Last weekend, several brush fires erupted in our area, burning at least several acres of land before being extinguished by local fire departments.
In West Windsor, Fire Chief Erik Boedtker told the Standard that a fire broke out last Friday in the town when a resident was using fire to clear brush in the process of planting trees in his orchard — and that the fire was an accident.
Jacob Astbury, chief of the Pomfret-Teago Volunteer Fire Department, told the Standard that last weekend’s weather was “kind of all lined up, perfect for brush fires to take off.” Four acres burned in Pomfret, he said, before the fire was put out in just over two hours after the department first responded to the fire. The fire department responded to the fire at 5:57 p.m last Thursday, April 9. Its location was just west of the Clifford Rd./Caper St. intersection in North Pomfret. According to Astbury, the cause of the fire is unknown but suspected to be accidental.
Early April is not considered an atypical time for wildfires to break out, said Boedtker, though the fires showed up a tad earlier than expected. “This is right around the time where all the departments start ramping up and making sure our brush fire gear is in order. We were actually scheduled to do a full-systems check of all of our brush fire gear Friday night and Saturday morning, which we still did. But obviously this beat us to the punch, just a little bit,” he said.
For more on this, please see our April 16 edition of the Vermont Standard.
