‘Never seen anything like it’: Middleton crews continue to battle brush fires ahead of dry week

MIDDLETON, Mass. — Massachusetts fire officials say they’ve never seen a fall fire season like this.

“It’s been a long week, and these crews are tired,” said Jon Davine, State Fire Marshal.

Fire crews across the state are exhausted after battling nearly 90 brush fires just within the last week.

Now we’re heading into another dry week, and the elevated risk for fires continues.

“This is my 26th year and I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Davine.

Davine says this fire season is unprecedented.

He says Massachusetts usually averages about 15 brush fires in October, but this year, there have been more than 200!

“And then in November, we usually average maybe a few fires and we’re already at 30 and it’s November 4,” said Davine.

“The risk is still there and unfortunately we’re still finding instances where people are burning, and we can’t have it, it’s just too dry, too dangerous,” said Chief Douglas LeColst, with the Middleton Fire Department.

Fire chiefs are begging the public to stop having outdoor fires right now.

Chief LeColst has been leading the effort to battle the biggest fire in the state for 9 days now in Middleton, where about 200 acres have burned.

“One of the bigger problems that we have is that the area that’s being problematic, we can’t really get close because of trees falling and so forth,” said Chief LeColst. “I was in the area this morning for like 10 minutes and I heard a couple trees fall.”

He says it’s too dangerous to put firefighters in some of these areas where the fire continues to burn.

Now they’re using forestry sprinklers to attack the flames after hoping water drops from the National Guard would help last week, but that wasn’t enough.

“The water was hitting the leaves on the trees, causing the leaves to fall to the ground, you now have a fuel source on the ground, the leaves dry out, then you have more fire,” said Chief LeColst.

Chief LeColst says about 70 percent of this fire is contained, but neighbors may see and smell smoke over the next week, so you may want to keep windows shut if you live around there.

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