The New Jersey fire signals a new era for the Northeast todayheadline

The Jones Road Wildfire, which started Tuesday in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, is on track to become the worst in state history. Fueled by gusty winds, low humidity, and dry undergrowth — conditions increasingly common in the region — the blaze has scorched more than 23 square miles, forced thousands to evacuate, and threatened nuclear waste at a power plant. As of Monday, firefighters had contained just 45 percent of the inferno.

It follows an unprecedented wildfire season in the Northeast, which saw the Hudson Valley and Catskills burn last fall, and a record number of blazes in the five boroughs of New York City. It’s a stark reminder that conflagrations are not confined to the West, said Aaron Weiskittel, director of the Center for Research on Sustainable Forests at the University of Maine. “If you’ve got fuel, there’s a potential for a fire,” he said. Though many people don’t consider it a common hazard, “there’s no reason that what has happened in the western U.S. can’t happen here.”

Despite the growing threat, communities find themselves increasingly unprepared as more people move to vulnerable areas and the federal government slashes funding and eliminates jobs. Last week, internal emails obtained by Grist reveal that the Interior Department is planning further staffing cuts.

Forest density, Weiskittel explained, is a major driver of mounting fire danger. For decades, aggressive suppression policies allowed vegetation to accumulate along the eastern seaboard, increasing the threat of more intense and unpredictable blazes. Historically, New England saw periodic, low-intensity burns — many set by Indigenous communities to manage the landscape and promote biodiversity. But for the last half-century, state and federal agencies stifled traditional fire patterns, creating a landscape all but destined to burn.

This year’s tinderbox conditions heightened the risk: According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, large swaths of New Jersey have been experiencing drought for nearly a year, with March and April bringing less than half their typical rainfall. The parched spring has prevented prescribed burns, said Michael R. Gallagher, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Research Station. “The conditions are primed for catastrophic fire,” he said. 

Police have arrested a 19-year-old man they believe started the New Jersey fire when failed to properly extinguish a bonfire. But climate change exacerbated the factors that propelled the flames by providing ample fuel and dry conditions. ​As temperatures rise, predictions of wetter weather in the northeast have been coming true; however, it’s arriving primarily as intense storms, interspersed with longer, drier periods and warmer temperatures. “That’s exactly what you need for fire,” said Lisa Doner, a paleoclimatologist at Plymouth State University. Despite enjoying a reasonable amount of snow this year, New Hampshire has seen little rain this spring, stressing the forests.

Doner’s research strives to understand what might happen as New England’s trees fall out of equilibrium with local temperatures. She does this by looking back at fires during geologic eras when the climate warmed. She’s analyzing sediments at sites around New Hampshire which provide continuous ecological records going back nearly 13,000 years. She and her colleagues have found a notable spike in charcoal dating to the peak of the last naturally warm phase, in the post-glacial Holocene era around 7,000 years ago. Preliminary data suggests that the “last time things got really warm and dry, New England had widespread fires,” Doner said.

Because of how long trees live, forests tend to be resilient even when conditions move beyond species’ optimal conditions — until a major disturbance like a fire. Doner is working with the U.S. Forest Service to study whether the region’s forests will be able to return to their prior state after major blazes. “We are entering into a regime of climate that is unprecedented in recent times, and we don’t really know how our forests are going to respond,” Doner said. 

While climate change is one driver of fire risk, it’s not the only one. An extensive outbreak of spruce budworm, an insect native to New England, is killing trees. “I call them standing matchsticks,” Doner said. Meanwhile, invasive pests like the emerald ash borer and the hemlock woolly adelgid are creeping north as winters grow more mild. “There’s a multidimensional threat from a variety of pests,” Weiskittel said.

Despite the growing danger, people continue to move into fire-prone areas known as the wildland-urban interface, where development meets forests. Of the 50 states, New Hampshire has the most people living in these zones, with many homes surrounded by dense tree cover. To make things worse, much of the region relies on small, volunteer fire departments. “We just don’t have that infrastructure, that knowledge,” said Weiskittel. 

Last year, Art Perryman, a New York State forest ranger director, told the state legislature that its firefighters were woefully unprepared. “We do not currently have the resources and support that we need to adequately address that mission,” he testified. 

Federal cuts will only deepen this crisis, preventing the timely detection or response to fires once they start. The U.S. Interior Department plans to continue eliminating jobs. Last week, the agency told its roughly 70,000 employees to submit information that would help superiors evaluate their work, according to emails Grist received from one federal firefighter. Fire crews will be impacted even without cuts to their teams, this person  said, because they rely on support from others for things like food, logistical support, and technical expertise. “You can’t just call people off the streets to fight fire,” Weiskittel said. “It takes specialized equipment, and specialized operators to run them.” 

In states like California, education campaigns and financial incentives have made it easier for homeowners to learn and implement risk reduction strategies, like replacing shingled roofs and removing vegetation near structures. But many hard-learned lessons, from comprehensive evacuation plans to hazardous material protections, aren’t yet common across the Northeast. 

Some experts are focusing on proactive solutions: Gallagher, for example, has been developing tools that help the region’s forest managers reduce fire risk by identifying areas where fuels can be removed. By combining a type of laser called LiDAR with new fire behavior simulation tools, he and others are making it easier to map vegetation structure at finer scales and simulate how fires might behave. In practice, this could help target prescribed burns and make setting them safer and easier, even for people with less fire experience. “Risk isn’t just about weather and fuels, but about the vulnerability of a population,” he says. 

But that vulnerability, experts noted, is shaped as much by policy choices as by environmental or technical considerations. “It’s more a societal issue than a biological issue,” Weiskittel said. Cutting grants because they use the word ‘climate’ certainly won’t help, he adds, as federal budget cuts reduce towns’ ability to respond to unusual or unexpected circumstances. “We know how to manage forests to increase productivity and improve resilience. It just costs money to implement.”