Photos of Spring Hill Fire burn scar

I have good pilot friends who understand me and my love of aviation. They know that I will never be a licensed pilot and take me on "sight seeing" flights as schedules allow. Meaning when the weekend weather cooperates. This past weekend, we had two good days, so I was able to go flying on Sunday afternoon, April 7th.

It was a great day for flying, and there were a lot of folk who were also in the air. We flew the Pine Barrens, and flew over a portion of the burn scar from the Spring Hill Fire. Recall this article by Stephen Stirling of New Jersey Advanced Media showing some before and after satellite imagery of the Spring Hill Fire burn scar. He reported on what Larry Hajna of the NJ DEP said about the veins of green trees that you see in the three of the four photos:

“The long, thin ribbons of trees result from a phenomenon called horizontal roll vortices,” said Hajna. “Basically, these tornadic winds move upward and it kind of does a wave and creates an air pocket that is cooler than the surrounding environment. And it leaves a strip of unburned trees and leaves a path that indicates the direction.”

These thin ribbons of trees are especially pronounced in this first photo. please excuse the poor quality of the photograph. Taking pictures out of the window of an airplane is sometimes challenging and I had to retouch the photograph.

Spring Hill Fire burn scar, photographed on April 7, 2019

The next two photos are taken when we are near Coyle Field. Coyle Field is owned by the NJ Forest Fire Service. Route 72 where NJ Forest Fire Service ground crews did burn out operations runs adjacent to Coyle Field (barely visible in the second photo).

Spring Hill Fire burn scar, Coyle Field (NJFFS) photographed on April 7, 2019

Spring Hill Fire burn scar, Coyle Field (NJFFS) photographed on April 7, 2019

This last photograph is taken somewhere over the Spring Hill Burn scar. Again the photo quality is not the greatest. But it does show the burned area.

Spring Hill Fire burn scar, photographed on April 7, 2019

NJ Pine Barrens can recover from a wildfire

I have found it sad to see a large area of my beloved NJ Pine Barrens burned, see for example this awesome NJ Advance Media article By Stephen Stirling with interactive satellite imagery before and after the Spring Hill Fire burned 11,600 acres last weekend; I need to warn you that you will have at least temporarily disable your ad blocker in order to see the article. However I can personally attest to seeing the Pine Barrens come back fairly quickly after a wildfire, this is the point of this article.

You may be interested in this short video report from NJ Network taken in 2008, a year after the 2007 Warren Grove Fire burned over 17,000 acres in the NJ Pine Barrens. You will see how the area burned had begun to regrow a year after the fire went through.


Direct link to video report from NJ Network

There is a good article from the NY Times published on September 25, 2018 (with photos) discussing how an area burned by a 860 acre in the NJ Pine Barrens in May 2018 had begun to regenerate by September. For those of you who are interested in the fire adapted ecosystem of the NJ Pine Barrens I found some information two evergreen trees that are commonly found in the NJ Pine Barrens and how they have adapted and even depend on fire to reproduce, the pitch pine and the shortleaf pine, and the Pinelands Alliance has a good fire ecology page (be warned that one of the videos  and the slide show requires the flash video plug-in which some of you may not want to use for security concerns).

I live a couple of hours away from the NJ Pine Barrens, I try to get down there at least once or twice a year. I usually drive by an area burned by the Warren Grove Fire a mile or south of the ignition point. I pull off in the pull off and take photos if I have my camera with me. The first three photos were taken in August 2008, about 15 months after the Warren Grove Fire. Note that you can see the cones on the dwarf pitch pines (aka pymgy pines) that only open after a fire. In the last picture you can still see evidence of the fire but of note is the growth that happened in the 15 months after the Warren Grove Fire.

Photo taken August 2008 at Stafford Forge (Rte 539 South), Warren Grove NJ 

Photo taken August 2008 at Stafford Forge (Rte 539 South), Warren Grove NJ 

Photo taken August 2008 at Stafford Forge (Rte 539 South), Warren Grove NJ 

In the following photo, taken at the same spot three years after the Warren Grove Fire, you can see the difference. You would hardly know that the area was burned in a wildfire three years prior.

Photo taken May 2010 at Stafford Forge (Rte 539 South), Warren Grove NJ 

2019 NJ fire season: Spring Hill Fire human caused?

Updated at 9 PM on April 1st: Thanks to a friend from the NJFFS for pointing me to this press release from the NJ Department of Environmental Protection announcing that the Spring Hill Fire is fully contained. The press release does not specifically state the fire was human caused, rather it seems that they have ruled out a fire caused by power lines, prescribed burns and lightning. They are asking for the public to come forward if they have any information about the fire, all tips will be kept confidential.

4:50 PM on April 1st

There has been an investigation into the cause of the Spring Hill Fire that burned 11,600 acres on the border of Burlington and Ocean Counties this past weekend. The Asbury Park Press is reporting (April 1st, 3:18 PM):

The forest fire that ripped through more than 16 square miles of the Pinelands over the weekend was caused by human activity, according to state fire investigators. … Investigators were tight-lipped about the evidence that lead them to this determination, but said they could not yet determine whether a crime had been committed.

The Asbury Park Press goes on to report on where the fire started:

The area where the fire was sparked was described as an open, sandy area near Spring Hill Road in Woodland Township in Burlington County. 

