Smoky Smell Engulfs New York City After Fires in Brooklyn and New Jersey
The New York Times
New Yorkers were hit with an unsettling smell on Saturday after fires broke out on Friday in Prospect Park and across the Hudson River.
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.
After the Mountain fire ballooned to more than 20,000 acres in less than 24 hours, improving weather conditions helped crews contain more of the blaze on Saturday.
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New Yorkers were hit with an unsettling smell on Saturday after fires broke out on Friday in Prospect Park and across the Hudson River.
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