After 36 days the wildfire that began Oct. 3 in the Dilly Cliffs area in North Woodstock and burned more than 70 acres has finally been declared extinguished. NHPR’s Sean Hurley visited the area today with Incident Commander John Neely and sends us this.
John Neely walks through a forest blackened by fire and raises his binoculars to scan the cliffs above. “One thing that you don’t want to do is call a fire out and controlled and done when there’s something still going on there,” Neely says. “So I want to make really sure - especially with this stubborn fire - that it is out. It’s gotten a lot of rain from that storm over the Halloween weekend and I’m pretty optimistic that that’s done the job for us.”
After a full tour of the area and double checking trouble spots, at 3 p.m. today, Neely declared the Dilly Fire officially out and dispatched crews to begin to retrieve equipment and thousands of feet of hose from the forest.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
