Wildfires in the Hudson Valley: What Are the Risks? (Part 2)
The Highlands Current, June 7, 2024
Native Americans used sophisticated tools and strategies to shape the landscape. One of the most important was fire. Indigenous peoples set fires to open land for planting and to clear crinkly underbrush that alerted game to a hunter’s presence. Burning the land returned nutrients to the soil and encouraged growth that deer, turkey and quail depended on for food.
Archaeologist Lucianne Lavin has uncovered evidence of controlled burns near Albany around the year 1000 A.D. They were almost certainly used in the Highlands, as well. “Such a fire is a spectacular sight when one sails on the rivers at night while the forest is ablaze on both banks,” wrote Adriaen van der Donck, an important leader in New Netherlands in the 1640s.
In the past few decades, controlled burns, or prescribed fires, have become a common part of preventing wildfires such as a 1988 blaze that consumed nearly 800,000 acres in Yellowstone National Park. The argument is now widely accepted that more than a century of rigorous fire suppression has created the conditions for even worse fires to break out and spread.
Erica Smithwick, director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State University, who specializes in eastern U.S. wildfires, has studied the issue of controlled burns and worked with land managers, hunters and conservationists to put intentional fire back on the radar in Pennsylvania.
While the practice faced some resistance, she notes that managers in the Pine Barrens region of New Jersey have been conducting controlled burns for years. As part of her pitch, she points out that controlled burns reduce tick populations.
There are two problems with controlled burns, however. The first is capacity, because it takes training. New York State does some training at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, in Minnewaska State Park and on Long Island, but not enough for fire agencies around the state to adopt the practice.
Evan Thompson, the manager of the Hudson Highlands State Park Preserve, believes it would be difficult to introduce controlled burns in the park’s rugged landscape, which spans some 25,000 acres on both sides of Route 9. “You can’t burn everything from Garrison to Fahnestock,” he says.
Still, Joseph Pries, the state Department of Environmental Conservation fire ranger for Dutchess and Putnam counties, says the agency is ready to draw up plans for controlled burns for any agency or manager who wants them.
The second limitation is public acceptance. Many people, thoroughly indoctrinated by decades of Smokey Bear commercials, remain skeptical of the idea that starting a fire can stop a fire. Liability is key: If a controlled burn gets out of control and destroys property (which has happened), who pays the bill? Anticipating this, in 2009, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed a law protecting public agencies and non-governmental organizations that employ trained burned bosses from lawsuits over damage.
Because there are so many homes along the perimeter of the Hudson Highlands State Park Preserve, Thompson worries about a controlled burn that escapes its handlers. “It could have disastrous consequences,” he says.
The same thing that could make a wildfire in the Highlands so destructive — the encroachment of homes into the woods — is what makes using controlled burns to mitigate the risk so difficult.
According to Smithwick, many places lack a forest management plan to sort through the intricate web of entangled species and conflicting demands that make up forest ecology.
Lauren Martin, a park steward at the Hudson Highlands State Park Preserve, agrees. “Forest management is a constant give-and-take,” she says. Dead trees can fuel intense fires but also shelter wildlife and would be expensive to remove.
“Something you do for one reason is always going to be detrimental to some other goal you have,” Martin says. A comprehensive plan for the Hudson Highlands park, if the state provided the funds, would be an invaluable resource in helping park managers balance the interests of wildlife management and fire protection, she says.
Smithwick recommends that communities concerned about wildfires join a program called Firewise USA, developed by the National Fire Protection Association, which has programming that can provide a bridge between land-management agencies and residents.
Educators “help people learn how important it is to clear brush from around their homes, not to stack wood under their decks” and to clean their eaves and gutters —measures that help reduce the risk of a wildfire spreading quickly to a home, she says. Firewise communities are also encouraged to develop evacuation protocols, especially near retirement communities.
The type of blaze most likely to break out in the Highlands is not the Maui inferno of 2023, or any of the fires that have scorched California, but the Walland and Gatlinburg fires of November 2016, which devastated tourism-dependent communities in eastern Tennessee. Exacerbated by intense drought, remarkably low humidity and wind gusts as high as 87 mph, the fires tore through 10,000 acres, killed 14 people and injured nearly 200. The destruction would have been far wider had it not started to rain, recalled Bruce McCamish, a Knoxville photographer on the scene.
This past November, fires ignited again in the region, forcing the closure of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Appalachian Trail.
Because of climate change, those fires could foreshadow what’s ahead for the northern Appalachians, which includes the Highlands. “I don’t want to be the person who tells people not to worry,” Smithwick says.
n August, the seaside town of Lahaina on the island of Maui burst into flames. Critical infrastructure faltered under the strain, and cellphone service failed. In some neighborhoods, evacuation notices arrived after homes were already ablaze.
