By Kent Jarrell
(June 30, 2025) — The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection recently held a briefing in Haddam, hosted by the Haddam Land Trust, on the fire impact on forests, focusing on the 200-acre brushfire this past April on Tinker Road. The Haddam Volunteer Fire Department and several other local departments, along with a crew of state foresters, responded to the blaze, which was started by a truck fire and spread to a home and into the Cockaponset State Forest.
Connecticut is 60% forest. According to Connecticut Fish and Wildlife, fires can be beneficial for maintaining healthy forests and ecosystems. While uncontrolled wildfires pose risks, they play a crucial role in nutrient cycling, habitat diversity, and forest management. More than two months after the Ruth Hill fire, the forest has already rebounded, and growth has resumed.
Alex Amendola of Higganum (photo above) was one of the state forestry responders and talked about his experience in an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Kent Jarrell: What was the fire like when you arrived?
Alex Amendola: We had a very stiff south wind. We had flame heights, flame lengths about two to three feet in some areas burning but moving pretty rapidly. By the time we responded the fire was already in the 30, 40, 50-acre range. The degree of risk is to the north. There are a few houses up there. We don’t want the houses to burn.
Kent Jarrell: What was the suppression strategy?
Alex Amendola: My job was to establish a control line, which we then did. Then our goal was, as the fire is burning, boxing it out with backburns so there’s no fuel for the fire. We dug with tools, essentially removing the leaf litter, removing the fuel, and creating a line of bare dirt, and then we’ll actually light the fuel directly adjacent to our control lines, which will burn 10, 20 feet worth of fuel toward the fire. So, we are essentially fighting fire with fire. We were able to successfully contain the fire within 12 hours.
Kent Jarrell: You are responding as a state forester. How do you coordinate with local fire departments?
Alex Amendola: When we show up, we take control from the local departments who are already here. My job is to map the fire, get the lay of the land, and generate a GPS map that we hand out. Our incident commander comes up with the game plan, creates squads of guys who then go and execute whatever tasks need to be done. That may be digging handlines, it may be a direct attack with bladder bags, or water bags spraying on the fire. The local fire departments have generally brought out hoes. They have a bunch of equipment here. They’re not as trained as we are for the woods, so we have them either wetting down the side of the road, maybe they’ll dig hard lines.
Kent Jarrell: Coordination must be tricky. You’ve got an ongoing fire you are trying to figure out.
Alex Amendola: You’d be amazed how many fire departments generally respond to fires, especially when they’re large like this one. It is very hard to figure out or to coordinate that stuff between everybody. There is a system in place, the incident command system. Many different fire departments respond, and it does become pretty hectic. Especially on this road, which is exceedingly tight, especially at the north end, where the fire began. So, it’s tough getting those large engines up there. But that’s why we’re all trained in the incident command system, and we all go through tons of different training and qualifications to be able to do this kind of thing, which is not just learning the fire in the woods, but how it behaves.
Kent Jarrell: We’re in an interesting era where there are big forest fires out west and up north in Canada. The U.S. government estimates that Connecticut’s temperatures rose two and a half to three degrees over the last hundred years. Now, with an increased precipitation and drought cycle, temperatures could go up another five degrees in the next 25 years. What kind of threat does that bring to Connecticut forests?
Alex Amendola: It brings a lot of threats. But it’s really a hard thing to pinpoint. Individual fire seasons can be so erratic based on precipitation, wind speed, drought, precipitation, available moisture, and relative humidity. O.K., we’re getting a two, three-degree, five-degree increase over 25 years? What does that mean for our future? We may see less fires. We may see more. Last year, we had the historic drought, especially for the fall season, not just the spring and winter. And in turn, we saw a historic fire season with large fires. This spring, we saw a few large fires, not quite as extreme. It can be so fickle. All it takes is a couple of weeks’ worth of drought, and we’re right back into the extreme fire danger.
Kent Jarrell: Why do you do what you do?
Alex Amendola: Nobody loves trees more than me. My whole life is based around trees and the forest. For better or worse, humans have had an impact on this planet on the environment. Land management stewardship ensures we can provide benefits for all species of wildlife and plants.
Photos by Kent Jarrell
