An 18-year-old employee of the New York State parks system died on Saturday while battling a forest fire in Orange County, the State Police said. It was one of several recent blazes in the New York metro area.
The employee, Dariel Vasquez, was killed while fighting a fire in the Sterling Forest in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., the State Police said in a statement late Saturday. Steven Nevel, a spokesman for the State Police, said that he could not confirm a cause of death.
Sterling Forest State Park is about 50 miles northwest of New York City.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said in a statement on Saturday that state officials were working to contain two fires in the park. The larger one was about 300 acres and extended into New Jersey. The smaller one was about nine acres and was near the Appalachian Trail.
It was not immediately clear early Sunday which of the two fires had led to the employee’s death, or to what extent they had been contained. The nearby town of Warwick, N.Y., said on social media late Saturday that emergency responders were confident that the larger fire did not threaten any homes.
Several other wildfires affected the area this weekend.
In New York, wildfires in New Jersey prompted a statewide smoke advisory on Friday, and a fire in Prospect Park in Brooklyn blanketed New York City in smoke on Saturday. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation placed the city, Rockland County and Westchester County under an air quality alert until midnight on Saturday.
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