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      Wildfire Grows in New Jersey and New York, Despite Modest Rainfall

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      The Jennings Creek fire is currently burning across 3,500 acres, officials said, and is expected to grow to over 5,000 acres.A wildfire consuming a vast stretch of hilly forest along the New York-New Jersey border continued to grow on Monday despite the first significant rainfall in nearly six weeks, fire officials said. Bone-dry weather and gusts of up to 40 miles per hour are expected to sweep through the region on Tuesday, raising the risk that the fire will continue to spread.More than 3,500 acres were burning in New Jersey and New York as of Monday night, and the fire was expected to grow to more than 5,000 acres, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection said.About 20 percent of the New Jersey portion of the fire was contained, according to the state’s Forest Fire Service. It was not clear how much of the New York portion of the fire was contained.The rain on Sunday night, measuring just a quarter of an inch across the region, only temporarily slowed the fire’s growth, said Christopher Franek, an assistant division fire warden for the Forest Fire Service.“We’re throwing everything we’ve got at it,” he said. “A lot of manual labor is choking on smoke and dust.” Five thousand acres is nearly eight square miles — about a third the size of Manhattan.Hundreds of firefighters from dozens of fire departments in both states are battling the blaze in a rugged patch of Passaic County in New Jersey and Orange County in New York near the Appalachian Trail.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Firefighters Gain More Control of Southern California Blaze That Spread Rapidly

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      After the Mountain fire ballooned to more than 20,000 acres in less than 24 hours, improving weather conditions helped crews contain more of the blaze on Saturday.Calming winds helped firefighters gain the upper hand on Saturday against the Mountain fire in Southern California, after three days of pitched battle using dozens of aircraft, hundreds of fire trucks and legions of firefighters on foot wielding saws and shovels.High winds and thick vegetation fueled the Mountain fire, which started on Wednesday near the city of Oxnard in Ventura County and exploded to more than 20,000 acres in less than 24 hours. But the winds died down on Friday, aiding fire crews in their fight against the blaze.Officials said Saturday evening that the fire was 21 percent contained and that it had not jumped its perimeter. The nearly 3,000 personnel working to tame the blaze planned to “mop up” hot spots and move through burned neighborhoods to assess the damage, officials said.The Ventura County fire chief, Dustin Gardner, said at a briefing Friday evening that he was grateful for the emergency workers who responded on the day the fire broke out. They “brought this calm to where we’re at today,” he said.Earlier in the week, fierce winds that gusted up to 80 miles per hour hurled flaming embers far beyond the fire line, sparking new fires, setting houses ablaze and grounding some firefighting aircraft. Roughly 10,000 people were forced to evacuate in what quickly became one of the most destructive wildfires in Southern California in recent years. As of Friday night, about 2,000 were still waiting to go home. Roughly 130 structures have been reported destroyed and damaged. There were no known fatalities, and no reports of missing people, Sheriff James Fryhoff of Ventura County, said in the Friday briefing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Smoky Smell Engulfs NYC After Fires in New Jersey and Brooklyn

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      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.”

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      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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After California Mountain Fire, Residents Return to Find Homes Reduced to Rubble

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      The Mountain fire has torn through more than 20,000 acres and destroyed more than 130 structures in Ventura County. “It’s just devastating,” one resident said.In the city of Camarillo, Calif., on Old Coach Drive, the smell of smoke lay heavy in the air. The fire that erupted this week had hopscotched around the neighborhood, leaving some homes relatively unscathed but reducing several to charred piles of wood and rubble.Kathleen Scott and her sister Tonia Wall surveyed what was left of their two-bedroom home: layers of ash and the metal outlines of what was once the washing machine and dryer.Bent over the earth where a bedroom would have been, the two used a small garden spade to dig through the remains. They hoped they might find some mementos belonging to Ms. Scott’s daughter, Jacquelyn, who died from a rare neurological condition at age 4.“We’re not expecting to find anything huge,” Ms. Scott, 57, said. “We’re just sifting through stuff, just to see, just in case, not to have any regrets.”“We’re not expecting to find anything huge,” Kathleen Scott, 57, said. “We’re just sifting through stuff, just to see, just in case, not to have any regrets.”Loren Elliott for The New York TimesMs. Scott holding some salvaged keepsakes that she found on her destroyed property.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fire in Oakland Hills Prompts Evacuations Under Gusty Conditions

