BARNEGAT – Ten years have passed since an epic wildfire engulfed homes in the adult community where Marlene Lazaro resides, upended lives in southern Ocean County for days, and left behind enduring lessons.

What the 77-year-old Barnegat woman experienced during the five days the Warren Grove fire ravaged the region still causes worry when Lazaro leaves her Brighton home.

"I cried when I saw how close the fire had come to the back of the house," she recalled of the moment she returned home after a three-day evacuation. "It was like 50 feet from the back of my house it stopped."

Her neighbors a block away were not so lucky. Their homes were gone.

The fire was so massive and disruptive that today locals still refer to it by name — the Warren Grove fire, named after the Air National Guard's Warren Grove bombing range, where the blaze began.

The fire consumed more than 17,000 acres of woods in southern Ocean and Burlington counties before rain and more than a thousand firefighters were able to halt its spread. It triggered the evacuation of thousands of residents, destroyed four homes and damaged about 50 others.

"Every May 15 I think of what happened there," said Janice Murray, whose parents' home in Brighton was destroyed. "It was a horrible view from the Garden State Parkway. The whole sky was lit. It was just smoke and red."

Murray's mother had died just months before the fire struck, and her 85-year-old father, Lester Balkie, was struggling to handle the loss coupled with the destruction of the home the couple had shared for more than 20 years.

"He was happy there. They were both very happy there," she said.

Balkie rebuilt the house, but it was not the same, Murray said. He died just six months after the fire. "Even though we were devastated... Life goes on," she said. "My father is happy with my mother now."

In the ensuing 10 years, the woods around Brighton have regrown and the homes that were destroyed have been rebuilt. But the lessons learned from the spectacular blaze remain with Lazaro, other neighbors, and the firefighters, police and elected officials who lived and worked through the chaos.

Traffic jams, communication breakdowns, and arguments among different agencies all exacerbated the problems that arose when, on that warm, dry day of May 15, 2007.

The fire began when an Air National Guard plane dropped a lit flare at a low altitude over the Warren Grove bombing range. A routine pilot's bombing practice quickly turned disastrous when the flare failed to extinguish before touching the parched vegetation on the ground.

Before the pilots took off that fateful Tuesday, Fire Warden Scott Knauer knew it would be a high-risk day for wildfire.

"We were at the highest level of readiness that we could be in," he recalled. "The weather and the fuel conditions were kind of in perfect storm mode where everything was lining up."

The area had not had rain for days and gusty winds made wildfire conditions dangerous.

"In fact, in the past, the bombing range has actually caused us some pretty significant fires," Knauer said. "We had an agreement on days like those, that they were not to use any live fire in their practice rounds. We had reached out to them that morning and told them 'Hey, look it’s going to be a bad day. Don’t use any live ammunition.'"

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But the message never made it to the Air National Guard pilots.

It took only hours for the flare's flames to spread over thousands of acres of dry forest. The southwesterly winds pushed the growing inferno east toward the Garden State Parkway and toward communities in Stafford and Barnegat.

Neighborhoods on the western sides of both towns were evacuated. Shelters were set up at Southern Regional High School and the Russel O. Brackman School in Barnegat.

"It was a very tense time," said Paul Shives, the current business administrator of Toms River who then served as Stafford's administrator. "I think it was one of those events in nature that you never thought would occur."

Shives remembers being in Trenton when his cell began ringing. The then-chief of police called and said he needed Shives to return home.

"I was worried about obviously the town and my responsibility, but I was also worried about my family because we lived in Ocean Acres (in Stafford)," Shives recalled.

His wife had the car packed and ready to evacuate, while Shives tried to correct rumors and handle the swarm of phone calls from residents and reporters clamoring for information.

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As the fire grew, routes out of southern Ocean County were shut down: Route 539, Route 72 and eventually the Garden State Parkway. West Bay Avenue in Barnegat and Route 9 came to a standstill, and public officials quickly learned that they needed to better coordinate among agencies.

More than 1,000 firefighters were battling the inferno by May 16. In a day, the fire had consumed more than 13,000 acres.

"Police are telling everyone to get out, (and) they get as far as Bay Avenue and it's gridlocked," said Barnegat Committeeman John Novak. "The fact that the State Police were shutting the Parkway down and making people get off in Barnegat didn't help things."

