AROUND 6:40 P.M. on November 8, two acres of Prospect Park began to burn. The fire started in or near the Nethermead, at the center of the park, and about 100 of the FDNY’s people put it out by midnight; one firefighter was slightly injured. The next morning, cars parked in Prospect Heights were dusted with sooty ash. You could smell smoke all over Brooklyn and as far away as midtown Manhattan. Or was that Jersey we were picking up? Because a swath of the Palisades had burned that same day. The air was “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” a phrase just specific enough to reassure no one. A couple of days later, out west by Greenwood Lake, a village on the border with New Jersey, more than 2,000 acres were aflame. While crews were trying to get that under control, Inwood Hill Park lit up on November 13. Any way you look at this year’s statistics, they’re superlatives, and not in a good way. Lately, we have about 200 brush fires per October; this fall, we’re going at double that pace. We’ve had about an inch and a half of rain since Labor Day instead of the usual ten. Also, it was 80 degrees on Halloween. How do you put out a rural fire in an urban park? The FDNY, which deals with a huge variety of terrain beyond high-rises and tenements, turns out to have eight brush-fire units. Even so, Inwood Hill Park is not an easy place to defend, in part because it is so densely treed. (Unlike Central Park, which was mostly planted, Inwood Hill is the last patch of basically virgin land in Manhattan.) As Chief of Fire Operations Kevin Woods put it the other night, “Obviously, there aren’t fire hydrants in the middle of a forest.” Instead the crews ran hoses 150 feet up a hill and pumped water straight from the Harlem River as they flew drones overhead to identify the hot spots. It took over four hours and more than 140 people to knock the flames down.

Neighborhood News: Our Wildfires

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