New Jersey Fire Map: Track NJ Wildfires Live (2026)

A New Jersey fire map has to cover one of the most fire-prone landscapes in the eastern United States: the Pine Barrens. In April 2025 the Jones Road fire burned 15,300 acres of that landscape in Ocean County, the state's largest wildfire in roughly two decades, and it will not be the last.

What does a New Jersey fire map show right now?

A New Jersey fire map fuses official NIFC incident records and WFIGS perimeters, NASA VIIRS and MODIS satellite heat, NOAA GOES detections and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts into one live view. US Wildfire Tracker shows all four free in any browser, refreshing every few minutes while the tab stays open.

New Jersey is a small, densely populated state with one large wildland core: the Pine Barrens, over a million acres of pitch pine and scrub oak across the southern and central counties. A fire there can move from a bonfire to a multi-thousand-acre incident in hours, as the Jones Road fire showed in April 2025.

US Wildfire Tracker scores every detection on whether an official NIFC record is linked, how fresh the perimeter is and how recent the satellite heat is. Weak signals under 25 percent probability are hidden by default, and the app states plainly that hotspots can reflect a permitted prescribed burn rather than a wildfire.

That distinction matters in New Jersey specifically: the state's own Forest Fire Service runs one of the country's more active prescribed-burning programs each winter, so a heat signature in the Pine Barrens in January is far more likely to be intentional than one in the same spot in April.

When is New Jersey's wildfire season?

New Jersey's wildfire season runs spring into early summer, driven by the same mechanism as its inland neighbors: bare tree canopy lets sun and wind reach dead leaf litter and last year's grass before green-up shades the ground. Statewide, 662 wildfires had burned 16,572 acres by early April 2025, more than double the 310 fires and 315 acres recorded in the same period of 2024.

New Jersey Forest Fire Service Division Forest Fire Warden Trevor Raynor described the mechanics directly during the Jones Road fire: "Our initial attack efforts failed because of extreme fire behavior, dry, droughty fuels, spring fire season, windy, low [relative humidity]." Long-term drought and an abnormally warm, dry stretch preceded the fire.

The Forest Fire Service's prescribed-burning season runs the opposite months, October 1 through March 31, deliberately timed to reduce fuel loads in the Pine Barrens before wildfire season starts. Peak wildfire season follows almost immediately after prescribed-burn season ends, which is part of why April is consistently New Jersey's most dangerous month.

New Jersey's spring pattern parallels what our Pennsylvania fire map guide and North Carolina fire map guide describe for their own states, though New Jersey's fire behavior in dense pitch pine can outrun both in speed once wind and drought align.

Which agency fights fires in New Jersey?

The New Jersey Forest Fire Service, part of the Department of Environmental Protection, is the largest firefighting agency in the state and one of the oldest state forest fire agencies in the country, established by law on July 4, 1906, after forester Gifford Pinchot's 1899 report on the state's fire losses. Its first year of operation recorded just three fires and a total firefighting cost of $5.30.

Today the Forest Fire Service covers about 3.72 million acres, roughly 77 percent of New Jersey's land area, through three regional divisions — Division A north of the Raritan River, Division B between the Raritan and Mullica rivers, and Division C south of the Mullica — split into 29 sections and 269 districts, each overseen by a firewarden who also acts as an incident commander and law enforcement officer.

The agency runs on a small full-time core, 85 to 89 civil service personnel depending on the year, backed by about 2,000 trained part-time, on-call wildland firefighters statewide — a volunteer-heavy structure similar in spirit to the one described in our West Virginia fire map guide, though New Jersey's fuel type burns faster.

New Jersey still staffs 21 fire lookout towers, some dating to the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps era, and about a quarter of the state's wildfires are first spotted by a human lookout rather than a sensor or a call — a detection method largely unchanged since the first tower went up at Culver's Station in 1908.

Why are the Pine Barrens so fire-prone?

