New Yorkers encountered an unsettling smell on Saturday, a day after fires broke out in Prospect Park and across the Hudson River.
The smell of acrid smoke spread throughout New York City on Saturday and persisted into the evening, a day after brush fires broke out on Friday in Brooklyn, the Bronx and nearby New Jersey. It was a surreal experience for a city that is rarely home to wildfires but is in the middle of a drought.
On Saturday, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation placed the city, as well as Rockland and Westchester Counties, under an air quality alert until midnight.
The smell of smoke woke Desi Yvette, 36, in her Williamsburg home in the middle of the night.
“It was close to 2 and I just stayed up for a while,” Ms. Yvette said as she walked her Maltese mix, Midas, on Saturday. “I thought maybe there was a fire nearby, but I didn’t hear any sirens. So I was like, I don’t think it’s an emergency or we would have been alerted. But it does smell bad.”
Ms. Yvette had not heard about the brush fire that broke out on Friday night in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, burning two acres in a heavily wooded area. “It’s crazy that it smells all the way over here,” she added. “It’s just been a week of, like, disaster.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement on Saturday that there were multiple wildfires burning across New York State, noting that Hudson Valley, Long Island and the Catskills region were at high risk.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
