Wildfire burns 12,500 acres of bone-dry New Jersey forest

By Ed Shanahan, Tracey Tully and Hilary Howard

A fast-moving wildfire in the Pine Barrens section of southern New Jersey had spread to 12,500 acres of the heavily forested area by Wednesday afternoon, and was among the biggest fires in the state in almost 20 years, authorities said.

The smoky blaze, known as the Jones Road Wildfire, originated in Ocean County and was first spotted on Tuesday from atop a remote fire tower. It has threatened as many as 1,320 structures, forced the evacuation of 5,000 residents of Ocean and Lacey Townships and caused a 17-mile stretch of the Garden State Parkway — one of the state’s busiest highways — to be shut down overnight, according to the New Jersey Forest Fire Service.

By 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, the parkway had reopened. By late afternoon, the fire was 40% contained but still threatened about 18 structures, according to the fire service. No injuries have been reported. An estimated 100 firefighters continued to battle the flames, according to fire officials.

Residents could return to their homes Wednesday morning, but they were urged to remain cautious because heavy smoke still lingered, the Lacey Township Police Department said on social media.

Embers from the fire jumped over the parkway on Tuesday night, sparking several small blazes near a defunct nuclear power plant known as Oyster Creek, according to state officials. The plant, owned by Holtec International, shut down in 2018 and is being decommissioned.

Patrick O’Brien, a Holtec spokesperson, said the fires closest to the facility had been “completely and safely extinguished.”

Even if a blaze were to reach an area where spent nuclear material is stored in secure casks, it would pose no risk, he said in a statement. All the buildings at the Oyster Creek site are “designed and constructed to withstand fires,” O’Brien said.

The blaze was first spotted Tuesday at 9:45 a.m. by an official in a fire tower in Cedar Bridge. At the time, the fire was between 10 and 20 acres, said Trevor Raynor, a warden with the fire service. The flames spread rapidly because of the dry vegetation in the area, he added.

Images posted on social media showed a thick haze of smoke shrouding the parkway near the Waretown exit and flames rising just beyond a guardrail on one side of the highway.

Many more acres are expected to burn as containment operations continue, said Bill Donnelly, chief of the fire service. But the fire should be brought under control by the weekend, when some rain is expected in the area, he added. The cause was under investigation, officials said, as firefighters, aided by other state, local and county agencies, battled the flames using fire engines, bulldozers and ground crews.

A helicopter able to drop 300 gallons of water and a contract air tanker able to drop double that amount were also being deployed, The Asbury Park Press reported.

About 25,000 Jersey Central Power & Light customers in the area were without power as of Wednesday morning, according to Chris Hoenig, a company spokesperson. He said that fire and emergency management officials asked the company around 6 p.m. Tuesday to shut off power into and out of a nearby substation as a safety measure, and that power would be restored “as safety allows.”

At 1.1 million acres, the Pine Barrens, also known as the Pinelands, is the largest forested area on the Eastern Seaboard between Maine and the Florida Everglades and is a frequent setting for wildfires.

Parts of the region are also heavily populated, especially near the coast. “We find ourselves with this fire at the wildland-urban interface,” said Shawn LaTourette, New Jersey’s commissioner of environmental protection, using a term that describes where human development abuts nature. “It’s a highly risky place.”

Last year was particularly bad for wildfires in New Jersey. From early October through Nov. 20, the forest fire service responded to more than 10 times as many fires as it did in the same period in 2023.

Five months later, conditions remain dire, Donnelly said on Wednesday morning at a news conference in Chatsworth, New Jersey. The number of wildfires has more than doubled, from 310 to 662, with over 16,500 acres burned so far this year, compared with the same period in 2024, he said.

The growing number of fires this winter and spring has prevented firefighters from performing some important prevention work, like controlled burns, Donnelly said in March.

The last major blaze to rival the Jones Road Wildfire struck the same region in 2007 and grew to 17,000 acres.

The area where this week’s fire began is in a part of New Jersey that emerged from an extreme drought a few months ago and still faces abnormally dry to severe drought conditions, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor. The fire risk across South Jersey was high as of Tuesday, according to the forest fire service. April 20 is the peak of the spring fire season, officials said, so this blaze happened as expected.

“It’s incredibly dry,” LaTourette said. “We still have a lot of work to do.”