The Pine Barrens are fire-adapted, not merely fire-prone: pitch pine, the dominant tree, has serotinous cones that need heat to open and release seed, so the ecosystem is built to burn on a cycle rather than avoid it. That biology is central to why the region ranks among the most fire-active landscapes in the eastern United States.

Pace University ecologist Matthew Aiello-Lammens put it plainly: "Some pitch pine actually require fire for them to release their seeds from these cones that are protected from fire." Without periodic burning, dead fuel accumulates until a fire, once started, has far more to consume.

Before organized fire protection, the toll was severe. State geologist reports from the era describe 70,000 to 100,000 acres burning in the Pine Barrens in an ordinary year, and an 1893 New York Times account said the region brought "a reign of terror" to residents each year, with $1 million to $2 million in annual property losses, according to a history of the agency — the direct reason New Jersey created its Forest Fire Service in 1906.

Sandy Pine Barrens soil compounds the risk because it drains fast and holds almost no moisture, so surface fuel — pine needles, scrub oak leaves, dried moss — dries out within hours of a dry, windy day regardless of recent rain. That is the same mechanism behind the state's prescribed-fire program: deliberately burning that fuel in winter, under controlled conditions, before spring wind and drought can do it uncontrolled.

What are the largest wildfires in New Jersey history?

New Jersey's worst wildfire disaster remains April 20, 1963 — "Black Saturday" — when a three-day outbreak of wildfires across Atlantic, Ocean and Burlington counties burned an estimated 176,000 to 190,000 acres, about 4 percent of the state's entire land area, under sustained winds near 30 mph gusting higher and relative humidity near 23 percent.

Statewide figures for Black Saturday vary slightly by source — the New Jersey Forest Fire Service's own retrospective and several regional news accounts put the toll between about 176,000 and 190,000 acres and between roughly 79 and 127 separate fires — but every account agrees it remains the worst wildfire disaster in state history since the Forest Fire Service was founded, with seven deaths and hundreds of structures lost.

The 2007 Warren Grove fire showed how an ignition source unrelated to camping or debris burning can still exploit the same dry, windy Pine Barrens conditions: NJ Forest Fire Warden Scott Knauer described the firefighting conditions bluntly in a retrospective on the fire's 10th anniversary, "Some days you eat the bear, and some days the bear eats you… well, the bear ate us."

What happened in the 2025 Jones Road fire?

The Jones Road fire started around 1:30 p.m. on April 22, 2025, in the Greenwood Forest Wildlife Management Area near Wells Mills Park in Ocean County, ignited by an improperly extinguished illegal bonfire. Two teenagers, ages 17 and 19, were later arrested and charged with aggravated arson.

The fire spread east through Barnegat Township toward Waretown, Forked River and Lacey Township, reaching 13,250 acres within two days and a final 15,300 acres by full containment on May 12, 2025 — 20 days after ignition. It burned through much of the Forked River Mountains inside the Pine Barrens.

More than 1,320 structures were threatened at the fire's peak; one commercial building and several outbuildings were destroyed, and three buildings in a Lacey Township industrial area were damaged. Roughly 5,000 residents evacuated under mandatory orders or voluntarily, with shelters opened including at Southern Regional High School in Stafford Township. Lt. Governor Tahesha Way declared a state of emergency in Ocean County while Governor Phil Murphy was out of the country.

Smoke from the fire degraded air quality well beyond New Jersey, reaching New York City and Long Island by April 24, 2025, prompting advisories to keep windows closed and wear masks outdoors. A Federal Emergency Management Agency Fire Management Assistance Grant was approved to help fund the response.

What weather drives New Jersey fire danger?

Two National Weather Service offices split New Jersey's fire weather: New York (OKX), covering the northeastern counties along with New York City, Long Island and southern Connecticut, and Philadelphia/Mount Holly (PHI), covering the southern and central counties along with Delaware and Maryland.

