Man Charged With Arson in Vast New Jersey Wildfire

A New Jersey man was charged Thursday with starting a bonfire this week that sparked the Jones Road Wildfire, one of the largest wildfires in the state in almost 20 years, officials said.

The man, Joseph Kling, 19, of Waretown in Ocean Township, faces charges of arson and aggravated arson in connection with the fire. He had left the bonfire unattended in the Forked River Mountains wilderness area in Ocean County, the authorities said.

The wildfire, which was first spotted from atop a remote, 204-foot fire tower in Ocean County on Tuesday morning, grew to 15,000 acres over three days. It shut down a stretch of one of the state’s busiest highways, prompted thousands of evacuations, destroyed a commercial building and threatened air quality from the Pinelands area in southern New Jersey to New York City.

The blaze was about 50 percent contained by Thursday afternoon, according to the New Jersey Forest Fire Service, which continues to use fire engines, bulldozers, helicopters and ground crews to fight it.

Nearly 85 percent of wildfires in the United States are caused by people, according to the United States Forest Service, and stem from things like unattended campfires, burning debris and discarded cigarettes.

The abnormally dry conditions in the southern part of New Jersey meant there was ample fuel for the unattended bonfire to spread rapidly, officials said.

The spring fire season has been unusually busy in New Jersey, which has been under a drought warning since November. Three months ago, the southern portion of the state, which includes the sandy, scrubby Pinelands, was in an extreme drought.

Last fall was the driest on record for New Jersey, said David Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist and a geography professor at Rutgers University. That was followed by a winter with less precipitation than normal.

Spring has brought more rain, and water sources are refilling, but plants are still thirsty, he said. Sunny, dry days can dehydrate vegetation fast, even after abundant rainfall — especially in areas like the Pinelands, with its sandy soils and flammable trees and shrubs.

The continued dry conditions set the stage for an active fire season, officials said. There have been more than twice as many wildfires so far this year as there were in the same period last year, an increase from 310 to 662, said Bill Donnelly, chief of the fire service. Over 16,500 acres have burned this year, he added.

Although the blaze continues to grow, efforts to move it west, away from homes and toward the forest, have been successful so far, Mr. Donnelly said at a news conference on Wednesday.

“Our objective is to build a line around the entire fire,” he said. Establishing “lines” by conducting controlled burns removes the dry vegetation that can fuel the fire.

The fire service routinely performs controlled burns throughout the state as a pre-emptive measure, but because of dry conditions and the active fire season, it had completed only about 10 percent of its goal by March, Mr. Donnelly said.

Smoky conditions will continue this week, but the fire should be brought under control by the weekend, when rain is expected, he added.

Both people and plants consume more water in the summer, and New Jersey is entering the season without much of a cushion, Mr. Robinson said. April in New Jersey brought average amounts of rainfall, which has helped recharge reservoirs and groundwater, but more is needed.

“A few dry weeks or months could get us back into trouble again,” he said. “We are not fully out of the woods.”