About the NJ Forest Fire Service

I am going to take a break of about a week, maybe a little more, in order to make a few posts about the New Jersey Forest Fire Service (NJFFS).

Spring in New Jersey means that it is fire season. If you go to the home page of the NJFFS and scroll down to the current wildfire activity box in the middle of the page, you will see that fire season in NJ lasts until about June 1. On this same page, you will also see from the map on the right hand side of the page that NJ Forest Fire Service divides the state into three divisions. There is a Division office in each division. If you scroll over the map, you will see a listing of the counties in each division. These are:

Division A:
Bergen
Essex
Union
Passaic
Sussex
Warren
Hunterdon
Morris
Somerset
Mercer

Division B:
Burlington
Monmouth
Ocean
Middlesex

Division C:
Camden
Gloucester
Salem
Cumberland
Atlantic
Cape May

Note that not all municipalities are in the NJFFS's primary response area. No municipalities in Hudson County are in the NJFFS's primary response area. If I understand correctly, the NJFFS will respond to brush and/or wildfires in towns outside their primary response area under mutual aid.

If you go to this NJFFS webpage, you will see that between Jan. 1, 2009 and April 5, 2009, there have been 332 wildfires burning 499.75 acres in NJ. I suspect that they update this page periodically, so depending on when you read this post, you might see different figures.

This webpage also refers to the goals and objectives of the NJFFS. I will repeat them here:

The objectives of the New Jersey Forest Fire Service are to hold wildfire losses at a level commensurate with values protected and to do the job safely and efficiently.

The goal is to limit the number of wildfires to under 2,000 annually and the acreage burned to less than one half of one percent (.5%) of the 3.15 million acres protected, or 15,750 acres.

Obtained from http://www.nj.gov/dep/parksandforests/fire/ff_aboutus.htm on April 13, 2009

Finally, There is also a very good video introducing the NJFFS on this same webpage called Living with Fire. If you live, work, or vacation in NJ, you might want to watch this short video.