OKX publishes specific numeric Red Flag Warning criteria for its zone: in spring and fall, winds sustained or frequently gusting above 25 mph combined with relative humidity under 30 percent and less than a quarter inch of rain over the prior three or more days. In summer the rainfall window extends to five days and a Keetch-Byram Drought Index reading above 300 can also trigger a warning.

A Red Flag Warning under OKX's own definition signals "imminent danger of severe fire weather with a relatively high probability of occurrence," typically issued less than 12 hours ahead of the expected event, per NWS New York's own warning definitions. Those were close to the exact conditions cited around the Jones Road fire: sustained drought, low humidity, and wind.

Because New Jersey's Pine Barrens fuel dries out within hours rather than days, a single Red Flag day layered on existing drought is often enough to turn a small escaped burn into a multi-thousand-acre incident, which is exactly what happened in April 2025.

How do evacuations work in New Jersey?

New Jersey has no statewide tiered wildfire evacuation system comparable to the West's Ready-Set-Go framework. The New Jersey Office of Emergency Management frames the choice as one of two "Protective Actions": Shelter-in-Place, staying inside and protecting yourself where you are, or Evacuation, leaving the danger area along a designated evacuation route to a safe shelter.

During the Jones Road fire, county and local officials issued what were reported plainly as "mandatory evacuation orders," and roughly 5,000 Ocean County residents complied with those orders or left voluntarily; Southern Regional High School in Stafford Township served as an emergency shelter. Lt. Governor Way's state-of-emergency declaration for Ocean County freed additional state resources for the response.

NJOEM issues public alerts through the Emergency Alert System on radio and television and through community notification systems such as Reverse 911, layered on the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). Residents in Pine Barrens communities should register for their county's specific alert system rather than assume statewide coverage is automatic.

Because Pine Barrens fires can move from ignition to a highway-closing incident within a day, as both the 2007 Warren Grove and 2025 Jones Road fires showed, our fire tracker near me guide covers setting a location-based alert radius before fire season starts, not after smoke is already visible.

How do you track New Jersey fires in under a minute?

Checking a New Jersey fire map takes under a minute once you know what to look for. US Wildfire Tracker is free, needs no account, and works in any browser or as a Chrome side-panel extension.

1. Open wildfire-map.org and filter the national view to New Jersey.
2. Check the fire probability tier before assuming a Pine Barrens hotspot is a wildfire — from October through March it may be a permitted Forest Fire Service prescribed burn.
3. Open a fire's detail card for acres, percent contained, discovery age, managing organization, and "Last satellite heat" and "Last NIFC update" timestamps.
4. Turn on "fires near me" with location sharing for a distance-based list around Ocean, Burlington or Atlantic county communities.
5. Watch for an active NWS Red Flag Warning banner from OKX or PHI, which signals elevated statewide fire weather even before a fire starts.
6. Use the built-in directions link to Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze if you need a route away from an active fire, and always follow county evacuation orders first.

The Chrome extension, listed in the Chrome Web Store as "Fire Tracker," opens the same map in a side panel so it stays visible while browsing; get it at the Chrome Web Store. For more on reading a live map generally, see our wildfire map guide.

What does wildfire smoke do to New Jersey air quality?

New Jersey's own wildfires can push air quality into unhealthy territory well beyond the fire itself: smoke from the 2025 Jones Road fire reached New York City and Long Island within two days, prompting advisories to keep windows closed and wear masks outdoors even for residents far from Ocean County.

The EPA's Air Quality Index runs from Good (0–50, "little or no risk") through Moderate (51–100) to Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups (101–150), Unhealthy (151–200), Very Unhealthy (201–300) and Hazardous (301 and up, "everyone is more likely to be affected"). New Jersey's dense population means a single large Pine Barrens fire can put smoke over millions of people in the New York and Philadelphia metro areas within a day.

US Wildfire Tracker layers a smoke and air-quality overlay on the same live map as the fire data, so a household far from an active fire — including outside New Jersey — can still check current smoke conditions; see our forest fire smoke tracker guide for how the overlay is built.

Frequently asked questions about the New Jersey fire map