VIDEO: In and out, in and out. The office for Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) in Hartford is a flurry of activity on any given weekday afternoon.
Few officials are as busy as Chris Martin, the state forester with decades of experience. The fall is the most frenetic time of year for him, as that is peak season for wildfires.
And lately, the state has not seen wildfires like it has in decades.
โ2024 was what we hope to be a very unusual year for Connecticut,” Martin said. “We had devastating floods in August in western Connecticut, and then basically the faucet just shut off. And we had no rain all of September, all of October, into November.โ
Martin says that was the longest drought in the fall in recorded history for Connecticut. No rain last fall brought a wash of fire, as 605 fires burned more than 500 acres, an average of seven new fires sparking each day.
Eight firefighters were injured. One died, Robert Sharkevich Sr. of the Wethersfield Fire Department, during the Hawthorne Fire amid the height of the season from mid-October to mid-November.