As darkness descended and winds whipped up, confusion reigned. Which roads were blocked by flames? The main road near the waterfront became choked with panicked residents. Some leaped into the ocean and were pulled from the ashy water by Coast Guard crews as they dodged embers.
The disaster in Maui may seem remote from Mount Beacon’s vantage point, but Natalie Simpson of the University at Buffalo School of Management notes that Lahaina shares certain features with Beacon and Philipstown: fairly compact communities lodged between mountains and water, with only two-lane highways to get in and out.
“You could have the same problems,” she says. “It’s important for communities nestled this way to think about what it would look like if everybody had to get out.”
The Highlands has no evacuation plan specific to wildfires, although there is one for nuclear disasters. For decades, municipalities within 10 miles of the Indian Point nuclear power plant south of Peekskill were required to have robust protocols in place. (The southern half of Philipstown is within range; Beacon is just outside it.) A booklet created by Putnam County, Are You Ready?, included a map in which all the arrows pointed north; a page at putnamcountyny.com/pready has advice on preparing for disasters such as blizzards, extreme heat, flooding, tornadoes and nuclear explosions but not wildfires.
Tina Volz-Bongar, a community activist in Peekskill, says the plans never inspired much confidence. For instance, while they called on parents to wait to pick up their children at school bus stops, she predicts they would, in fact, rush to the schools, likely disrupting the “orderly movement of people” envisioned.
Ralph Falloon, a former Cold Spring mayor who is deputy commissioner of the Putnam County Bureau of Emergency Services, says the evacuation plans for Indian Point are still useful. “We will forever be grateful for having that technology and planning still at our disposal,” he says. The Putnam agency is now more focused on threats such as severe storms or toxic chemical spills related to the huge volumes of freight traffic that cross through the area by truck and train.
Kelly McKinney has two decades of experience responding to disasters for the American Red Cross and the New York City Office of Emergency Management. “Evacuation is a challenging, complex situation,” he says. “There will be multiple simultaneous operations going on all at the same time.”
If the emergency is a massive wildfire, authorities must predict where the fire is going, notes McKinney, who is now chief of emergency management at NYU Langone Health in New York City. If necessary, officials would use the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS), a reverse 911 system, to send automatic emergency alerts to cellphone users in designated areas.
ccording to Dutchess County’s Hazardous Materials Community Emergency Response Plan, the decision to evacuate residents is made by “incident commanders” — whoever is in charge — taking into account the severity of the danger, the resources available and the time it would take to evacuate.
Once the call is made, police officers would go door-to-door alerting residents and directing traffic. Others would prepare buses and other forms of transportation for people without cars. Sections in the county’s 38-page Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan relate to evacuating livestock and pets, although Red Cross shelters don’t allow animals.
Evacuees are warned not to use phones so they don’t overwhelm networks used by emergency responders. Those fleeing by car should close vents and keep the AC off.
“Emergency preparedness is a labor-intensive process,” McKinney says, noting that cash-strapped local governments rarely have the budgets to anticipate every scenario. “New York City has resources because of 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy,” he says. “You learn those lessons. Maui is going to be resourced after this. East Palestine [Ohio, the site of a 2023 train derailment and chemical fire] is going to be resourced. You want to be resourced before the disaster, rather than after.”
Local governments should involve the public in planning, he says, noting that unorganized volunteers are worse than no volunteers. Natalie Simpson of the University of Buffalo cautions against overreliance on cellphone alerts. “If that goes down, as cellular communication did in Lahaina, you have nothing,” she says.
If the power goes out or some other widespread disaster strikes, a better bet might be more old-fashioned: the car radio. Specific stations issue alerts (primarily, in our region, 1420 AM and 100.7 FM). If a massive cyberattack takes down the power grid and cell towers, AM and FM transmitters would likely be brought back online first, she says.
Simpson notes that the Highlands has a resource that Maui did not: neighboring communities. “There are things that I’m not impressed with in Lahaina’s emergency response to the wildfire, but I sympathize with them, because they’re on an island and there aren’t secondary resources to draw on,” she says. “Flying things in is much, much slower. In the Hudson Valley, you can draw on nearby towns and counties to help out.”
But Smithwick at Penn State points out that East Coast municipalities “are intermingled in a way that’s different from in the West Even if the fire risk is less severe, the potential human impact could be larger under the right conditions.”
What especially concerns Smithwick is that, when a fire does break out, it’s not always clear who’s in charge. “The complexity of land use and management is more heterogeneous and intermingled than in the West,” she explains. “Here you have so many municipalities and government agencies that have to coordinate and manage smaller tracts of land.”
That could pose a problem in the Highlands, where, thanks to quirky municipal boundaries (e.g., Mount Beacon is in Fishkill), overlapping jurisdictions (Cold Spring is part of but also distinct from Philipstown) and huge parcels of state-owned land, the lines of responsibility can be confusing. “In the context of emergency preparedness,” Smithwick says, “that often leads to more trouble.”