Please read the Asbury Park Press article for more information. The Asbury Press Article includes a photo gallery along with some NJFFS drone footage over the fire area (over 12 minutes long, the direct link to the drone footage may found here.

I prepared a couple of images for you based on the information in the Asbury Park Press article, locating Spring Hill Road using the search feature on Google Earth. The first image is a close-up of the area that was discussed in the article. I circled a sandy area off of Spring Hill Road. As the fire is named Spring Hill Fire, I am thinking that the sandy area I circled off of Spring Hill Road is one candidate for where the fire started. And if I am wrong, it is in the general area.

The second image is an image where I zoomed out.

I am looking around for more photo galleries that I can share with you. There were some photo galleries attached to the news articles that I shared on March 31st, I will look around for more.

I want to close by sharing a video. This is a video report from News12 New Jersey, which does have a pay wall, so I hope that all of you can see the video. This video is from earlier today before the preliminary results of the investigation were in. Early on in the video you will see a couple of aerial shots of the fire area. In the event that the script code does not work here is a direct link to the video report from News 12 New Jersey, note the video is muted and you have to click on the microphone to hear the audio (sorry about that).

2019 NJ fire season: Spring Hill Fire (NJ) April 1st update

I wrote yesterday about the Spring Hill Fire that has burned approximately 11,600 acres in the New Jersey Pine Barrens (aka the New Jersey Pinelands) in Burlington and Ocean Counties NJ.  The wildfire is now 100 percent contained. However, there are still areas that continue to burn so the New Jersey Forest Fire Service crews will continue to monitor the fire for several days, see this article from the Asbury Park Press (April 1st, 9:35 AM) for more information.

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.

screen image taken on April 1, 2019 at 9:45 AM from https://www.spc.noaa.gov/new/FWclimo/climo.php?parm=1000ac

2019 NJ fire season: Spring Hill Fire in Burlington/Ocean Counties NJ Burns 10,000 Acres

direct link to video from NJ Advance Media (March 30th)

The Spring Hill Fire was first reported about 1:45 PM on Saturday, March 30th in Penn Forest  in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. The Spring Hill Fire is located in Barnegat and Woodland Townships, Burlington County NJ. When first observed by the Apple Pie Hill Observation Tower, the fire was very small. The video from NJ Advance Media that I embedded above was shot on the afternoon of March 30th when the wildfire was at about 1,000 acres. During the next several hours the wildfire grew to 5,000 acres. A SEAT flew the fire yesterday as well as a helicopter with a bucket. Voluntary evacuations were in place, but there were no mandatory evacuations and no residences have been damaged or destroyed. It is possible that some hunting cabins have been destroyed. Road closures remain in place. The latest update has the fire at about 10,000 acres. At last report the fire is at 75 percent containment. There was some rain that moved through the area this morning into this afternoon, however while the rain will help it may is not enough to put out the fire. According to John Rieth (reported by the Asbury Park Press (March 31st, 1:52 PM) :

As of noon Sunday, about 75 percent of the fire is contained, but not under control, said John Rieth, an assistant warden with the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. 

A wildfire is under control when the threat of it spreading has been halted, and that hasn't yet happened, Rieth said. 

There are no threats to structures and no reported injuries or property damage, but local fire departments are standing by in case that changes, Rieth said. On Saturday, Burlington County activated its wildfire strike team. 

The fire grew from about 8,000 acres to 10,000 acres Sunday morning, but the growth is in part because the state's forest fire service is fighting the wildfire by setting fires around it to stop it from spreading, Rieth said. 

The fire control line may even expand out further than the 10,000 acres, Rieth said. Ten thousand acres is equal to about 15.5 square miles.

To place the Spring Hill Fire in context, David Livinisky of the Burlington County Times wrote about large fires in Burlington County in a March 31st article about the Spring Hill Fire:

Forest fires are not unusual in New Jersey’s Pinelands forests. The forests sandy soils and pines are highly combustible fuel, particularly during warm, dry and windy days in the spring. But fires as large as this one are infrequent. 

This fire is believed to be one of the largest to spark in the county since May 2007 when an F-16 jet on a training mission over the Warren Grove Bombing Range near the border of Burlington and Ocean counties dropped a defensive flare below the minimum required altitude. The resulting fire burned more than 17,000 acres over six days. 

The last major fire to threaten homes in Burlington County was in April 2014 when more than 1,300 acres of pine forests and brush burned in Woodland and Tabernacle between Sooy Place Road and Route 532. That fire was far smaller than a 1992 fire than burned more than 13,000 acres in Burlington and Ocean counties and forced the evacuation of about 150 Woodland residents and the closing of the Chatsworth Elementary School.

Thanks to the ground crews and air support of the NJ Forest Fire Service along with mutual aid firefighters for all your work on this fire. Thanks for keeping us in New Jersey safe. Stay safe.

Some media reports on the Spring Hill Fire
NJ Advance Media with photo gallery (March 31st, 12:45 PM)
Asbury Park Press with photo gallery (March 31st, 1:52 PM)
ABC 6 Philadelphia (March 31st, about 1 PM, video from early AM)


I will continue to follow the Spring Hill Fire and will report back with updates. Stay tuned.