By Maria Tsvetkova and Rich McKay
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wildfires raged from one end of New Jersey to the other on Friday after one of the driest months on record, prompting New York City to issue smoke warnings and forcing farmers to take steps to protect their crops.
The fires raged in five New Jersey counties on Thursday and Friday, mainly in the central and southern parts of the state, the National Forest Fire Department said on its Facebook page. The National Weather Service has issued a red flag warning for the area due to high winds that could worsen wildfires.
“These conditions – dry weather and high winds – have the potential to spread any fires that develop today,” said Matthew Tauber, meteorologist on duty at a local National Weather Service office.
The New York City government warned residents they might see or smell smoke from the wildfires and urged people to be cautious about using grills and outdoor gas during “heightened wildfire risk.”
One of the wildfires was burning along the Palisades in New Jersey’s Bergen County, just across the George Washington Bridge from the city. Smoke from the fire drifted across the Hudson River into neighborhoods at the northern tip of Manhattan, a video on social media showed.
On the other side of the state, a fire could be seen from Philadelphia in Gloucester County across the Delaware River. At least three other fires were burning in Ocean, Camden and Burlington counties.
The New York City region has not seen significant rain since mid-September and no major rainfall is expected. The National Weather Service is expecting a quarter to a third of an inch of rain (up to 0.8 cm) Sunday night.
“That’s not a lot of precipitation,” Tauber said. “It will take quite some time to alleviate the dry conditions of the past five to six weeks.”
To be fair, the New Jersey wildfires — the largest on Friday was 300 acres (146 hectares) — were much smaller than the wildfires that typically break out in California. The Mountain Fire north of Los Angeles, for example, had already consumed more than 20,000 acres, Cal Fire said Friday.
But the outbreak in New Jersey — the nation’s most populous state, according to the U.S. Census — highlights the extremely dry conditions affecting most or all of the state, which had a relatively wet spring.
Last month was the driest October on record in Newark, New Jersey’s most populous city, since 1949, according to the weather service.
New Jersey farmers say they are struggling to protect their crops.
“It’s a crisis for all of us growers,” said Stephen Lee, 78, patriarch of Lee Brothers Cranberry Farm in Burlington County, a 300-acre farm with swamps and reservoirs that he runs with his sons and grandsons. Burlington County covers part of southern New Jersey.
“We are not yet at our breaking point, but the situation is very tense right now,” Lee said. “We haven’t had any real rain in three months, it’s been four now. Without serious rain I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
They are just finishing the season’s harvest and are barely getting by on well water, bringing the diesel bill for the pumps to $800 a day, he said.
But their reservoirs are “almost non-existent”, and they usually drill 2.2 meters into the ground to reach the water table for their pumps. “Now we have to drill 28 feet deep,” he said.
New Jersey is the third largest producer of cranberries in the United States, behind Wisconsin and Massachusetts.
Bill Exley, 52, of Exley’s Christmas Tree Farm in Monroeville, New Jersey, was checking the irrigation pumps at sunrise Friday on the farm he co-owns with his father, Bob Exley, 82. ” he said, adding that he does not want to think about the bill for the electricity pumps at the two farm sites, which cover thousands of trees spread over 50 hectares.
(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova in New York and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Frank McGurty and Frances Kerry)
