Fire and fuel breaks in NJ's wildland urban inerface

I recently had the opportunity to learn a little about fire management practices in the wildland urban interface in the pinelands in central and southern NJ through attending a day long Forest Stewardship Firewise Tour. One of the fire management practices that I learned about that day are fire and fuel breaks. I got a handout that morning:  Wildfire: Best management practices for creating and maintaing wildfire fuelbreaks in New Jersey's Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) is available on the NJ Forest Fire Service's website at this location (a pdf file). This document starts with some definitions, some that I will include here and then moves on to a discussion of what the individual homeowner living in the WUI can do.

Further, fire and fuel breaks are also built and maintained along natural or constructed "roads" through the WUI. In  February of 2010, I wrote about firebreaks that were planned for Barnegat NJ, go here to see that article. I had a chance to visit one such fire and fuel break in Stafford Township, NJ within the burn area of 15,000 acre 2007 Warren Grove fire. To be honest, I'm not quite sure if this was the firebreak that I wrote about in February 2010, but I don't think that really matters.

I'll start with briefly summarizing some definitions from the document I referred to earlier, Wildfire: Best management practices for creating and maintaing wildfire fuelbreaks in New Jersey's Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) :

Firebreak:  A natural or constructed barrier used to stop or check fires
that occur, or to provide a control line from which to work.

Fuelbreak:  A natural or manmade change in fuel characteristics that
affect fire behavior so that fires burning into them can be more readily
controlled and managed.

Keeping these definitions in mind, I had a chance to visit the Hay Rd. fire and fuel break in Stafford Township, NJ within the burn area of the 2007 Warren Grove fire.

Here are some pictures that I took that day. Hay Rd. itself is the firebreak. The fuel break is on one side of the road. Hay Rd. is a sand road a little to the north west of the Stafford Township Recycling Center, that may be found on this image from wikimapia.

Other relevant links of interest from the NJ Forest Fire Service website:

Wildfire hazard mitigation
Prescribed burning
Fire planning (including links at bottom of page)
Fire hazard regulations
Definitions