Governor Kathy Hochul announced Tuesday that New York state will be under a burn ban until the end of the month as wildfires burn in the Hudson Valley and abnormally dry conditions persist statewide.
“It is absolutely critical that New Yorkers avoid any outdoor burning at this time,” said Hochul at a press conference in the Hudson Valley. “The threats are too great, and we cannot have our resources directed to smaller fires.”
Though rain has fallen in some parts of the state in recent days, officials say the risk for wildfires remains high. The National Weather Service has issued a red flag warning for New York City, Long Island, the Capitol Region, and the Hudson Valley, indicating a particularly dangerous combination of high winds and dry conditions.
State data shows that a huge swath of New York is under a drought watch, from Long Island up through the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. Other areas are experiencing abnormally dry conditions.
“Conditions are just exceptionally dry,” said Samantha Borisoff, a climatologist with the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University. “It's just unfortunately a recipe for wildfires to start, to burn deeper, to burn longer, and be harder to put out.”
Hochul’s major concern was focused on a fire that has spread over 5,000 acres in New York’s Orange County and in New Jersey since last Friday. The blaze, called the Jennings Creek Fire, was not yet been contained as of Tuesday afternoon, Hochul said.
Residents living near the fire have voluntarily evacuated, and no structures are under threat, said Hochul. An 18-year-old New York state parks employee, Dariel Vasquez, was killed while fighting the fire on Saturday, officials said.
Scientists have found that human-caused climate change is making droughts more frequent and severe, fueling wildfires. For New York, this high level of fire activity is unusual, said Jackie Bray, commissioner of the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.
“On an average year in New York state, about 1,400 acres burn,” said Bray. “In the last three days, this fire alone has burned 2,700 acres, and just a second fire has burned 700 acres.”
Several fires have burned in other parts of the state, including in Ithaca and in New York City’s Prospect Park. Elsewhere in the Northeast, fires have recently occurred in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
The high fire risk comes after months of unusually low levels of rainfall across much of the Northeast. Some areas, like New York City’s Central Park and Philadelphia, experienced record-low rainfall in October.