The Spring Hill Fire was first reported on Saturday, March 30th in Penn State Forest in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. I have no specific information about the location of this wildfire, but I did go into Google Earth and using Google Earth's search feature, I located Penn State Forest for you.
All major roads in the area of the Spring Hill Fire (Routes, 72, 539, 532, and 563) were open Sunday evening, March 31st.
Bill Gabbert of Wildfire Today beat me to the punch, he reported on the Spring Hill Fire in a March 30th article that he has been updating. Thank-you Bill for your great reporting and for bringing the news of the Spring Hill Fire to your readers from the United States and Canada and around the world.
Early this morning a friend of mine who lives in South Florida and knows of my writing, told me that the Sun Sentinel (Broward County FL) had an article reporting on the Spring Hill Fire. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a link for you, but will keep looking. However, I did see an article from ABC News on my news feed this morning reporting on the Spring Hill Fire. So, it would seem that the news of the Spring Hill Fire has hit the wire services.
It is with some consternation that I say that I am glad for the national reporting on the Spring Hill Fire. The reason being is that a 10,000 acre is indeed a very major wildfire in New Jersey. In the ten years that I have been writing this blog on aerial wildland firefighting and related issues, the largest fire that I recall in the NJ Pine Barrens that was fought by NJFFS crews was the 3,500 acre Penn Swamp fire of July 2017. Amanda Hoover of New Jersey Advance Media wrote a nice article at the time focusing on eleven very major fires that burned in the NJ Pine Barrens (and elsewhere in NJ), this article may be found here. Amanda wrote of the 1963 Chatsworth fires that burned 190,000 acres and two wildfires that burned over 10,000 acres (approximately 17,000 acres in May 2007, "Warren Grove Fire" and a wildfire in 1995 that burned 15,000 acres in Ocean County NJ). The other eight fires she wrote about were under 3,000 acres. She did reference a 2016 article in Rolling Stone Magazine in her article. I read the Rolling Stone piece, by Kyle Dickman, when it came out and went back and reread the article last night. Kyle's article is well researched and I trust his figures. I was especially interested in what he wrote about the infrequent of wildfires over 1,000 acres in the New Jersey Pinelands (what I refer to as the NJ Pine Barrens):
Over the past century, roughly 100,000 wildfires have burned in the Pinelands. According to a smaller state catalog of significant wildfires since 1905, firefighters or weather stopped all but 19 before they reached 1,000 acres, and only 10 grew beyond 10,000 acres. Just two became biblical blazes that torched more than 150,000 acres each.
One of the biblical blazes that Kyle referred to are the 1963 Chatsworth fires, I am not quite when what the other one is, perhaps in the first half of the twentieth century.
A friend of mine from the National Weather Service who is also a fire weather expert just sent me a link to a site from the Storm Prediction Center which displays the probability of wildfires of 100, 300, 1,000 or 5,000 acres. I am still getting used to this site, this is the link that he sent me. I saved a screen shot for you showing the probability on April 5th of a wildfire over 1,000 acres occurring in the Continental United States. As you can see the probability of such a fire occurring in New Jersey is very low (about 2 percent). As I understand it, you move forward and back in time by clicking on step at the upper right.
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| screen image taken on April 1, 2019 at 9:45 AM from https://www.spc.noaa.gov/new/FWclimo/climo.php?parm=1000ac |
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