People are angry, people are anxious, and the occupants of Town Hall need to heed the community’s repeated calls for more-urgent action on fire preparedness.
As the Amagansett Fire Department and other responding departments learned on July 16 — when they skillfully managed to stamp out a dangerous blaze north of the Long Island Rail Road tracks on the Napeague stretch, which certainly could have grown much, much worse — our native woods, or what remains of them, have become a tinderbox and a disaster waiting to happen.
Is this crisis dynamic in the woods news? No, it is not actually news. The chorus of concern from alarmed residents has been getting louder for three years. We at The Star started sounding the alarm on the accelerating death of trees in Northwest Woods, and the potential knock-on effects on the environment, back in 2018 with a feature in East magazine and have raised the issue repeatedly and with increasing urgency in this newspaper.
What is new, now, is that more trees than ever are lying on the woods floor, dead, and it appears there is still an inclination among our town’s elected officials to pass the buck.
Decisions were made years ago to cut down trees infested with the southern pine beetle and leave them where they fell. As anyone who has ever fought a wildfire will tell you, having an obstacle course underfoot makes the heavy work of dragging hoses across the terrain exponentially harder and slower. The felling of trees happened in Northwest Woods, Napeague, and Hither Hills. New York State is the steward of Napeague and Hither Hills State Parks, and it is the state that has announced long-term plans to pull out and proactively burn future felled trees under the supervision of a “burn boss” over the next several winters. All well and good.
But in the meantime, more-urgent local action must be taken to assist the volunteer fire departments with new measures and new equipment to face what may come.
The July 16 conflagration was, according to Amagansett’s chief, nearly out of reach of a fire hydrant. Napeague is not the only forested zone in town that is both imperiled and not well served by hydrants. All those who fought that fire should be thanked heartily for their success in controlling it that day, but that fire raises critical questions about reliance on the municipal water supply and how to get water to the remoter neighborhoods where there are lots of trees.
We urge the town board and fire chiefs to look north to Canada, where rural departments routinely handle wildfires miles out of the reach of hydrant systems with the use of so-called dump tanks, dry wells, drafting from any and all available natural water sources (including, yes, pools and even saltwater), and training in long-distance relays using portable tanks and pumpers. We suggest that Town Hall could arrange and fund a meeting of the minds for local chiefs and fire chiefs from rural coastal towns in, for example, southwest Nova Scotia. Some 400 miles as the crow flies from Montauk, small Nova Scotia departments much like ours battled a wildfire that covered more than 57,000 acres in 2023 with water drawn from some hydrants and dropped from helicopters, yes, but more from ponds, streams, and even off bridges and wharves.
It did not escape our notice that the Montauk Fire Department has invested in portable tanks recently, and that other department chiefs have mentioned expanding their drafting capability from swimming pools. Water supply to the woods is clearly very much on the minds of the firefighters here. What is needed now is a task force at the town level to get out ahead of the water supply issue and help those who we will call heroes if and when a worse wildfire comes.