Wildfire season is starting earlier and not just on the West Coast
By April 11, the cranberry bogs in New Jersey’s pinelands were as low as farmers had seen them in decades. Central and southern parts of the state had been experiencing abnormally dry conditions for more than a year, and dead grass, branches, shrubs, and leaves carpeted the forest floor like crinkled up paper bags. It was a sunny Tuesday afternoon, with low humidity and wind gusts that reached 25 mph.
the road separating the base from the forest, where he saw a “boiling column” of fire topping 200 feet to the east. The fire was moving at nearly 5 mph — too fast for firefighters to attack head-on. “I’d never seen fire behave like that at night,” he said. Spring is traditionally the start of fire season in the northeast, but this year the NJFFS got its first call earlier than usual, on March 7. It’s been busy ever since. Later that month, Amtrak canceled trains because of a string of brush fires ignited by sparks from a freight train in North Jersey. A few weeks later, the forest-fire service battled three major wildfires in a matter of days, including the Jimmy’s Waterhole fire.
Just like wildfires out West, drought conditions are key to understanding how bad things could get on the East Coast. Yet over the past century, the Northeast has seen an overall increase in annual precipitation. According to Erin Lane, coordinator of the USDA’s Northeast Climate Hub, the region has seen a 56 percent increase in the number of days with extreme precipitation . Logic follows that the increase in precipitation would lead to a proportionate decrease in drought conditions.
Whenever wildfire conditions are right, as they have been most days this spring, Sam Moore ascends a 105-foot fire tower in Medford and scans the treeline for smoke. Just 19 years old, Moore is one of the youngest employees of the service, and his khaki uniform hangs on his lanky frame like a shirt pitched on a sapling to dry. His position as a fire observer is part-time, but Sam Moore IV hopes one day to be a full-time forest fire warden, just like Sam Moores III, II, and I before him.
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