Firefighters Control Brush Blaze in Ritzy Hamptons

A major brush fire in Long Island’s fashionable Hamptons was brought under control late Friday by firefighters who battled the blaze on the ground as helicopters and planes dropped water from the air.

“The fire is under control,” said Tim Ryan, spokesman for Suffolk County Executive Robert Gaffney. “This does not mean that the problem is over. We have had 19 days without rain, and everything is as dry as a tinderbox.”

More than 1,500 volunteer firefighters waged a ground war against the fire with hoses, shovels and picks. Seven National Guard helicopters dumped 200-gallon loads of water pumped from a nearby lake onto the five-mile-long, 1 1/2-mile-wide fire zone.

The fast-moving fire burned across 6,000 acres of land and destroyed a lumber yard and one home. The Westhampton commuter railroad station and at least seven nearby homes, mostly small, wood-frame structures, were damaged.

“It’s like being in hell,” said volunteer firefighter L.J. Heming, 33, of Middle Island.

Sources who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Associated Press that investigators noticed a certain pattern in the way the fire burned, indicating it may have been set.

Threatened homes included slope-roofed, post-modern country houses that typically sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the fire posed little threat to the more posh homes of well-known Hamptons residents such as Steven Spielberg, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

An exception was composer Marvin Hamlisch, who hosed down the roof of his Westhampton Beach summer house and fled back to Manhattan on Thursday, taking along a favorite picture of his wife in case the fire got to their home.

About 250 residents were ordered to evacuate from more dangerous areas.

The area was eerily quiet on Friday, when traffic jams of luxury cars normally would be headed to the island’s east end for the last weekend before the traditional Labor Day end to the summer resort season.

President Clinton dispatched Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt and other officials, experts and equipment.

Gov. George Pataki and U.S. Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato toured the area. “It’s real scary stuff,” said Pataki, who had already declared a state of emergency.

In one bizarre tableau, a development of 20 Westhampton houses stood intact amid a burned-out area. Firefighters had been able to split the fire, which raged on either side of the homes.