New Yorkers across the city woke up to a concerning, smoky smell on Saturday morning after brush fires broke out on Friday in Brooklyn, the Bronx and nearby New Jersey. It was a surreal moment for a city that rarely experiences wildfires but is in the middle of a drought.
On Saturday, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation placed the city, as well as Rockland and Westchester Counties, under an air quality alert until 11 p.m.
The smell of smoke woke Desi Yvette, 36, in her Williamsburg home in the middle of the night.
“It was close to 2 and I just stayed up for a while,” Ms. Yvette said as she walked her Maltese mix, Midas, on Saturday. “I thought maybe there was a fire nearby, but I didn’t hear any sirens. So I was like, I don’t think it’s an emergency or we would have been alerted. But it does smell bad.”
Ms. Yvette had not heard about the brush fire that broke out on Friday night in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, burning two acres in a heavily wooded area. “It’s crazy that it smells all the way over here,” she added. “It’s just been a week of, like, disaster.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement on Saturday that there were multiple wildfires burning across New York State, noting that Hudson Valley, Long Island and the Catskills region were at high risk. Ms. Hochul had deployed a “multiagency response” to fires burning across hundreds of acres in Ulster, Sullivan and Orange Counties, the statement said.
Firefighters in New York City first received a call about the Prospect Park fire at around 6:40 p.m. It took about three hours and over 100 emergency responders to put out the blaze, a Fire Department spokesman said.
One firefighter was taken to a nearby hospital for a minor injury. The cause of the blaze has yet to be determined.
While a smoky haze filtered over Brooklyn on Saturday morning, blurring the edges of fall foliage on an otherwise sunny day, New Yorkers tried to make sense of the fire.
“The buildings aren’t made out of wood, are they?” one woman asked her friend while walking down Nostrand Avenue in the borough’s Crown Heights neighborhood.
At Grand Army Plaza near Prospect Park, a weekly farmers’ market was in full swing. Ava Butler, 26, was shocked to hear about the fire.
“I didn’t think it would happen in Prospect Park,” she said, adding, “It’s scary and sad.”
Mars Charles, who was selling sea moss at the market, was less concerned. He just thought someone was barbecuing, he said.
Across the East River in Manhattan, Lisa Bura woke up coughing in the middle of the night, thinking her apartment on the Upper West Side was on fire. She saw smoke coming through her open windows, she said.
“I didn’t turn on the lights, but I could definitely tell that there was a lot of smoke in the air,” she said. “I was thinking about getting some masks, but I haven’t.”
Around the same time firefighters were battling the blaze in Brooklyn, another brush fire broke out in Highbridge Park in the Bronx. Roughly 25 firefighters took about two and a half hours to extinguish the blaze, the Fire Department said.
Diana Finch, a resident of the Bronx Park East neighborhood, got a heavy whiff of the smoke, which she said smelled like a wood fire, as it came through her bedroom windows at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday.
The smell reminded her of another brush fire that occurred in her neighborhood last week.
Ms. Finch said that people all over the borough were talking about the smoky scent, many connecting it back to wildfires that engulfed parts of New Jersey and Connecticut this week.
“We are smelling all of it,” said Phyllis Nastasio, another Bronx resident.
Ms. Nastasio was leaving the restaurant Wicked Wolf in the Bronx on Friday night when the smoke first hit her nostrils. It was very windy and you could immediately smell it when you stepped outside, she noted.
Another fire broke out near the city — in the Greenwood Lake area of New York close to the New Jersey border — at around 11 a.m. on Saturday. Local firefighters were on the scene and battling the blaze, according to an emergency management dispatcher. It was unclear how much the smoke from the fire was contributing to the smell in the city.
Amid a particularly dry fall, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City issued a drought watch last week, urging New Yorkers to conserve water.
The dry season has contributed to an uptick in brush fires, said Zachary Iscol, the city’s commissioner of emergency management. He and other officials are pushing people to conserve water and remain vigilant, as the region’s drought is expected to continue over the next two months.
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