Big Fire Near The Boot Camp

[Tony]

Yes tuckerton road at intersection with caranza. Beyond that it was closed. Guessing it burned down to bulldozed road. I think they did burn around Costello but didn’t drive back there. It was burned from Hampton/glossy spung up to where it branches off to tuckerton. The smoke was moving towards what I call batsto fireline road, parallel to 206.

is the command center located at the atsion ranger station

 

[Jim]

Anyone remember the final acreage on the Tea Time Hill Fire last July? I thought that was over 5,000 acres, but can only find 4,000. This one being 5,000 acres would be a good deal larger, unless they reduce the final acreage due to a more accurate measurement or swamps being subtracted.

 

[NMuscella]

Anyone remember the final acreage on the Tea Time Hill Fire last July? I thought that was over 5,000 acres, but can only find 4,000. This one being 5,000 acres would be a good deal larger, unless they reduce the final acreage due to a more accurate measurement or swamps being subtracted.

Final acreage for Tea Time Hill Wildfire was 4,300 acres.

 

[ecampbell]

is the command center located at the atsion ranger station

Yes.

 

[Jim]

Last update from 8 pm yesterday was 5,500 acres and 70% contained so it probably won't get much larger. Could be smaller if internal swampy areas are removed due to not actually igniting.

I was looking at the various maps and noticed that in the LIDAR view of that area you can see the road name near the fire location (from the FFS maps) and I guess that name of the road was taken from a small drainage? No idea what a spung is, but my guess is a lost English word for creek or swampy area, similar to loblolly. When you look at the DEP 2024 map, the road is named Lower Forge-High Crossing.

Interesting thing about the sensitivity of the LIDAR map is that you can see the old fire breaks in the area between Tuckerton RD and the Basto River, south of the Central Line.

 

[Boyd]

No idea what a spung is

@Spung-Man can probably explain that better than anyone else around here.

It's not clear to me which maps you're talking about. But this is Mines Spung Road. You can see that Lower Forge-High Crossing Road is actually South of there.

BTW, I think it's Bulldozed Road and not "Bulldozer" Road. Interesting bit a trivia here, this road is not shown on the USGS 24k topo maps, it was probably created after work concluded on those maps. It does appear on the new USGS digital topo's however. This was something we discussed in the past, in relation to the roads that NJDEP was planning to close.

 

[Jim]

It's not clear to me which maps you're talking about. But this is Mines Spung Road. You can see that Lower Forge-High Crossing Road is actually South of there.

Click the NJPB Maps on the top. Move the map over the area of the fire.

Left side drop down, it should say "Map". Click and drop down to either LIDAR or 2024 DEP.

 

[Jim]

Why does my reply require Mod approval?

 

[Boyd]

OK... I made that LIDAR map myself in 2013. I removed it from my site later because it's just full of errors, the resolution is very low and the coverage area is limited. Ben said he would like to use it here though, so I gave it to him. IMO, nobody should use that map today it's very misleading. We have an old thread where a member came up with a whole theory about non-existant geographic features, based on errors in the data. Of course, you are welcome to use whatever maps you like though.

I have three LIDAR based maps of the pines on my site with much higher resolution data, plus the big LIDAR map of the whole Northeastern US. And if you really want to explore the LIDAR imagery, use the 3d terrain viewer which gives you complete control over map rendering.

 

[Boyd]

Why does my reply require Mod approval?

This is standard behavior for the Xenforo forum software that we use. New members will have their posts put into the moderation queue if they contain links. Unfortunately, this also happens when you quote a post that contains links, like you did. But you can thank the spammers for that, one of their favorite tricks is quoting an existing post and making sneaky changes to the links, sending people to some spam site.

I don't know what the threshold is, but after you've made a few posts this will stop happening. You only joined yesterday, so please be patient. We will try to approve any posts as quickly as possible.

 

[Jim]

Oh, that is weird about the spammers. Thanks.

I was just looking for a map here that used the name of the fire. LIDAR was the one I found first. The DEP map was just interesting. Someone at NJ FFS must know the old name, as few maps used the Spung name.

