Firefighters are facing flames 200 feet (60 meters) high as they battle a blaze that is consuming 6 square miles (15 square kilometers) of pine forest. The fire causes showers of embers and has forced evacuations to be ordered, but there have been no casualties or property damage, according to authorities.
The fire in Manchester, near the McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst military base, forced the evacuation of some 170 homes on Tuesday night. Police and firefighters went door to door asking people to take refuge in a nearby school. Helicopters loaded water from a lake into large containers and dumped it on the flames.
“We would see the red glow in the sky, and every time the wind direction changed, it got worse,” said Jason Cylenica, who lives in the neighborhood closest to the fire. Her wife Cynthia Tiemper said embers were raining down on her backyard, so they decided to evacuate before firefighters knocked on her door.
The same conditions that favored the spread of the fire in New Jersey prevailed in about twenty states, according to the National Weather Service. The agency issued “red flag warnings” in nearly all regions because of hot, dry weather and higher-than-usual winds that combine to increase the risk of fires, spokesman John Moore said.
No rain is forecast through the weekend in the part of New Jersey where the flames are burning.
Wildfires are frequent in the Pine Barrens, a 450,000-hectare (1.1 million-acre) federally protected state preserve halfway between Philadelphia to the west and the Atlantic coast to the east.
