Thursday, December 12, 2024
As wildfires swept through Orange County, New York earlier this month, the East Meadow Fire Department joined efforts to provide much-needed aid to communities threatened by the flames.
A team of volunteers from East Meadow traveled to the site of the Jennings Creek wildfires, which broke out on Nov. 9 near Greenwood Lake in the Town of Warwick, about an hour-and-a-half north of East Meadow. One of the region’s most significant wildfires since 2008, it burned over 5,000 acres in New York’s Hudson Valley and New Jersey. Many Long Island volunteer fire departments, escorted by the Nassau County Fire Marshal’s Office, assisted in battling the blaze.
Jeffrey Rosenthal, the third assistant chief in the East Meadow Fire Department, said the state implemented its fire mobilization and mutual aid plan, a statewide agreement for those in fire service to assist with large-scale fire incidents and natural disasters.
East Meadow provided one truck, Engine No. 614, and 25 personnel on Nov. 14 for its first trip upstate, Rosenthal said. About 17 people joined the second deployment on Nov. 18.
Firefighters from each of the department’s six companies volunteered for the deployments.
On Nov. 14, volunteers in East Meadow were scheduled for a 24-hour shift to assist with the efforts, but were only needed for 12 hours. When they arrived at the Greenwood Lake firehouse for a briefing, Rosenthal said they were quickly rushed out the door for a possible structure fire at an iconic home on the lake, referred to as the “Pink House.”
“It’s this three-story house that was in danger of being burnt up,” Rosenthal said. “The fire was coming down the mountain and coming from both sides approaching the house.”
The East Meadow crew worked tirelessly to push the fire line back, and ultimately prevented the home from sustaining any fire-related damage.
Most of the firefighting techniques that the volunteers were using were relatively new to the department, Rosenthal explained. He recounted being at the scene of the 1995 Pine Barrens fire along Sunrise Highway near Riverhead, a massive Long Island wildfire that took days to contain.
“We’re not used to this,” he said of the upstate fires. “And even with the Pine Barrens, it was a different type of terrain. It was flat land trees. This was really mountainous.”
Volunteers in East Meadow were tasked with lighting fires to create a controlled burn to prevent existing fires from spreading to new areas. They also dug trenches and created pathways to ensure that fires couldn’t jump from one area to another, and assisted with putting out hotspots, or areas of smoldering ground.
Many East Meadow firefighters who volunteered did so on their own time, Rosenthal said. “Most of the people that went up, if not all of them, took time off of work using their personal days, their own vacation time, or their bosses let them off without pay,” he said. “They really used all of their own time to help other people — which was actually really nice. They didn’t have to do that, but they did.”
Brian Messina, a captain in East Meadow’s Company No. 4, who helped coordinate much of the department’s efforts upstate, said their deployments really strengthened the camaraderie between the volunteers in East Meadow.
After returning from their Nov. 14 deployment, Messina said they received word that a fire line they had worked hard to push back had broken through again.
“We all took it personally,” he said. “We were saddened — upset — and almost like ready to drop what we were doing, get in our own personal cars, and help push that line back. And ultimately, I think that’s really what those residents truly needed, not just somebody to go there and put the fire out, but to treat their home like their own.”
The entire experience, Messina said, really opened the department’s eyes to new techniques.
“Our expertise is structural firefighting,” he said. “So going out there to a wildfire, and yeah you learn about in class, but being able to open yourself to ideas and conditions that we’re not used to dealing with on a daily basis, it was pretty special.”
The department was planning for a third deployment, Rosenthal said, but it was canceled after they received word the fire was completely contained.
The community of Greenwood Lake was “fantastic,” he added.
“They made sure we had food and drinks, lip balm and nasal stuff, eye drops, like things you wouldn’t think of — they had it,” he said of the town’s people. “They had everything we needed to make us comfortable. It was amazing how everyone pitched together and became one community.”
