It Could End in Fire
David Dell, Ph.D., Board Chair, Sustainable Hudson Valley
January, 2024
Jae C. Hong/AP Photo
Frost's subtle short poem Fire and Ice reminds us that climate change dooms do not all have to be rising waters and surging floods. We are getting a small taste now of what fire can do, even in an area that some have called the Saudi Arabia of water.
Here in the central Hudson Valley we're just a dryish winter and warm windy march away from turning the woodlands west of the Hudson into a blast furnace and making the air in Dutchess worse than New Delhi's worst smog. It could be too big and too fast to slowdown the burning, let alone extinguish it.
We need to be ready.
With resources and back up for our first responders whose lives will be at risk
with disaster plans for evacuation and emergency alerts and communications
with clean air havens, and acute respiratory care
for shutting down the nearby power plants and incinerators
for coordinating a multi county strategy and response capability
for getting access to state and federal resources before during and after
We are “lucky” we have a little time to learn from the hard lessons of being surprised in the lushest areas in California and the vast Canadian forests. We now know that it can happen here. This is a time to get prepared to make the worst much less worse. We all need to make sure that we as individuals, our businesses and organizations, our communities, and governments take this seriously and give it our caring attention.