News

Riverhead firefighters put out Soundfront brush fire; chief blames camp fire

BETH YOUNG PHOTO | Volunteers extinguished a brush fire near the wrack line on the Long Island Sound.

A brush fire along the Long Island Sound wrack line, just west of Reeve’s Beach in Riverhead, was quickly contained by the Riverhead Fire Department Saturday afternoon.

Fire Department personnel received a 911 call of a fire on the beach, about a half mile west of the public beach in the Reeve’s Park neighborhood, just after 3 p.m.

Bathers remained on the beach while firefighters boarded four-wheel drive trucks with a portable water pump and hoses, which they used to pump water from the Sound onto the smoldering line of seaweed and driftwood that stretched for a couple hundred feet along the beach.

“It looks like somebody had a campsite fire and it spread,”  said Riverhead Fire Department Second Assistant Chief Joseph Raynor, who was at the scene. “It caused a lot of nuisance, a lot of time that could be better spent elsewhere,”

He said Riverhead firefighters had already responded to two major calls Saturday, including a mutual aid call to a mulch fire in Eastport and an accident in Polish Town in which one man was taken by helicopter to Stony Brook University Medical Center.

Firefighters put out the last whiffs of smoke along the beach and returned to the Reeve’s Beach parking lot at approximately 4:45 p.m.

[email protected]