Why Did Brooklyn’s Biggest Park Light Up in Flames?
Reading Time: 5 minutesClimate change has brought us a new kind of fire season in the Northeast., Fire season Northeast: Why did Brooklyn’s biggest park catch fire?
In Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on Sunday, onlookers gawked at a charred hilltop, where newly fallen leaves had already obscured the scorched earth of Friday’s 2-acre brushfire. Some respected two ‘Do Not Enter’ signs; others did not.
Those who hopped the fence returned with photos of what looked like a burned encampment: dozens of pull-tab cans, a grill, and the singed remains of fans, a microwave, and a rug. Box springs lay heaped in a pile beneath a folding camp bed, freed by the flames. A large smiley face scratched into a nearby rock survived unscathed.
Passersby debated whom to blame. The people living in the encampment? The people who should have kicked them out? Their fellow citizens, for having such uncharitable thoughts?
Scapegoating misses the point: ‘At the end of the day, what is really causing these fires is the dry conditions,’ New York City Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol told me later when I asked about the cause. The city is under its first drought watch in more than 20 years, thanks to a historic lack of rain. A brief drizzle Sunday evening gave firefighters a short break but did not make a long-term dent in drought conditions or wildfire risks.
Joan Didion has called fire season the season of prickly dread, the season when the wind works on the nerves and every voice seems a scream. A season, in other words, when we are quick to point fingers.
Perhaps these fires burn in part because the Northeast does not yet have a grim and hard-won culture of fire safety. In Northern California, fire-evacuation ‘go bags’ are normal, campfires are essentially a thing of the past, and even people living outside take fire risks seriously. But mostly, this season’s fires burn because, for big swaths of the Northeast—including New York City—this is, to date, the driest fall on record.
In the past few weeks, brush fires have blazed not just in Prospect Park but in parks across all five NYC boroughs, including in Van Cortlandt, Fort Tryon, Flushing Meadows Corona, Clove Lakes, and Gerritsen Beach. In November alone, the city’s Fire Department has responded to 202 brush fires, according to a spokesperson.
New York state, New Jersey, and Connecticut are battling dozens of wildfires, well above the norm. The commonality is green space—or former green space that is now dry and crispy. Forest rangers are concerned about forests that haven’t burned in decades, which contain an abundance of downed wood waiting to go up in flames.
The Catskill watershed is experiencing its largest wildfire on record, with nearly 650 acres burned. In New York state, rangers have responded to 60 wildfires since October, totaling about 2,750 acres burned, according to Captain Scott Jackson, the fire management officer for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. ‘It is a more extreme fire season than we have seen in recent history,’ he said.
The Jennings Creek wildfire, on the border of New York and New Jersey, has burned 5,000 acres so far. A column of smoke from the fire this weekend targeted New York City with bull’s-eye precision, prompting air-pollution warnings for sensitive groups. Eighteen-year-old New York State Parks Department volunteer Dariel Vasquez died fighting the blaze.
New Yorkers still need to be careful. The city and the state remain at risk of wildfires. To that end, Mayor Eric Adams instituted a temporary ban on grilling in parks after the Prospect Park fire made headlines. Other blaze hazards include fireworks, campfires, and smoking. ‘Believe it or not, it is illegal to smoke in parks,’ said Iscol, the city’s emergency management commissioner.
If the drought continues, city residents can expect not just grilling restrictions but also mandatory water restrictions: Reservoirs are low, and New Yorkers are thirsty. ‘We consume in New York City about a billion gallons of water every single day,’ Iscol said. Usually, by this point in the season, the city’s reservoirs have accumulated more than enough water for the whole year. Currently, they are about 40 days short.
The city is in a drought watch, and Iscol expects that these restrictions will soon escalate. ‘Watch means that you should start getting prepared. A warning means that you should start putting that plan in place and emergency means that, you know, it is occurring,’ he said.
As Hell Gate put it, ‘No campfires, no grilling, stomp out your butts (or better yet, vape), and remember to keep your showers short, as New York’s interminable dry spell is set to continue … forever?’
I also wondered about that question of forever. Western states have faced a decadeslong megadrought—the worst in more than a thousand years. Is the Northeast facing the same fate?
I spoke with Michael Rawlins, the associate director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Overall, the Northeast is a wet place that will, on balance, get wetter, he told me. A warmer atmosphere holds more water, so as the planet heats up, we can expect more extreme rain ‘whenever the conditions are right to squeeze that moisture out,’ he said.
But these monthslong droughts in the Northeast will continue to occur. Climate models predict that they will be relatively short compared with the multiyear Western-style megadroughts, but the Northeast must prepare for more droughts, like the one we’re in now, that are hotter and longer than before.
First, Rawlins told me, climate change is adding heat to a dry spell. With hotter temperatures, more water evaporates, further dehydrating the already parched ground. That means a higher wildfire risk than there would have been in a similar period without rain 20 years ago.
Second, Rawlins says, climate change may help extend this drought, further increasing the risk of wildfire. That’s because the other thing climate change is doing is unsettling the jet stream: the river of air that undulates across the Northern Hemisphere and brings rain and storms from west to east in predictable waves throughout the year.
Research by Rawlins’ colleague Jennifer Francis suggests that a quickly warming Arctic may be slowing those waves, causing short-term weather systems to linger. ‘Instead of a dry week, we’re seeing more like a dry two weeks or three weeks,’ Rawlins said. He notes that recent research suggests that the Northeast may continue to see more persistent weather systems—dry and wet—and thus more ‘weather whiplash.’
Hotter, longer drought conditions mean that instead of smelling pleasantly damp, rotting leaves on the forest floor, we get the ominous smell of dry, dusty ones. When dry weather does settle in, fires are more likely to ignite. And when they do, an increasingly warm world makes them more likely to spread. If the fire weather is working on your nerves, remember what’s really to blame, beneath it all: our continued reluctance to stop burning fossil fuels.
On that note, Rawlins said, ‘I’m no longer going to mince words here when it comes to my opinions on human actions and leadership by governments.’ He told me that climate experts have now given up hope of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the point that they had predicted might prevent the worst climate tipping points. The international community is currently working to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
‘I think the election of Donald Trump could be potentially a tragedy for our best hopes of transitioning to a more clean energy economy,’ Rawlins said, pointing to the president-elect’s promises to fossil-fuel companies while campaigning.
‘It’s just perverse,’ he said. ‘I can only hope that some of the promises that were made on the campaign trail do not materialize.’
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