By CRAIG FREILICH

MACOMB – The fire in Macomb that prompted the declaration of a fire emergency in St. Lawrence County has been smoldering and flaring up for a month, according to witnesses and fire personnel.

The current focus for fighting the fire is to try to keep it from entering an area of dry pines.

“It’s burning in a rock cut in very rocky terrain,” said Gouverneur Fire Chief Thomas Conklin, about three-quarters of a mile from the road in rocky ground so tough and steep that ATVs and UTVs can’t make it to where the firefighters need to be.

Firefighters have been called back five or six times since the lightning strike July 9 that destroyed an old oak tree and started the smoldering fire on the property of Pete and Penny Bogardus along South Woods Road.

“It was an oak tree two foot across, and it just blew it apart,” said Rich Tully, who lives across the road with his wife, Deborah.

He said he and his wife “wandered over and took some pictures, but didn’t see anything” that would have led them to believe the fire was smoldering and moving. But since then they have taken another look after the fire flared up. “You could see clearly where it wandered away from the tree,” Tully said.

On Friday firefighters from Brier Hill, Heuvelton, Gouverneur, Hammond, Lisbon, Rensselaer Falls, Oxbow, and Morristown fire departments were on-scene, along with, Gouverneur Rescue and Morristown Fire Department Auxiliary helping battle the blaze.

Firefighters have poured 40,000 to 60,000 gallons of water on the fire, Conklin said, but that has not been enough to quell it.

Department of Environmental Conservation rangers were called in Thursday night to help the numerous firefighters and other volunteers who are working at the scene. “They are establishing a plan with multiple crews” to fight the smoldering, wandering fire, Conklin said.

He said they thought it had been contained a couple of days ago, but it has continued burning and is now approaching a 50-acre pine forest “that’s covered with dry pine needles. There’s lots of dry foliage on the ground. And there hasn’t been any rain here in four weeks,” Conklin said.

“Every day they put it out and then it’s burning again,” said Tully this morning. “There’s a crew of people working on it. It’s down into the rocks now.”

It is such a persistent fire that the county has declared an emergency burning ban in the county that officially begins at 6 p.m. this evening, according to county according to Emergency Services Director Michael LeCuyer.

LeCuyer said nine fire departments battled the ongoing blaze for more than 12 hours Monday, but were unable to stop it from spreading. He estimates the fire has destroyed about five acres so far.

LeCuyer has said the fire, believed to have been started by a lightning strike, has been burning brush for weeks, but is now approaching that pine forest.

“Our major concern right now is keeping it out of the pine forest. We want to get a perimeter around it and keep it from spreading,” he said.

Meanwhile, Conklin said, another fire about five miles away along the Scotch Settlement Road in Rossie last week is believed to be out.

“We believe lightning started that fire, and that it had been burning for some time,” Conklin said.

“It had got into the sod and roots, like sawdust, and worked its way into a field and then into swampy area,” he said.

Firefighters battled that fire for about six hours last Wednesday at property owned by Dave Maloy.

Conklin said he believes that fire has been extinguished.

“The fire department hasn’t been called back,” he said.