Above: A video of the fire shot by Laura Gioffe and shared with the Watershed Post. 

A 19-year-old Delhi man was gravely injured in an explosion behind the American Legion building in Delhi around 8:15 p.m. on Wednesday, May 13. The minivan he was driving rammed into a 1,000-gallon propane tank behind the building and exploded, Delaware County officials and police say.

The man, 19-year-old Joseph Mueller of Delhi, was taken to O’Connor Hospital in Delhi and then was airlifted by helicopter to Upstate Medical University in Syracuse by LifeNet, according to Steve Hood, the director of Delaware County Emergency Services, and to a press release from Delhi Police Chief Michael Mills. 

The man was not affiliated with the Legion, nor had he attended an event there the night of the explosion, said Ed McGrath, the commander of the Delhi American Legion Post. The Legion was hosting a bingo night when the explosion occurred. 

A forest fire that has been burning on Hunter Mountain since Thursday, May 7 is still burning, but has not jumped its containment line, said New York State Forest Ranger Rob Dawson on Tuesday May 12.

In a sign of confidence that the Hunter Mountain fire is indeed under control, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has re-opened the hiking trails in Hunter that have been closed since Friday, May 8 because of the blaze, according to DEC spokesman Rick Georgeson.

The number of acres consumed by the fire is now 133 acres, Dawson said. A team of forest rangers managing the fire conducted a controlled burn on Monday afternoon, May 11, which has added to the acreage, he said.

"We did a little burnout up top to burn the fuels out," Dawson said. "Around the same time, the hot areas that are burning every day flared up."

Dawson said that the controlled burn was intentional.

Above: A helicopter fights the Hunter Mountain fire on Saturday, May 9. Photo by Ariel Woolheater. 

Four days after it was sparked in a remote Greene County Valley, the largest forest fire to burn in the Catskills town of Hunter in living memory is fully contained, according to officials at the incident’s command post at the Lanesville firehouse at noon on Sunday, May 10.

The fire, based in the Greene County hamlet of Lanesville, is one of the largest of many that have sparked in the dry, hot Catskills this week, including a brush fire that consumed almost 3,000 acres on the Shawangunk Ridge and a burn at the Delaware County dump. 

Above: Fire on the mountain. A helicopter pours water on a forest fire, visible as a plume of white smoke rising over the ridge, on Hunter Mountain on May 8, the second day of the blaze. Photo by Douglas Senterman.

Updates at bottom of post. -- Ed.