 

[Boyd]

Well, the USGS certainly knows where Mines Spung Road is. It's shown on their current digital US Topo map.

https://boydsmaps.com/#15.00/39.760299/-74.647034/ustopo2023/0.00/0.00

 

[RednekF350]

@Spung-Man

BTW, I think it's Bulldozed Road and not "Bulldozer" Road. Interesting bit a trivia here, this road is not shown on the USGS 24k topo maps, it was probably created after work concluded on those maps. It does appear on the new USGS digital topo's however. This was something we discussed in the past, in relation to the roads that NJDEP was planning to close.

About twenty or more years ago, I started frequenting the area around Bulldozer Road and Mannis Duck Pond, back when NJFW first instituted the Coyote-Fox predator season. That season runs from January 1 to March 15 every year. I clearly remember the State's routered wood signs high in the trees indicating, "Bulldozer Road"

 

[Boyd]

Very interesting! All the maps I've seen have said "Bulldozed", I think the old Garmin topo's said that and the USGS calls it "Bulldozed" now. Don't ever recall seeing it called "Bulldozer" until this fire map.

Did a quick search, and we have posts going back to 2003 that reference "Bulldozed Road". But it's funny - the majority of posts in that search weren't about the road at all, they used "bulldozed" as a verb to describe something that was demolished.

 

[bobpbx]

Last update from 8 pm yesterday was 5,500 acres and 70% contained so it probably won't get much larger. Could be smaller if internal swampy areas are removed due to not actually igniting.

I was looking at the various maps and noticed that in the LIDAR view of that area you can see the road name near the fire location (from the FFS maps) and I guess that name of the road was taken from a small drainage? No idea what a spung is, but my guess is a lost English word for creek or swampy area, similar to loblolly. When you look at the DEP 2024 map, the road is named Lower Forge-High Crossing.

Interesting thing about the sensitivity of the LIDAR map is that you can see the old fire breaks in the area between Tuckerton RD and the Basto River, south of the Central Line.

Going by memory, a spung is a circular depression in the landscape formed by cold and fast glacial winds...a blow out if you will, of the loose soil. This was thousands of years ago, when the glacier terminal moraine was parked in North Jersey.

 

[bobpbx]

PBX had a trip named "The Woods of Mine Spung". It was in 2015.

u

 

[Boyd]

Spung is Piney speak for the thousands of intermittent pools of water that dot the Pine Barrens. Rhodehamel (1970) estimated that 2% of the Pine Barrens surface is covered by these closed basins. Everyone who grew up in the Pines knew what a spung is – a pocket of water. The name’s origin is obscure. A “spung” is defined as a purse or fob, a small ‘pocket” formerly made in the waistband of breeches. It was made of wash-leather or stout lining material, and was sewn in just under the waist.

Peter Wolfe, my geology professor back at Cook College (’82), wrote about spungs as ice-thaw features during the 1950s. He grew up on a Pine Barrens farm at Nesco, so we both always had lots to talk about spung dynamics. Their origins have been controversial. In 1999 I paired up with an eminent Polar authority to reinterpret the spungs as Pleistocene blowouts (French & Demitroff 2001). I always get a chuckle out of outside researchers, who still refuse to apply the local appellation, and instead call spungs vernal pools, intermittent pools, bogs, coastal plain ponds, dry ponds, and fens when talking about these cool puddles.

Spungs are better called intermittent ponds, a term that Pinelands scientists prefer to use. Vernal pools are pockets of water filled by surface runoff. Spungs are instead fed by grounwater passing through them. Wade through a spung and you will feel cold pockets of water contrasting with otherwise warmer hydrofill.

Spung is a very old local name used to describe any natural intermittent pond. Generically they can all be lumped together as closed basins. Spungs are a northern variant of the mysterious Carolina Bays that dot the Eastern seaboard from New Jersey to South Carolina. We (French & Demitroff 2001) interpret these basins as blowouts formed by strong winds flowing of the Laurentide Ice Sheet under dry sparsely vegetated conditions.

Spungs are windows into the local groundwater table. Some spungs once had permanent fish populations. Very few if any support fish today. Many are now dry woods. Ever so slowly, these ponds have experienced shorter and shorter periods of hydrofill allowing vegetation to take hold obliterating all evidence of their form.

We are over-pumping groundwater from the aquifers at such a rate that the shallow groundwater table is dropping. 17-trillion gallons in reserve and 45-inches a year precipitation in recharge is not sufficient to keep our shallow wetlands from drying up. That is a bad thing, since spungs provide critical habitat to many threatened and endangered plants and animals.

S-M