The blaze continued for days before shifting winds and heavy rain finally brought some relief. Firefighters were able to extinguish the last of the flames by Saturday.

Novak said it was nothing short of a miracle, one he prayed for in Barnegat's town hall.

Why the barrens need to burn

On the eastern edge of the million-acre Pine Barrens, Ocean County towns are easy targets for wildfire. The porous, sandy soil dries quickly and the pine tree sap makes the trees more fire-prone, said John Cowie, outreach liaison for the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. Cowie is helping to lead efforts across the nation to limit the effects forest fire on communities like Barnegat that abut forests.

The usual westerly winds also tend to push fires eastward, from the large expanse of protected forest on the county's border toward the east lying developments.

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While a danger to these towns, the Pine Barrens depend on these fires to eliminate the pine tree competitors and to open cones and spread seeds.

"It’s a fire-dependent ecosystem," said Knauer, the fire warden.

The problem is convincing residents, many of whom are transplants from other regions, to take the kind of initiatives that could spare their communities from the next forest fire.

Some are initially resistant. They do not want to lose scrubs and underbrush in a 100-foot wide buffer around their neighborhood. They do not want trees branches under 13 feet lopped off.

Yet these are the kinds of preventative efforts going on throughout the western communities of Barnegat, where the risks of forest fire are high.

Here, prescribed burns are routine in the late winter and early spring. Without these efforts, fire can climb into the canopy of the forest, where it is more difficult for firefighters to extinguish.

To get neighborhoods' support, Barnegat started one of New Jersey's first Wildfire Safety Councils. The township's safety council met Thursday at town hall, where municipal officials, police offers, members of the Forest Fire Service and leaders of the township's various western neighborhoods talked about efforts being made to protect Barnegat from the next wildfire.

The fire "exposed all the weaknesses we had," said Barnegat Committeeman Alfonso Cirulli, who then served as mayor. "If it didn't happen from a flare, a cigarette would have done it."

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"We want to keep you safe here," Barnegat Deputy Mayor Frank Caputo said Thursday during a meeting of the council. "You look outside and you drive down in the barrens and you look around at the trees and see how pretty it is, the greenery, but that is fuel for a fire... and it's inevitable that it's going to happen."

The Wildfire Safety Council and buffers around the communities are not the only changes to arise from the Warren Grove fire.

Relationships between the military and locals — tense after the fire and following an Air National Guard's weapons mishap in 2004 that resulted in the accidental strafing of the Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School — have improved.

The Air National Guard has stopped using flares and pyrotechnics in target practices at the Warren Grove range, Major Tom Still said. Pilots also undergo training and test on the rules of the range before flying, and have to repeat the day's fire risk during training, he said.

Still said the Warren Grove fire became "a hard lesson learned."

The New Jersey Forest Fire Service also revised its procedures. The service is more likely to evacuate residents sooner in the event of a forest fire, said Knauer, the fire warden.

The service also created a new fuel break, or a path cleared of trees and vegetation, to the south of the Brighton and Pinewood Estates communities in Barnegat. The fuel break, they hope, will help slow or stop a forest fire.

Local officials revised their response to wildfire as well. The Barnegat Police Department has since taken over the task of emergency management in the township, duties which were once handled by civilians. The result is faster communication with other agencies and smoother handling of evacuations.

The challenge is to keep the community prepared for the next fire, which Caputo said is just a matter of time.

When the next fire happens, police hope to meet less resistance during evacuations. They want residents to keep "go bags" stocked with emergency clothing, medication and essentials in case they need to leave quickly. Keeping the fire buffers around the western neighborhoods mowed and managed is also integral.

But Barnegat officials and emergency responders know that denial of the risk and lack of preparedness are options the town cannot tolerate.

Today, nearly everyone here who lives on the edge of the forest has altered their lives.

Since the Warren Grove fire, Lazaro, of Brighton, now keeps important papers with relatives, moved scrubs away from her house, and carries her medication on her constantly.

She knows how quickly disaster can strike when you live on the edge of the Pine Barrens.

"Every 30 years or so, it (the forest) wants to burn from one end to the other," said Knauer, the fire warden. "Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose."

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Amanda Oglesby: 732-557-5701; aoglesby@GannettNJ.com