![]() There was a recurring theme among the volunteer brigade members who spoke with us recently and those interviewed back in 1995 – if one firefighter is in trouble, they were all in trouble together. “We are all trying to manage the forest in a way that sustains the forest and helps to minimize the advent of wildfires.” “They oversee land use and land management in the central Pine Barrens,” says CPBC Executive Director John Pavacic. It also created the Central Pine Barrens Commission – a five-member body that is made up of the regional director of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the elected Suffolk County executive and the town supervisors or Brookhaven, Riverhead and Southampton. The law made the Long Island Pine Barrens the state’s third forest preserve (alongside the Catskills and the Adirondacks) and protected “a 53,000 acre Core Preservation Area where no new development is permitted and a 47,000 acre Compatible Growth Area where limited, environmentally compatible development is allowed,” according to the Pine Barrens Society. “There were hundreds of projects proposed that would have wiped out most of the Pine Barrens had we not had a plan.” ![]() “If we had waited any longer it would probably have been lost in development,” he says. “The war of the woods is over, and the people of Long Island won,” Amper declared at the signing ceremony. “Battleground” tells the story of a forest that had seen fires burning for centuries – but never with so much at stake. The East End is marking 25 years since the Pine Barrens were spun into an inferno by what is widely believed to be an impetus as small as a carelessly discarded cigarette or match. “I think at the time it was the largest mutual aid fire in the state’s history,” he says. ![]() “We had never seen anything to that magnitude before,” says John Jordan, commissioner of Suffolk County Fire, Rescue and Emergency Services.Īt the time, Jordan was (and still is) a volunteer firefighter out of North Babylon, and the call to duty was spreading to firehouses further and further west almost as fast as the wildfire itself. The Sunrise Fire of 1995 turned day into night for those battling the flames – and it didn’t seem real to those who witnessed it. When it finally did on a gusty August afternoon, the flames caused trees to explode into a dark smoke – creating a sticky tar that clung on to responders for days. There was no rain for weeks and the tinder on the forest floor on the East End of Long Island was prepared to ignite – all it needed was a spark. ![]()
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