Wildfire grows in New Jersey and New York, despite modest rainfall

Firefighters battle flames from the Jennings Creek fire in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., Nov. 10, 2024. The Jennings Creek fire nearly doubled in size on Monday, Nov. 11, 2024, to 5,000 acres, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, though the estimate included areas that had stopped burning. (Dakota Santiago/The New York Times)

By Andy Newman and Mark Bonamo

A wildfire consuming a vast stretch of hilly forest along the New York-New Jersey border continued to grow earlier this week despite the first significant rainfall in nearly six weeks, fire officials said. Bone-dry weather and gusts of up to 40 mph are expected to sweep through the region 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 spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection said.

About 20% 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 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 8 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 Franek, who added he had been up for more than two days straight. “Getting to the fire has been a real struggle.”

The fire, which started 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% are expected in the area Tuesday, and there is little chance of rain over the next week.

“If we got an inch of rain, it would quiet us down,” 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 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, authorities were monitoring 82 fires, including more than a dozen that had broken out in the past few days.