Long Island, N.Y., Firefighters Tackle Huge Brush Fire

April 09--Homes in Riverhead and Manorville have been destroyed by raging brush fires that have consumed at least 2,000 acres of woods and vegetation as strong winds blew flames, igniting grass and forest in tinderbox-like conditions, Suffolk officials said.

As of 7:30 p.m., winds were diminishing and only the eastern front of the fire was still out of control, after the inferno burned swathes of Manorville, Ridge, Riverhead and several other communities in what is considered a single inferno, said County Executive Steve Bellone and rescue officials.

At a news conference from the Command Post at Ridge, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said "It is not yet under control" and that departments from Nassau and Suffolk were still "hard at work."

He said the fire is moving in a southeast direction. He said local evacuations have been called for. "There are scattered homes throughout the area that have been evacuated," he said.

He said the county would be going door to door if additional evacations were necessary. He said two residences had been completeley destroyed and one commercial building had been destroyed; 236 homes were without power.

Several hundred acres were still burning, Ridge fire officials said at the news conference.

Chief Craig Robinson of the Plainview Fire Department said nightfall is becoming a concern, as it will make the job a lot more challenging. About 50 departments were battling small blazes and darkness, he said.

Robinson said the fire is a mile into the woods in Manorville and they are attempting to chop away a path to get into the woods. He said he saw two or three houses that burned to the ground in Manorville near North Street.

"It's still jumping a little," Robinson said.

As least 10 homes in Riverhead have burned, and a mandatory evacuation of parts of Riverhead started 5 p.m., with residents relocated to the Riverhead senior center, said county spokeswoman Vanessa Baird-Streeter.

Michael Wiwczar, an honorary chief with the Wading River Fire Department, said that he had witnessed a home on Schultz Road in Manorville completely destroyed by flames. He said they ripped right through the side of the house.

"I've never seen anything this big," Wiwczar, who has 54 years of firefighting experience, said of the blaze. "It's just a tremendous fire."

The area near Line Road, just above Robert Cushman Murphy County Park, was being hit hard, he said. Several homes in the area were burning as of early evening, Wiwczar said.

Mark Bennett, who lives on Oakwood Drive in Manorville, rushed home from work early Monday evening to find the edge of his property burning. He went inside his house, scooped up his 2-year-old corgi beagle, Parker, and a backpack full of kibble, and quickly evacuated the area.

"We were lucky," Bennett said, noting that his house hadn't burned. "We lost a little bit of property. It's scary."

On Manorville Road in Ridge, it was a mad scramble to escape homes as flames approached just before 6 p.m.

Marcia Lucas ran down the street, toting a backpack and shouting, "I'm getting the hell out of here!"

"It's extremely scary," the evacuated resident continued. "I've been living here a long time and I've never seen this."

A caravan of fire engines approached the street where bright orange flames swallowed trees and moved perilously close to homes. As residents fled, firefighters suited up amid thick smoke to attack the blaze.

"We're going in to try to knock down the head of the fire before it reaches the back of these homes," said First Lt. Ralph Lettieri of the Hagerman Fire Department in East Patchogue.

Diane Juergens, a Ridge resident, said she encountered the blaze as she returned home from attending classes around 3 pm. "It looked like a volcano exploding," said Juergens, whose husband Chris has been kept from home by one of several roadblocks around the neighborhood. "The plume of smoke in the air was just amazing."

Juegens said the area has been inundated with vehicles. "It looks like a war zone, with firetrucks and helicopters," she said. There was a fire just to the north some 20 years ago but "this is the closest a fire has ever come to here."

Many residents who own horses in the Manorville area are scrambling to get trailers to move their animals to safety, said Manorville resident Doug Dittko.

Annie's Acres, a stable in Manorville that houses about 25 horses, would be in danger if the fire continued to spread, Dittko said.

"You have to have the transportation -- they are huge animals, they weigh 1,500 pounds," Dittko said. "You also have to have a place to land them."

Some 50 horses are in areas that have already been evacuated and SPCA's emergency response team is responding and will probably stage at the Grumman facility nearby on Route 25, fire officials said.

Three firefighters were injuried and taken to Stony Brook University Medical Center; one firefighter suffered a minor burn, two are being treated for smoke inhalation, officials said.

Fire agencies were asked to go first to the staging area at the Suffolk Fire Academy in Yaphank and get their assignments, with priority going to the spraying down of residential homes in the path of the inferno, Baird-Streeter said.

Several firefighters had minor injuries as flames surrounded two fire trucks at one point, and they abandoned both vehicles, Baird-Streeter said.

