SI Advance

It was the first major brush fire of the year.

The fire, which is under investigation but may have been started by an unextinguished cigarette, began in a remote location of the park near the model airplane field, around 9:30 a.m. It was extinguished in an hour.

Also yesterday, an area of brush flared up around Grayson Street and Chesterton Avenue around 11 a.m., burning another 8 acres.

Though the fires brought back memories from a couple of years ago, they fortunately didn't escalate into an event that rivals the five-alarm fire that burned 75 acres of phragmites and put adjacent homes in jeopardy in March 2006.

Yesterday's fires didn't come close to homes.

"We got it quick and it was accessible," said Chief Thomas Haring, the FDNY borough commander. Three brush fire units and a new FDNY Polaris vehicle joined 33 units with 138 firefighters, including some from Brooklyn, in responding to the initial blaze.

"We got it from several sides," Haring said. "Houses were never threatened."

Firefighters began pulling back from the park around 10:40 a.m., but some had to return along with additional units for the separate fire less than a half-hour later.

During the first fire, firefighters worked near an area where several spots with low-level radiation were found in 2006, but firefighters were not exposed nor was any radiation released into the air, an FDNY spokesman said.

The entrance to Gateway National Recreation Area was closed to vehicular traffic as firefighters battled the blaze, but walkers, runners and bikers still were able to use the park's pathways.

There has been no measurable precipitation on Staten Island since April 12, and that was only about one-third of an inch of rain. The total for all of April stands at 1.5 inches, less than half than normal.

There was a small brush fire in Clove Lakes Park on April 18.