Wildfire burns in 3,200 acres of New Jersey forest area

A fast-moving wildfire in the Pine Barrens section of southern New Jersey spread to 3,200 acres of the heavily forested area by Tuesday evening, prompting the shutdown of a 17-mile stretch of one of the state's busiest highways, authorities said.

The smoky blaze, in Ocean County, 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.

Embers from the fire, which began Tuesday morning, jumped over the parkway at about 6 pm, 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 poses no risk, according to O'Brien and Shawn LaTourette, commissioner of the State Department of Environmental Protection.

All 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 that the blaze was 5% contained as of 8 p.m. and that a local high school was being used as an evacuation shelter. 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.

Officials did not provide an estimate for when the fire might be brought under control. 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 23,000 Jersey Central Power & Light customers in the area were without power as of 8 p.m., according to Chris Hoenig, a company spokesperson. 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."