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      Firefighters in Northern California were responding to a blaze that burned two homes and 15 acres.A brush fire erupted in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, forcing the evacuation of hillside neighborhoods and the brief closure of a major highway as high winds threatened to spread the blaze.The five-alarm fire, which officials have named the Keller fire, had burned about 15 acres and damaged two homes in an Oakland Hills area, the Oakland Fire Department said. It came one day before the 33rd anniversary of the 1991 Tunnel fire, which killed 25 people and destroyed 3,000 homes several miles north of the current blaze.More than two hours after the fire was first reported, officials began to express confidence that they were getting a handle on the situation. There were no reports of injuries, and Oakland Fire Department officials said that the forward progress of the wind-driven fire had been stopped.Images shared by fire officials showed aircraft flying through billowing smoke, dousing the hillside below as a fire engine fixed its hose on a home.“If air resources don’t get here as quickly as they did, we might have a different report right now,” Damon Covington, the Oakland fire chief, said at a news conference.The area has some of the East Bay’s most desirable homes, with those near the top of the Oakland Hills peering over the San Francisco Bay with views of city skylines. But the 1991 blaze also looms in the memories of longtime residents as a deadly threat, especially in an era of climate change that has included some of the most destructive wildfires in California history.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Resisted Sending Aid After California Wildfires, Aides Say

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      As California battled the deadliest wildfire in its history in 2018, Donald J. Trump, then the president, initially opposed unlocking federal funding for the state, according to two former Trump administration officials.But Mr. Trump shifted his position after his advisers found data showing that large numbers of his supporters were being affected by the infernos, said the officials, who have both endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election.Olivia Troye, who was Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland security adviser, said that Mr. Trump had initially instructed Brock Long, then the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not to send “any money” to California, a state that Mr. Trump lost decisively in the 2016 election.Mark Harvey, the senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council in the Trump administration, also recalled Mr. Trump delivering that message in a meeting with Mr. Long. (Mr. Long did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did John R. Bolton, who was the national security adviser at the time.)Ms. Troye said the episode, which was previously reported by E&E News, was not the only time Mr. Trump resisted providing disaster aid to Democratic-leaning regions. She mentioned his response to sending aid to Puerto Rico after it was hit by hurricanes.“We saw numerous instances — this was just one — where it was politicized,” Ms. Troye said in an interview regarding the California episode, adding, “It was red states vs. blue states.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lahaina Inferno Emerged From Smoldering Remnants of Quelled Fire

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      Federal investigators have concluded that hidden embers remained from a morning fire in the Hawaii town of Lahaina. They reignited later into a fire that destroyed much of the town.The inferno that consumed the Hawaii town of Lahaina last year emerged from the remnants of a brush fire that firefighters had believed they had contained and extinguished, federal investigators concluded in a report released Wednesday.That determination confirms what has long been suspected about the fire that killed more than 100 people on the island of Maui. Residents have previously described how the flames emerged in the same area where firefighters had spent the morning battling a blaze triggered by downed power lines. Heavy winds rapidly stoked the renewed flames into residential streets, leaving many with little chance to escape.But until now, local authorities had left open the possibility that there could have been something else that triggered the blaze that swept through Lahaina. Now, in a report released jointly with the Maui County Department of Fire and Public Safety, investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concluded along with local investigators that the initial fire had never been fully extinguished — and was able to reignite and spread.Brad Ventura, Maui’s fire chief, said at a news conference on Wednesday that a rekindled fire is something that nobody wants to see happen. But he said the department was confident in the actions of the firefighters who were on scene that day and had made the decision to depart.“We stand behind them on their decision,” he said. “It is hard. We will be working with them, but we will be standing by them.”More than a year after the fire, Maui officials are still formulating a plan for rebuilding.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As California Fires Burn, Some Residents Begin to Mourn Lost Homes

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      Firefighters are making progress against the Bridge, Line and Airport fires to prevent more destruction, but for some, the damage is done.Mazen Sheikhly’s heart was pounding on Thursday as he drove up a winding road to his one-bedroom home of nearly two decades outside the community of El Cariso Village in the Santa Ana Mountains in California. He could feel his blood pressure rising because of the uncertainty of what he and a friend would find.The Airport fire southeast of Los Angeles had exploded in the canyons of Orange County earlier in the week before crossing the mountains into Riverside County, forcing Mr. Sheikhly and thousands of others in the area to evacuate.Now, on his return, he opened the gates to the long driveway of his 20-acre property known for its glittering views of Lake Elsinore below. Then he saw the emptiness.There was “nothing left of the house,” Mr. Sheikhly said. “Completely gone.”A 2000 Indian motorcycle that he treated as his baby was now a gutted hunk of metal. Pictures of his mother and the designer clothes and jewelry that he had from his years working at Neiman Marcus were turned to ash. “It’s like a loss in your family and you can’t get it back. It’s death,” he said.Three major wildfires in Southern California — the Bridge fire, the Line fire and the Airport fire — have destroyed dozens of homes, scorched over 110,000 acres and displaced tens of thousands of people. Cooler, more humid weather has helped slow the fires’ spread and enabled firefighters to make progress trying to contain the blazes, allowing some evacuation alerts to be lifted or downgraded on Friday.But even as crews gain more ground, many residents must deal with the shock of seeing a lifetime of memories reduced to ashes, or the stress of not knowing what they will find, or when they will be able to go back.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More