New York: Fires in New Jersey are choking her in smoke –

Fires are burning in five New Jersey counties, mostly in central and southern New Jersey. They started from a parkway, i.e. a road for cars inside a suburban park, according to the first information, from an electric car whose battery caught fire. Smoke alarms in New York that are mandatory throughout the city, ring mostly in northern Manhattan.

New York warns residents about smoke, urges caution with natural gas and outdoor grills. Wildfires were burning from one end of New Jersey to the other on Friday after one of the driest months on record, prompting New York to issue smoke warnings and prompting farmers to take measures to protect their crops .

The National Weather Service has issued a red flag warning for the region due to strong winds that could exacerbate the fires, Reuters reports.

“These conditions — dry weather and gusty winds — have the potential to spread any fires that develop today,” said Matthew Tauber, a service meteorologist at a local office of the National Weather Service.

The scanty rainfall has created a flammable climate

The New York state government warned residents that they may see or smell smoke from the wildfires and urged citizens to be careful using grills and outdoor gas stoves during the “elevated brush fire danger.”

One of the fires is burning along the Palisades in Bergen County, New Jersey, across the George Washington Bridge from the city. Smoke from the fire was billowing across the Hudson River into neighborhoods on the northern tip of Manhattan, videos posted on social media showed.

At the opposite end of the state, a fire in Gloucester County appeared to be burning across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. At least three other fires were burning in Ocean, Campden and Burlington counties.

The New York area has not seen significant precipitation since mid-September and no significant precipitation is forecast. The National Weather Service is expecting 80mm of light rain Sunday night.

New Jersey extremely vulnerable

“This is not a lot of precipitation,” Tauber said. “It will take enough to relieve the drought conditions of the last five to six weeks.” To be sure, the fires in New Jersey—the largest on Friday at 360 acres—were much smaller than those that typically break out in California.

The mountain wildfire north of Los Angeles, for example, had already consumed more than 20,000 acres, Cal Fire said Friday.

But the outbreak in New Jersey — the nation’s most populous state, according to the U.S. Census — highlights the extremely dry conditions affecting most or all of the state, which experienced a relatively wet spring.

Last month was the driest October on record in Newark, New Jersey’s most populous city, since 1949, according to the weather service. New Jersey farmers say they are fighting to protect crops.