The fires had burned land on and off Brookhaven National Lab property, mostly on park land, said Michael Bebon, deputy director for operations at the Upton-based laboratory. The fire started about 2:30 p.m., he said along the north side of the lab property.

As a precaution, the lab evacuated two employees from the sewage treatment plant on the northern border, but said the complex housing of its well-known relativistic heavy ion collider was not in imminent danger.

The fire covers approximately 300 acres on the Brookhaven National Laboratory site, lab officials said.

Bebon said the fire departments at the scene are experienced at controlling brush fires and have specialized equipment for such blazes. That includes so called "stump jumpers," brushfire-fighting vehicles that have four-wheel drive, high clearance and side protection.

A Suffolk County police helicopter was up in the air trying to find the perimeter of the fire, police said.

Residents are urged to stay off the high-occupancy vehicle lanes of the eastbound Long Island Expressway, officials said, as fire authorities race to the fire scene. Eastbound Route 25 was closed east of William Floyd Parkway, police said.

County officials also closed the westbound north service road of the Long Island Expressway, starting at exit 69. Both the HOV and service road closures were expected to last until midnight.

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, at the Command Post in Ridge, officials said on News 12, he asked county residents to refrain from calling 911 because the system was getting overloaded. He said officials are evaluating whether local evacuations were necessary.ha

"This is an evolving situation," he said.

Bellone's county website said firefighters from 109 fire and rescue units in Suffolk County have responded to the scene of the brush fire, and 15 additional departments from Nassau County are en route.

The website said a mandatory evacuation is being sought by the Riverhead Police Department for the area north to Grumman Avenue, east to Edwards Avenue, south to Peconic Avenue, and west to Wading River Manor. Riverhead Town opened a shelter for evacuees at the Riverhead Senior Center ib Shade Tree Lane in Aquebogue.

LIPA has cut power to a major transmission line running through the area.

"We were asked to de-energize our transmission line at the request of the fire marshall," spokesman Mark Gross said. "We have switched load to another line so no customers are impacted."

The fire forced the Long Island Rail Road to cancel the eastbound stops from Greenport to Yaphank, said rail road spokesman Salvatore Arena. Passengers were told that the train, due in Yaphank at 8:17 p.m., would stop at Ronkonkoma, where buses would take passegers the rest of the way, he said.

That cancellation came after MTA police reported fire across rail road tracks in Calverton shortly before 6 p.m., near Edwards Avenue, Arena said.

Mid-march to mid-May historically marks the period of highest fire risks across the state. From 2000 to 2009, New York's fire departments responded to an average of 2,300 wildfires each year from March 16 to May 14, according to statistics. That represents about 46 percent of all wildfires for the year.

Bill Korbel, News 12 meteorologist said the conditions left by recent weather had set the stafe for the blaze.

"The conditions all winter long have been very dry, less than one third of the normal rainfall this year and 1/2 inch of rain for the past six weeks or so, March into April," he said.

"Added to that was today there were very strong winds, gusting up to 40 mph. And the air is extraordinarly dry. Relative humidity was 15 percent, more like you'd find in the southwest. It would be 40 percent here on a normal spring day.

"This is extraordinaly dry weather. That drought allows fuel to dry up and be more flammable. Strong winds spread it, just pick up and blow embers and start other fires."

The forecast overnight calls for winds to subside a bit, probaly cut in half, to 10 to 15 mph. "The first showers could come later Tuesday or Wednesday. There could be showers and the humidity will be up a bit. That should help them (firefighters) knock it down a bit," Korbel said.

The blaze in Ridge draw immediate comparisons to the so-called Sunrise Fire of 1995.

The conflagration began on the afternoon of Aug. 24 near the eastern campus of Suffolk County Community College in Riverhead. It was named for the highway it jumped as it burned across a large section of the Pine Barrens. It was among the state's largest brush fires in a century. Scientists who conducted aerial surveys say about 3,200 acres of the 100,000-acre pinelands burned but no lives or homes were lost.

The blaze was officially contained only after four days, as firefighters struggled to keep up with the wind and the flames, which constantly changed direction. Investigators never determined the exact cause but said it appeared to be intentionally set.

Besides firefighters from across Long Island and federal "hot shot" teams from around the country, the 106th Air National Guard unit's crews dropped baskets of water from helicopters.

With Patrick Whittle, Bill Bleyer, Stacey Altherr, Emily C. Dooley, Gary Dymski, William Murphy, Yancey Roy, Kevin Deutsch and Patricia Kitchen

Copyright 2012 - Newsday, Melville, N.Y.