L.J. Heming of Hampton Bays Remembers the 1995 Westhampton Wildfires

My father, Lawrence James Heming III, lovingly known by most as “L.J.,” sits on his bed in jeans and a T-shirt from his U.S. Navy Reserves unit in the Bronx, as he tells me the story of the 1995 wildfires. Behind him, on the headboard in my parents’ Hampton Bays home, is a photograph of him and my mother, Katie, from a fire department dinner.

In August 1995, my dad was a probie in the Middle Island Fire Department. The department went to a brush fire in Rocky Point and had just returned to the firehouse when they got called back out — to respond to the massive Sunrise Wildfires in Westhampton.

Because of his probationary status, he was not allowed on the brush truck. But that didn’t stop him: He jumped on a tanker instead with a fellow firefighter named John Webb Sr. The tanker was needed because there were no fire hydrants on Sunrise Highway, and water was desperately needed.

“I figured I could either sit back at the house or go with the tanker and at least be part of it,” my dad said.

“It was daytime, and all you could see was the smoke,” he recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t going to be a one-day thing.’”

For the next week or so, he spent almost every waking moment doing whatever he could to help fight the fire. “I knew the roads like the back of my hand, because I grew up out here,” he said.

For the first few hours, it was a constant cycle of filling up brush trucks from the 5,000-gallon tanker. When they ran out of water, they refilled and went back.

Eventually, they heard a call over the radio for a stand on Sunrise Highway just west of Westhampton Beach. “And here it comes,” he remembers, “and it’s roaring 200 feet high. There’s trucks lined up the whole length of Sunrise Highway, and here comes this wall of fire.

“We had a nozzle on the tanker, so I pulled out the line and I said to John, ‘Give me all the pressure you’ve got.’ So he turned the pressure up, and I yelled at him to get under the truck.

“I took the nozzle and I opened it up to a fan pattern to protect the truck,” he recalled. “And, the next thing I know, we get hit with a wall of fire. It jumped the whole width of Sunrise Highway. We felt the heat, but because I put the water out in the spray pattern, it kept us protected.

“So it jumps the highway, and everyone takes off, because now Westhampton is in danger — it wasn’t burning before, and now it’s burning.”

“All day and all night, we are filling up and giving people water. This has been going on for two days now, haven’t left the truck, just going and going. But we are also going back into the neighborhoods, and finding trucks. No one could make heads or tails on the radios,” he said.

As they went back into the neighborhoods, they wound up in the thick of the fire multiple times, as they went to save fellow firefighters calling out for water over the radios.

My dad and Mr. Webb went for a meal break, the rumors floating around told them that there were steaks at Suffolk County Community College in Speonk. They were some of the first people to go get food. As my dad walked toward the food, he was stopped by the media, and he recalls someone sticking a microphone in his face and asking what it was like when the fire jumped the highway.

“I said, ‘It was like being in hell’ — and I never thought that was going to go anywhere,” he said.

But it did: The quote wound up in newspapers all over the country, and on CNN.

The next morning, as his father and my grandfather, Lawrence James Heming Jr., watched the 6 a.m. CNN broadcast in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he hears of the fires on Long Island, and suddenly he sees his son’s face on the TV screen. “He fell out of his chair,” my dad said with a smile.

When my dad and Mr. Webb went to leave the college, they were stopped by their chief. “He said, ‘How long have you been here?’ and I said, ‘What day is it?’” he remembers. But he was too full of adrenaline to stop and continued to fight the fire. Eventually, his chiefs ordered them off the truck to go home and get some sleep.

Then there was my mother, a girl from Amityville named Katie Miller.

The two had met in February 1995, and my father was strongly against the idea of marriage and children, living the good life as a bartender at CPI.

“I had tickets to Van Halen at Jones Beach,” my father said. “So I said to your mom, ‘Let’s go.’”

He was distracted during the concert, anxious to get back to the fire, but his chief wouldn’t let him come back yet. “So, they’re playing, and I’m not really into it,” he said. “My mind was on the fire.

“They play a song called ‘Not Enough,’ and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I don’t know why,” he said. “And I’m listening to the words, and they resonate something in me. My mom’s gone — she died, this is three years later — and I swear I was never going to get married. And I’m listening to the song, and I’m listening to the words, and I look at your mother, and I knew.

“It was like a bolt of lightning from the sky — this was the woman I was going to marry,” he said as a single tear rolled down his cheek. “I never thought I could ever love someone so much.”

He went back to the fire after the concert — with a Van Halen T-shirt under his turnout gear. He worked until the fire was over.

“It was definitely a life-changing experience,” he said.

Julia Heming, a 2020 graduate of Hampton Bays High School, is a freshman at Stony Brook University, majoring in journalism. She has worked for the past two summers as an intern for the Express News Group.