Emergency management officials in Connecticut were monitoring 93 fires, all in different stages, on Friday morning.
Joining in on the firefight were two crews from out of state, one from Quebec, Canada and the other from California.
The crew from California, the Groveland Hotshots, are an interagency hotshot crew working for the U.S. Forest Service. They help with disaster relief, mainly fires. The crew of 22 people drove four days to get here and plans to work for 14 days before heading back to California. It was their first time in Connecticut.
“It was a pretty interesting order, but wasn’t too surprised (because of the dry weather conditions). We come with our chainsaws, burning equipment, hand tools and have the ability to break up into many different squads and actually manage multiple different fires at the same time,” said Steven Meeks, the superintendent of the Groveland Hotshots.
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On Friday, the Groveland Hotshots were assigned to work the southeast and eastern side of the Hawthorne Fire in Berlin.
Last week, the Department of Energy and Environmental Services talked about having wildland firefighters physically dig a permitter around the fire and try to box it in. The Groveland Hotshots are providing extra reinforcements to continue that work.
They have a crew that will first go through and run chainsaws and cut up limbs, move vegetation and brush. Then another 16 people will go behind that crew with hand tools that dig down to dirt where the fire can’t pass through anymore.
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“The problem with back east here is obviously, all the leaves and how fast they fall this time of year. So from what I was gathering is they came through, put lines in and within the next day that could be fully covered again with leaves. Or areas they had mopped up already and were burned down and black are covered again, so it’s kind of hard to even tell what was burned and not burned at this point. So, you have to keep going back through,” said Meeks.
With the red flag warning on Friday, emergency management officials were urging people to be hyper-vigilant and avoid any type of flame.
“One of the fires was an individual in the town of Ellington was mulching leaves with his riding lawnmower. Very common for people to be doing that at this time of year. The leaves will build up, get near an exhaust pipe and it started a fire. He wasn't able to stomp the leaves out quick enough and it resulted in a quarter-acre fire,” said Rich Schenk, the fire control officer for DEEP.
