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bet on red Ladies and Gentlemen, the Northeast Is Burning
The smoke around New York City is back. But don’t blame Canada.bet on red
In Vancouver, British Columbia, where I’ve lived for 25 years, we used to blame California and Washington for our occasionally smoky skies. Then in the summer of 2015, Vancouver’s air turned Martian orange, just as the air on the East Coast did last year. Only this time, the fires were ours. It wasn’t just a bad year; something fundamental had changed. Since then, almost every summer has brought red suns at midday, health advisories, broken heat records, anxiety and, when fires get close, real fear: Our old house is a tinderbox. Where would we go?
Red flag warnings in New England indicating fire weather — that is, hot, dry, windy conditions — have been issued repeatedly since late October. These warnings are common in the West, but they are extremely rare in the Northeast, where I grew up and where my base line was established, my notion of what normal weather is. And I can tell you: This isn’t normal. Back in the 1970s, the idea of wildfires along the I-95 corridor in November was simply inconceivable.
This fall, more than 500 wildfires have ignited in New Jersey alone. And in the past two weeks, in parts of Connecticut and Pennsylvania where developments end and wild lands begin, known as the wildland-urban interface, fires have been threatening homes, too. New York City’s fire department responded to 271 brush fires across the five boroughs just in the first two weeks of November. A 5,000-acre fire has been burning for more than a week on the New York-New Jersey border, prompting voluntary evacuation orders on Saturday, after the fire broke through containment lines.
Last month a firefighter was killed and two more were injured by a vehicle while fighting a wildfire in Berlin, Conn. On Nov. 9 an 18-year-old New York State employee was killed fighting a fire in Sterling Forest State Park. Wildfire fighters getting killed? Maybe in Colorado or California. But in the Northeast, hardly ever.
Two weeks ago, a newspaper reporter from Provincetown, Mass., called me. Could the pitch pine and scrub oak forests of Cape Cod burn like the Western forests I described in my book “Fire Weather”?
“Yes,” I told him. “Maybe not in the past, but now they can.”
It felt strange, almost traitorous, to say that, because I’ve been going to the cape since I was a child. I know the smell of those pine needles in summer, the soft crunch of the cones underfoot. The idea of those trees burning never occurred to me before this year.
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