’ve got at it,” he said. “A lot of manual labor is choking on smoke and dust.” Five thousand acres is nearly eight square miles — about a third the size of Manhattan.

Hundreds of firefighters from dozens of fire departments in both states are battling the blaze in a rugged patch of Passaic County in New Jersey and Orange County in New York near the Appalachian Trail.

“Everything is a blur right now,” said Mr. Franek, who said he had been up for more than two days straight. “Getting to the fire has been a real struggle.”

The fire, which started on Friday, claimed the life of an 18-year-old New York State parks worker over the weekend when a tree fell on him. No evacuations have been ordered, but about 10 structures are threatened in New Jersey, officials said.

The Jennings Creek fire is one of hundreds that have flared up in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut during a season of record-breaking drought. As mid-November arrives, trees cloaked in dead, dry late-autumn leaves have become towers of tinder.

Jay Engle, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service covering New York City and the surrounding area, said that not much had changed in the fire risk forecast.

“We got a little bit of a wetting rainfall, but as we go into tomorrow things are going to dry out again,” he said. Humidity levels as low as 35 percent are expected in the area on Tuesday, and there is little chance of rain over the next week.

“If we got an inch of rain, it would quiet us down,” Mr. Engle said, “but unfortunately we have no relief in sight.”

The fires blanketed much of the New York City metropolitan region in acrid smoke over the weekend. The air quality improved somewhat on Monday, with the State Department of Environmental Conservation reporting that the city’s pollution level was “moderate.”

In New Jersey, the Forest Fire Service has responded to more than 500 fires since early October, more than 10 times the number that the agency fought in the same period last year.

In Connecticut, the authorities were monitoring 82 fires, including more than a dozen that had broken out in the last few days.

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