By LAURIE BESANCENEY
Enterprise Staff Writer
VERMONTVILLE - A landscape was blackened Tuesday and smoke was seen from miles away as nine area fire departments rushed to the scene of a forest fire on Swinyer Road in Vermontville.
The 16- to 20-acre fire, called in to the Saranac Lake Volunteer Fire Department shortly before 11 a.m. by a homeowner on state Route 86 in Harrietstown, was the second-largest this year in the Adirondacks.
New York state Forest Ranger Dan Fox said the property owner, Hans Eckardt, who owns 90 acres at 97 Swinyer Road, started the fire accidentally by burning paper. The Eckardt family had no comment Tuesday afternoon.
Fox explained that the fire, which was contained to Eckardt's private land, was a surface fire with some "torching," not a ground or forest crown fire.
"It got into some small pine trees and might have crawled up a few trees, but nothing like out West with the big crown fires," Fox said. "There was some torching and small trees igniting from lower branches."
There was very little, if any, fire below the surface of the ground, Fox added.
The fire was "pretty well licked by noon," Fox said, although it was monitored and patrolled by forest rangers throughout the afternoon and expect to be today as well. Bloomingdale Volunteer Fire Department Chief Tim Woodruff said it took about two hours before he felt comfortable that the fire would not get out of control, and that was mainly because the wind died down.
Bloomingdale Volunteer Fire Department was one of the nine departments that helped fight the blaze.
"The local fire companies did an excellent job knocking it down," Fox said about the fire.
The toughest part about fighting the fire was the lack of access to the old meadow or farm land, Fox said. Hand tools, such as rakes and shovels, as well as all-terrain vehicles with water backpacks and portable water tanks were used to fight the fire. Woodruff explained that tankers were brought to a staging area where water tanks on four-wheel drive vehicles were filled up to fight the fire. ATVs were used to transport volunteers and equipment. Approximately 100,000 gallons of water were used to fight the fire, along with 20 to 30 gallons of foam, according to Woodruff.
It has been an unusual spring, Fox said, because it is an extremely dry pre-summer. That, coupled with Tuesday's warm temperatures and gusts of wind up to 20 miles per hour, may have contributed to the spread of the fire. He added that there was no "green up," i.e. fresh grass and plants, only the "fine fuel" of the dry brush.
"It doesn't take much to take," Fox said. "It's the biggest fire, so far, this year."
Although it was the biggest fire in Fox's zone, there was one fire that was bigger in the Adirondacks this spring - a fire that burned approximately 40 acres of land on Keese Mills Road near the Sunbeam Club Monday, according to state Department of Environmental Conservation Region 5 spokesman Dave Winchell. Another fire nearby, but outside the Adirondack Park, burned 30 acres of land in Fort Covington April 15. Winchell said that since April 8, and as of about 3 p.m. Tuesday, forest rangers responded to 32 fires which burned 150 acres of land in the Adirondacks. He added that these figures do not include numerous fires local fire departments have fought without the assistance of forest rangers.
A burn ban was issued over the weekend for Franklin County, where the Vermontville fire was located, in response to 10 consecutive days without rain and erupting grass and brush fires throughout the county. There is also a burn ban in St. Lawrence County. Woodruff said the town of St. Armand in Essex County issued a burn ban Tuesday afternoon, although Essex County as a whole has not.
Although the DEC has not issued an official burn ban, Winchell said the DEC is telling people not to burn anything until conditions change. The DEC's fire danger level is listed at "high." Winchell added it has been an unusually early spring fire season because, although the surface is dry, there is frozen ground deeper which impedes digging fire lines.
"It's a strange mix of frozen ground and dry conditions," Winchell said.
Tuesday's blaze was about a mile away from the site of a 1991 fire in Vermontville, which burned 300 acres. Fire departments from as far away as Glens Falls and Watertown responded to that fire. It was also close to the site of a five-acre 1999 fire, started by a property owner burning wood off Muzzy Road in Vermontville.
In addition to the Bloomingdale Volunteer Fire Department, the Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, Tupper Lake, Paul Smiths/Gabriels, Wilmington, Duane, Dickinson and Owls Head departments responded to the scene, according to Woodruff. The fire department in Jay had a pumper and tanker on standby at the Bloomingdale firehouse, and the fire departments in Upper Jay and Keene stood by in Lake Placid. There were about 100 area fire department volunteers at the scene with four forest rangers. State police also assisted by blocking Swinyer Road. The Bloomingdale department was the last to return, at 3:28 p.m.
