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A forest fire in a Philadelphia suburb was threatening homes Thursday in what officials called the driest conditions in nearly 120 years.

Another fire about an hour away in Jackson Township was less than half contained when the blaze broke out in Evesham, threatening 50 homes, the New Jersey Forest Fire Service said. It could not immediately give a size estimate for the Evesham blaze.

“This is the driest we’ve been in the agency’s history,” said Jeremy Webber, a supervising fire warden with the Fire Service, which was established in 1906.

Lack of significant rainfall since August contributed to the dry conditions, which prompted the state to impose strict restrictions on outdoor fires.

Details about the Evesham fire were scarce Thursday morning, as the fire had only recently been reported. The fire service said the 50 threatened homes have not needed to be evacuated yet.

The fire in Jackson, in the central portion of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, had grown to less than half a square mile (1.2 square kilometers) and was 40% contained as of mid-morning Thursday, said Deale Carey, incident commander for the fire service.

He said conditions were so dry that new spot fires were continuously breaking out as wind-blown leaves fall onto burning or smoldering areas.

Two-minute read

There haven’t been many “pings” if any from OCEARCH-tagged great white sharks off New Jersey’s coast this year until this week, when a 12-footer nicknamed Scot popped up just inshore of the continental shelf.

A satellite picked up Scot’s tracking tag on its dorsal fin at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, revealing the apex predator’s location was just northwest of the Hudson Canyon. The Hudson, a submarine canyon and prolific fishing ground for tuna, begins about 80 miles east of the Manasquan Inlet.

Scot is an impressive adult male shark that weighed 1,644 pounds when it was tagged by researchers Sept. 8, 2021, having been found it was swimming near Ironbound Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. OCEARCH researchers nicknamed him Scot after the people of Nova Scotia.

Since being tagged, Scot has swam 16,326 miles, a journey that has taken him from the Florida Keys to the Gulf of St. Lawrence on its seasonal migrations up and down the Atlantic Seaboard.

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OCEARCH is a nonprofit research group that has been studying great white sharks’ behavior for over a decade off the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. Its Western North Atlantic White Shark Study is one of the most comprehensive studies of great white sharks in the world and includes a full health assessment of each shark, microbiological studies, movement, temperature and depth studies through the use of three different tags.

The largest of the great white sharks OCEARCH has tagged is Nukumi, a female that was 17 feet, 2 inches and 3,541 pounds when it was tagged. Nukumi has yet to ping off the coast of New Jersey.

The study has shown that the great white sharks winter in the waters off the southeastern coast of the U.S. and migrate north to waters off New England and Canada in the summer.

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When Jersey Shore native Dan Radel is not reporting the news, you can find him in a college classroom where he is a history professor. Reach him @danielradelapp; 732-643-4072; dradel@gannettnj.com.