New Jersey wardens keep watch over fire-prone Pine Barrens

A thick scar runs across the trunk where a lightning bolt struck, sending a charge through the tree and into the debris covering the ground.

The result: a spark, slow smoldering, and then a one-acre fire that might have spread across the Pine Barrens had it not been spotted from a nearby airfield early last week.

"These are easy," said Steve Holmes, a division warden with the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. "But we don't get a lot of lightning strikes. Almost all the fires we're investigating are started by people. And a lot of them are set on purpose."

New Jersey has 700 to 1,500 forest fires a year, most classified as accidental - a piece of machinery throws a spark, someone carelessly tosses a cigarette.

But around 200 wildfires each year are determined to have been set, not including those caused by children. They are concentrated in the Pinelands far from eyewitnesses.

"Over the last decade, we might have had five convictions," said Mike Drake, acting head of the fire service. "Those instances where we do find the person, usually all we can do is charge them with the cost of suppression. You have to be 99 percent sure to get criminal [convictions]. For civil charges, maybe it's 51 percent."

Most forest fires do not grow into major fires, those covering more than 100 acres. Unless the fires threaten homes or lives, getting police to dedicate resources to a criminal arson investigation is often difficult, Drake said.

"Our detectives take wildfires very seriously, but we're not going to argue that point," said Lt. Stephen Jones, a state police spokesman, adding that only a relatively small number of wildfires fall within state police jurisdiction.

The fire service did get a conviction in a series of wildfires set by Ryan Dellane, a 19-year-old volunteer firefighter from Manahawkin sentenced earlier this summer to 11 years in prison.

Dellane admitted lighting nine fires over two years, but fire service officials say the true number could be as high as 50. One of the fires spread over more than 500 acres, forcing the evacuation of two towns.

Though the fire service and the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office would not give details of the investigation, fire officials said they caught on to Dellane when they noticed a pattern in the times and locations of the fires.

Investigators put cameras at fire spots and eventually arrested Dellane after a two-year spree in which he would set wildfires and then ride out on the fire truck to fight them.

The length of time it took to catch Dellane is not surprising, officials say, considering the challenges of pulling clues from vast wooded spaces that have been engulfed by fast-moving flames that can reach temperatures above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Determining roughly where the fire started is relatively easy for the state fire wardens: Check the wind direction and the burn patterns on trees and rocks to see how the fire traveled.

But then wardens are usually left to search for clues in a 100-square-foot area covered in charred debris. Sometimes the cause is obvious - a campfire or illegal burn barrel.

But if it's arson, there might be no physical evidence save the odor of lighter fluid or a human scent, which require dogs to sniff out.

It's largely thankless work, determining the cause of something that to the public was just a plume of smoke on the horizon.

As volunteer crews stamped through the ash left by last week's lightning strike, dousing the last of the hot spots, they speculated that this year's dry conditions could have allowed the fire to spread much farther.

That's why Glenn Liete, a division fire warden, tracks the arsonists whose fires don't make headlines.

"It's chance," he said. "The difference between a big fire and a small one is usually a matter of weather and the time of day."