2024 New Jersey Wildfire Season: Prescribed Burns (March 20 update)

While we are in the early days of the spring wildfire season which started in New Jersey on March 15, the New Jersey Forest Fire Service (NJFFS) continues to conduct prescribed burns (Rx) on NJ Dept of Environmental Protections (DEP). In addition the NJFFS has an application process for private landowners wanting prescribed burns on their property, some of this prescribed burns on privately owned lands are being conducted today, March 20th according to the NJFFS Prescribed Burn Fire Dashboard. The NJFFS Prescribed Burn Fire Dashboard is a map that lists Rx burns being conducted on the current date known as active burns and scheduled Rx burns that are planned to be conducted over the next five days, if there are not active or scheduled burns the map will be empty. Because the dashboard is updated daily and there is no mechanism to link to a static version on the NJFFS website I am not making a copy to display. But I can see and I hope that you will trust me that today, March 20th, prescribed burns on privately owned lands are being conducted across the State (Sussex County in northern NJ, Mercer County in central NJ, and Cape May County in southern NJ. If you want a better idea of where these counties are located you may follow the above link to the NJFFS Prescribed Burn Fire Dashboard and zoom in a little to see county names, this should work outside of the prescribed burn seasons. 

I do know that prescribed burns were conducted on March 16th through the 19th, both from the NJ Forest Fire Service Facebook page and from e-mail notifications that I receive. However, unlike for prescribed burns done earlier in March there is no listing of the exact location of these burns, nor are past burns shown on the NJFFS Prescribed Burn Fire Dashboard. I can see from todays Dashboard the prescribed burns are scheduled across all of New Jersey in the next five days (March 21 to 26) in Sussex County (northern NJ), Somerset County (central NJ), Monmouth County (central NJ) Ocean County  (southern NJ), and Atlantic County (southern NJ).