[caption id="attachment_71177" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Galway-born Declan Hennelly."]
A Galway-born New York parks employee was among about 100 people who fought a major fire in New York's second-biggest state park last week. The blaze, at Harriman State Park, was one of several fires that erupted outside the city during unseasonably dry and windy weather.
Declan Hennelly from Ballinasloe worked until midnight on Tuesday of last week to contain a blaze that engulfed 600 acres of the park, situated about an hour north of New York City.
Harriman encompasses 200 miles of trails and several lakes. The blaze had begun the previous day at lunchtime.
Hennelly, who works for the parks department, said: "There were 20 people working on our part of the fire and probably 20 more on the other part, and several shifts".
While Irish American and indeed Irish-born firefighters are familiar in major cities, Hennelly is a rarity as an Irish-born employee of the state parks department.
"I've never met another Irish employee, and only two others who are not American," said Hennelly, who has been two years with the department.
The New York state parks' system could not readily ascertain how many Irish-born employees it had, but Larry Hajna, a spokesman for New Jersey's parks, said, "I'm not aware of anyone from Ireland among our 500 to 600 employees."
Harriman lies on the New York/New Jersey line, just on the Empire State side. It is administered by the parks department's Pallisades region, which had appealed for help from Hennelly's neighboring Taconic region.
No one was injured in the blaze and no properties were damaged, although smoke could be smelled by residents of Stony Point, a few miles away.
The affected area was heavily wooded and inaccessible.
Hennelly sounded unfazed by his trial by fire, a change from his more usual duty of maintaining ski trails.
"You just have to be careful and remember not to stand downwind of the fire," he said
"You don't really put out forest fires, you just try and contain them," he explained.
"We create a circle around the fire. We then burn inside that line to remove the fuel and wait for the fire to burn itself out."
