By Maria Tsvetkova and Rich McKay
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wildfires were burning from one end of New Jersey to the other on Friday after one of the driest months on record, leading New York City to issue smoke warnings and forcing farmers to take steps to protect their harvests.
The blazes were burning in five New Jersey counties, mostly in the central and southern parts of the state, on Thursday and Friday, the state Forest Fire Service reported on its Facebook page. The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for the area due to strong winds that can make wildfires worse.
“Those conditions – dry weather and gusty winds – have a potential to spread any fires that develop through today,” said Matthew Tauber, a duty meteorologist at a local office of the National Weather Service.
The New York City government warned residents that they may see or smell smoke from the wildfires and urged people to exercise caution using grills and outdoor gas during “increased brush fire risk.”
One of the wildfires was burning along the Palisades in New Jersey’s Bergen County, across the George Washington Bridge from the city. Smoke from the blaze was wafting across the Hudson River into neighborhoods on the northern tip of Manhattan, video posted on social media showed.
On the opposite end of the state, a fire in Gloucester County could be seen burning across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. At least three other fires were burning in Ocean, Camden and Burlington counties.
The New York City area has not seen any significant rain since mid-September and no major rainfall is in the forecast. The National Weather Service expects a quarter to a third of an inch of rain (up to 0.8 cm) on Sunday night.
“That’s not a lot of precipitation,” Tauber said. “It will take quite a bit to alleviate the dry conditions from the past five to six weeks.”
To be sure, the New Jersey wildfires – the largest on Friday was 360 acres (146 hectares)- were much smaller than those that typically break out in California. The Mountain Fire north of Los Angeles, for example, had already consumed more than 20,000 acres (8,094 hectares), Cal Fire said on Friday.
But the outbreak across New Jersey – the most densely populated state in the country, according to the U.S. Census – highlights the extremely dry conditions affecting most or all of the state, which experienced a relatively wet spring.
The past month was the driest October on record in Newark, the most populated city in New Jersey, since 1949, according to the weather service.
New Jersey farmers say they are struggling to protect crops.
“It’s a crisis for all us growers,” said Stephen Lee, 78, patriarch of Lee Brothers Cranberry Farm in Burlington County, a 130-acre farm of bogs and reservoirs he runs with his sons and grandsons. Burlington County stretches across a swath of southern New Jersey.
“We’re not at our breaking point, but it’s a very tense situation right now,” Lee said. “We haven’t had any real rain for three months, going on four now. Without some serious rain, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
They are just now finishing harvest for the season and barely made it through with well water, bringing diesel fuel bills for the pumps to $800 a day, he said.
But their reservoirs are “almost non-existent”, and usually they drill 7 feet in the ground to hit the water table for their pumps. “Now we have to drill 28 feet down,” 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 out at sun-up on Friday checking the irrigation pumps on the farm he co-owns with his father, Bob Exley, 82. “This drought is killing us,” he said, adding that he doesn’t want to think about the bill for the electricity running pumps at the two farm locations, covering thousands of trees across 50 acres.
(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova in New York and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Frank McGurty and Frances Kerry)
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