Wildfire burns in 11,500 acres of New Jersey forest area

A fast-moving wildfire in the Pine Barrens section of southern New Jersey had spread to 11,500 acres of the heavily forested area by Wednesday morning, prompting the shutdown of a 17-mile stretch of one of the state’s busiest highways, authorities said.

The smoky blaze, in Ocean County, which at one point threatened at least 1,320 structures, forced the evacuation of 3,000 residents of Ocean and Lacey Townships and caused the Garden State Parkway to be shut down between Exits 63 and 80, the New Jersey Forest Fire Service said in a statement.

Authorities in New Jersey said that by late morning the parkway had been reopened and that the blaze no longer threatened any structures. Yet, the growing fire threatened to be among the largest in the state in 20 years, said Shawn LaTourette, New Jersey’s Commissioner of Environmental Protection.

Residents could return to their homes on Wednesday morning, but were urged to remain cautious when traveling in the area because heavy plumes of smoke lingered in the air, the Lacey Township Police Department said on social media.

Embers from the fire, which began Tuesday morning, jumped over the parkway at about 6 p.m., 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, according to O’Brien and LaTourette.

All the buildings at the Oyster Creek site are “designed and constructed to withstand fires,” O’Brien said in a statement.

“There is not a concern to the security of the material in cask storage,” LaTourette said. “Dried cask storage is designed to handle much higher temperatures than a wildfire.”

The fire service said on Wednesday morning that the blaze was 30% contained. No injuries had been reported.

An estimated 130 fire service firefighters were battling the blaze, and officials with the state’s radiation monitoring unit were also on site, LaTourette said.

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.

The fire should be brought under control by this weekend, when some rain is expected in the area, Donnelly said. 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 LaTourette.

He said fire and emergency management officials asked the company around 6 p.m. to shut off power into and out of a nearby substation as a safety measure, and that power would be restored “as safety allows.”

Several dozen cars were in a park-and-ride lot in the closed section of the parkway, at the Celia Cruz Service Area in Forked River, according to Tom Feeney, a New Jersey Turnpike Authority spokesperson. Those with cars to retrieve should call the authority’s operations center for information on how to do that, he said.

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 a frequent setting for wildfires.

As in much of the rest of the country, 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 the number of fires as it had in the same period in 2023.

“We have never experienced conditions like this,” Bill Donnelly, chief of the fire service, said then.

The area where the fire began is in a part of New Jersey where conditions ranged from abnormally dry to severe drought as of April 15, 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.

“It’s incredibly dry,” LaTourette said, “and has been for a while.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.