Forest Fire Service fills Six-Month Prescription

STAFFORD TOWNSHIP - Friday turned out to be a great day for a fire.

At 7 a.m,. the New Jersey Forest Fire Service was not so sure. It had rained Wednesday, and a little Thursday, too - not ideal conditions for the controlled burning they like to do this time of year while temperatures are low.

But by 10 a.m., the decision was made that the wind had dried out the woods enough for a decent flame to carry, and inside the Coyle Field fire service station on Route 72, men in green jackets and work boots began getting ready for the day's project.....Continue Reading

"It's not exciting yet," Drake said, looking at the patches of orange embers creeping from the roadway into the forest, while fire service crews in yellow protective gear observed the flames.

The prescribed-burn season extends from October to mid-March, but most of the burning gets done this time of year. The service aims to burn 20,000 acres annually, but usually comes a few thousand acres short because the weather does not always cooperate - some days are too wet, others too hot and others too windy, and the parameters vary by each location.

The service also increasingly has to coordinate with other agencies and organizations to plan the burns, Drake said. For Friday's project, they consulted with the Department of Transportation to close Route 539, the Pinelands Commission to get a permit, the Department of Environmental Protection to make sure no species would be harmed and local police and firefighters to keep the public safe.

While Drake waited for the fire to pick up, he pointed out an area that had been burned by the Warren Grove fire of 2006. That fire raced through a swath of forest that had not seen prescribed burns since the 1970s, giving it enough leaves, pine needles and dead branches to torch more than 17,000 acres.

"All this is really a life-safety issue," Drake said of the burning. "We do prescribed burning to lessen the fuel, so when there is a fire it won't burn as hot or as fast."

At about 2 p.m., the white smoke grew blacker, and Drake took his truck to the top of a hill to look down on the forest. Crews had started the second phase, lighting another line of fire several hundred feet back from the road, sending it with the wind back toward the roadway.

Drake could tell from the smoke's color that the fire had started to reach up into the canopy of the trees, many of which grew no taller than 6 feet. He said this particular burn was hotter than the service would typically light, but environmental groups actually asked them to burn it more, since the wildlife there had adapted over thousands of years to thrive around intense fire.

Soon colorful shades of smoke erupted from the forest, and Drake descended the hill to get a closer look. The road was now engulfed in smoke, completely obscuring a firetruck that drove ahead about 50 feet.

A voice crackled on the radio, reporting that the blaze was steaming back our way. The trees closest to the asphalt started to shake, and then exploded in orange flame.

A minute before, the cold wind made it feel like 20 degrees - now it felt like a sauna about 100 feet away from the fire.

"It took a little bit, but we got her going," someone said on the radio. "That's exactly what we wanted."

While ash fell from the sky as Drake nonchalantly talked to the guys in the truck beside his. It looked like an inferno in front of them, but they looked bored, and talked about Drake's new pick-up.

"If this was April or May," - the prime time for wildfires - "I don't think we'd be sitting here chatting," said Craig Augustoni, a coordinator with the Division of Fire Safety. The comment drew a chuckle from Drake.

The crews would manage the fire for the rest of the day until it cooked about 325 acres. As of Saturday, the service had burnt about 9,000 acres since October in southern and central New Jersey.

Wildfire season officially begins March 15. From now until then, Drake said, the service will be burning on every day it can, because anything that isn't safely burnt now will be potentially dangerous until October.

They probably will not get to all the acres they have planned to burn, but he said they will do as much as they can to minimize the danger.

"Because we have such a tight window," Drake said, "we have to pick our areas to defend."

E-mail Lee Procida: LProcida@pressofac.com

Controlled burns

On Saturday, the New Jersey Forest Fire Service conducted six controlled burns in southern New Jersey, including:

* 20 acres near Philadelphia Avenue and Egg Harbor Lake in Egg Harbor City, Atlantic County
* 34 acres near The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Galloway Township, Atlantic County
* 200 acres north of Batsto Village in Washington Township, Burlington County
* 150 acres near Route 539 in Lacey Township, Ocean County
* 55 acres in Double Trouble State Park in Berkeley Township, Ocean County
* an unknown number of acres in Winslow Township, Camden County