Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire Towers
New Jersey’s fire season technically ended in May, and the state’s forest-fire service has since dispatched its firefighters to the west: currently, they are in Minnesota, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. But to Bill Donnelly, the service’s warden, New Jersey’s fire season, like North America’s, can feel unending. “As of lately, it’s just been three-sixty-five,” he said the other day, as he climbed twelve flights of stairs in New Jersey’s new fire tower, its first since 1948. Donnelly, who is fifty-seven and has a graying crewcut, started in the service as a fire-tower observer in 1989, when he was twenty. Back then, the hourly weather check involved trekking up and down a hundred-foot tower. (Today, the data is in a cabin up top.) “Let me tell you, I had buns of steel back in the day,” he said.
The new tower, one of twenty-one in the state, is in Jackson Township. It replaced one evicted by a new housing development. The day Donnelly climbed, it was ninety degrees, with dry conditions and a stiff breeze. “This is the Cadillac,” he said, of the taut structure. A catwalk at the top commanded a twenty-mile view of blue sky, a bowl of green below. A wildfire, already observed, was under control on Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, a nearby military base.
Justin Sauers, the tower’s operator, opened a door in the cabin to greet Donnelly, releasing an arctic blast. “It’s about thirty degrees cooler in here,” he said.
Fun, fizzy dispatches from the city and beyond
The centerpiece of the cabin’s six-by-six-foot room is the alidade, a sighting device attached to a table-size compass rose. The operator aligns the sight with smoke on the horizon, notes the angle, then drags a string across a topographical map hanging from the room’s ceiling to take a reading. The map shows other towers close by, each radiating a string that is fastened to the map when other towers radio in readings. “The more strings, the more precise you can get on where the fire is,” Sauers said.
“Gotta go old school—more dependable,” Donnelly said. He was scanning the horizon, a long-standing habit.
“A lot of people don’t even know New Jersey has fire towers,” Sauers said. “I think after Jones Road last year”—a fire that burned fifteen thousand acres in twenty days—“people started realizing how many towers we still use. It is the best technology.”
Sauers, who wore a beige fire-service uniform and surfer sunglasses, grabbed his radio transmitter to start the daily weather broadcast, but Donnelly interrupted. “There’s a smoke problem right there,” he said, pointing. “We got a fire!”
“Cory, Cory,” Sauers said into his radio, addressing the operator of a nearby tower. “Look up towards me.”
The radio crackled. “What do you got?” Cory van den Berg said.
“Dark column coming up, my forty-eight. You have it?”
Van den Berg said,“The only column I see is coming off the base.”
Sauers turned to Donnelly. “Billy, call Deale.” That would be Deale Carey, the section warden.
“Where am I sending him?” Donnelly asked. “How many degrees?”
“Forty-eight.”
Donnelly radioed. “Hey, Deale, we’re picking up smoke at forty-eight degrees, about two and a half miles, along the edge of the river. You know Sixty Acre?” (A condo association.) “That’s a good place to start.”
After beginning as a tower operator, Donnelly spent decades in the field, fighting forest fires locally and out West and training out-of-state teams. “Montana was here this year,” he said. “They were blown away—like, holy shit, you guys have some big fires.” He also worked the canine fire-investigation unit; once, a bloodhound located a suspected arsonist’s father, hiding behind a screen door. “Guy’s telling me there’s no way his kid was outside and lit the fire,” Donnelly said. “And then the dog came right up the steps and . . . bloosh! I was, like, ‘Well, my dog seems to think so.’ ”
Sauers grew up nearby—his father is a part-time firefighter—but only got into tower work recently. “We had the big fire in Lakewood on March 14th of 2021,” he said. “My dad was there, and he suffered a medical emergency, and the way the forest-fire service came together to support my family through it—I was, like, this is what I want to do.”
Donnelly had raced up to Lakewood from a training exercise that day—the fire burned a hundred and seventy acres, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of families—to discover that Sauers’s father had been kept alive by a police defibrillator until an ambulance arrived. “His father got really knocked out,” Donnelly said. “But he came back.”
“Just yesterday I got to dispatch him,” Sauers said.
Deale radioed in, having pinpointed a homeowner with a fire in his yard. The warden would now move in. Deale reported himself available. “B9 is clear,” Deale said, using his service number.
“Copy that,” Sauers said. “Clear and available.” ♦