New Jersey Forest Fire Shuts Stretch of Garden State Parkway

(Bloomberg) -- A forest fire in southern New Jersey that has shut a stretch of one of the state’s biggest thoroughfares is yet to be contained, sparking evacuations and threatening to snarl commuters.  

The fire rapidly grew to 8,500 acres (3,440 hectares) in Ocean County, about 90 miles south of New York City, by late Tuesday evening, nearly tripling in size in just a few hours, according to the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. An 11-mile section of the Garden State Parkway has been shut.

Some 3,000 residents have been evacuated, with more than 1,300 structures threatened, according to the forest service.

The fire is inching closer to the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, according to satellite imagery. The facility was closed in 2018 and is now being decommissioned. Embers from the blaze reached the facility Tuesday evening, but Pat O’Brien, a spokesman for Holtec International Corp., the plant’s owner, said they were all safely extinguished. The buildings and the concrete casks that store radioactive waste are all designed to withstand fires, he said, and the company is working with firefighters to monitor the situation at the site.

As a precaution for firefighters working near electrical equipment close to the blaze, Jersey Central Power and Light de-energized power lines connected to a substation near the nuclear plant on Tuesday. The shutdown cut off power for about 25,000 customers and was not expected to be restored overnight, the utility said. 

NJ Transit, the state’s public transport corporation, reported up to 30-minute delays to its bus service to and from the New York Port Authority and Atlantic City bus terminals due to the partial parkway closure.

The fire is only 10% contained and the cause is under investigation, the forest service said in a post on X on Tuesday. Containment describes the proportion of the perimeter of a fire that’s hemmed in so that flames can’t escape.

Forest fires hit swathes of New Jersey and New York late last year as dry conditions blanketed the region. While the blazes are small compared with those that regularly devastate the western US, they are heightening risks in one of the most densely populated parts of the country. 

(Updates with information on power outage in fifth paragraph.)

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