About 75 firefighters, two helicopters, bulldozers and 15 fire engines were being used to battle the flames.
Greg McLaughlin, the Forest Fire Service chief, said the blaze began on the grounds of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, a military facility spanning several municipalities at about 4 p.m. Tuesday. Military personnel tried to extinguish it, but winds soon spread the fire beyond the base's perimeter and across a busy highway, Route 539, necessitating a large response from numerous municipalities in the region.
Last month, a wildfire in the Pine Barrens threatened over a dozen homes in Little Egg Harbor, not far from the site of a massive forest fire in 2007 at an Air National Guard target range. That fire burned nearly 27 square miles . Fire is an essential element of the Pine Barrens ecosystem; many of the pine trees there rely on heat from fires to release seeds from their cones, providing for the growth of new tree
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