Gov. Christie: N.J. boardwalk fire is '95 percent' contained

Hot spots could take days to extinguish

A firefighter saws through a metal wall on a building while battling a fire at the Seaside Park boardwalk on Thursday in Seaside Park, N.J. The fire began in a frozen custard stand on the Seaside Park section of the boardwalk and quickly spread north into neighboring Seaside Heights.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

A firefighter saws through a metal wall on a building while battling a fire at the Seaside Park boardwalk on Thursday in Seaside Park, N.J. The fire began in a frozen custard stand on the Seaside Park section of the boardwalk and quickly spread north into neighboring Seaside Heights.

SEASIDE PARK, N.J. — Hot spots could keep flaring up for days on a New Jersey shore boardwalk where a fire leveled four blocks and about 30 businesses just 10 months after the same area was devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

Gov. Chris Christie said the fire was 95 percent contained by late morning today. He said state grants and loans could be made available to help businesses with recovery costs not covered by insurance.

Christie said there were only minor injuries, including to three police officers who fell from a moving vehicle.

“I will not permit all the work we’ve done over the last 10 months to be diminished or destroyed by what happened last night,” Christie said during a media briefing in Seaside Park.

The fire, which broke out Thursday afternoon, zipped up four blocks of boardwalk in Seaside Park and Seaside Heights. It was driven by strong gusts and fueled by tar roofs on the pizza shops, bars, ice cream shops, an arcade and other businesses.

The fire was finally stopped around 11 p.m. Thursday when officials decided to dismantle a section of the boardwalk, even though that meant moving firefighters and letting some buildings continue to burn.

Images from the air showed a once-colorful area reduced to a monochromatic pile of charred dark gray rubble. Among the places wrecked was FunTown Pier, an amusement park that had not yet reopened after being damaged last October by Sandy.

Today, firefighters were pouring thousands of gallons of water on the smoldering remnants of the fire.

This image from aerial video shows a raging fire in Seaside Park, N.J. on Thursday.

About a quarter of the 400 firefighters who battled the blaze Thursday remained on the scene early today, and heavy equipment was poised to move in and start poking through the rubble once firefighters extinguished the last burning pockets.

“There’s not much left” in the affected areas, said Brian Gabriel, Ocean County’s fire coordinator. “It looks like a couple of bombs went off. It’s pretty much complete devastation.”

Authorities began making tentative plans to rebuild the boardwalk, most of which had just been redone in time for Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer. Boardwalk merchants were numb as they pondered the second major disaster to befall them in 11 months.

“We just reopened June 1, went through the whole summer trying to stay open, and now this happens,” said Daniel Shauger, manager of Funtown Arcade, which was one of 32 Seaside Park boardwalk businesses damaged in the fire. “We’re wiped out again. It’s just unimaginable.”

He said business was down by two-thirds this summer because of the fallout from Sandy, which filled his arcade with water and sand and ruined inventory, game machines and computers.

“It was just enough to survive,” Shauger said. “We were really looking forward to next year. And we’re still looking forward to next year.”

Seaside Park officials began plans early today to rebuild their part of the boardwalk, at the southern end where the fire began Thursday afternoon near a frozen custard stand. Bob Martucci, the borough administrator, said it will cost $600,000 to rebuild the borough-owned boardwalk; individual businesses are privately owned and would not be included in that cost, he said.

Arson investigators began looking into the cause of the fire Thursday night and continued early today, which is routine with a fire of this size. Al Della Fave, a spokesman for the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office, said there was no indication today that the fire appeared suspicious, though a cause had not been determined.

It could have been much worse. On Thursday, as the fire pushed northward despite the frantic efforts of firefighters to contain it, Seaside Heights officials tried a Hail Mary: They ripped out a 25-foot swath of the boardwalk they had just finished rebuilding five months earlier. And they filled the void with giant sand piles — makeshift dunes designed to halt the spread of flames and save the northern portion of the boardwalk upon which the community relied for its financial survival.

It worked.

In much the same way as forest fire crews rip out vegetation to deprive an advancing fire of fuel, the boardwalk gambit succeeded in halting the fire’s extension any farther into Seaside Heights.

“That appears to have done the trick,” Seaside Park Mayor Robert Matthies said.

Seaside Park Councilwoman Nancy Koury said the fire caused several million dollars’ worth of damage.