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New York wildfire breaks through, 160 homes evacuated as blazes keep Northeast at risk

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New York wildfire breaks through, 160 homes evacuated as blazes keep Northeast at risk

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Firefighters were operating under high risk that flames would spread Sunday as they took on a wildfire on the New York-New Jersey border that broke a containment line and prompted more than 160 homes to be evacuated the previous night.

The voluntary evacuation allowed fire personnel to confront the Jennings Creek Wildfire uninterrupted overnight and will remain in place until Monday as those efforts continue, Jesse Dwyer, a supervisor in Warwick, New York, said in a Facebook post on Sunday.

“Efforts overnight by both local and regional firefighters to protect structures were successful and no structures are presently in danger,’’ Dwyer said.

Residents had been allowed to return home. In an early-evening announcement, Warwick officials said the Orange County state of emergency was extended. They also asked those in the evacuation area to shelter in place so firefighters could continue doing their jobs.

Officials have said the blaze, which began Nov. 8 and has burned more than 5,000 acres across both states, is about 90% contained. But the jump over the containment line required an emergency response that involved asking hundreds of Warwick residents to voluntarily leave their homes and opening a shelter at a local middle school.

“We got home, packed up just like the essentials, everything that we had in the safe, like important papers, and then we came here,’’ Viktoria Kall told CBS News, adding she arrived at the school around midnight.

Crews have been dousing the flames with water dropped from New York Air National Guard helicopters and have the blaze “boxed in by fire lines,” the New York State Park Police said on social media Sunday. It previously said the fire had expanded by just four or five acres.

“The small section of fire that breached a containment line did not reach the contingency line,” the posting said.

Weather not cooperating

Weather conditions have presented a challenge to suppressing the fire, and no rain that might help the cause is expected until possibly Thursday.

The National Weather Service issued a statement Sunday warning about the elevated risk of wildfires spreading in the New Jersey counties of Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Passaic, and Union.

All of New Jersey and southeast New York state have endured the worst parts of an ongoing drought that stretches from Virginia to Massachusetts, exacerbating fire danger. Last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul banned outdoor burning across the state through the rest of November because of the dry conditions.

New York confronts brush fires

Recent brush fires in Manhattan’s Inwood Hill Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park have drawn attention to the marked increase in those incidents this year in New York City, whose fire department said it had responded to an unprecedented 229 of them in two weeks from Oct. 29 to Nov. 11.

Department Commissioner Robert Tucker is responding by forming a brush fire task force, which will be made up of “fire marshals, fire inspectors, and tactical drone units in response to the historic increase in brush fires occurring throughout the five boroughs,’’ the FDNY said on social media Sunday.

The department said it’s also conducting safety outreach across the city to reduce brush fires. Two of them near Amtrak tracks in the Bronx last week forced the suspension of the popular train service linking Penn Station to Boston for more than 24 hours.

(This story was updated to add new information.)

Contributing: The Bergen Record

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