By KATHLEENE PARKER
White Rock

As I read two articles in the May 1 DAILY POST, I pondered:  25 years since the Southwest’s first “mega fire,” the Cerro Grande, have we learned nothing?

Contrary to Ellen Walton’s assertion, today’s wildfires are not “caused” by climate change, but by 150 years of timber mismanagement that created “forests of gasoline,” followed by severe drought—one of many over the last 2,000 years—and, yes, that worsened by climate change.  

David Izraelevitz said nothing about rethinking how we live in forests with little similarity to those 100 years ago. Or, that Los Alamos and White Rock remain vulnerable to wildfire.

In the mid-1990s, Santa Fe National Forest forester, Bill Armstrong, warned that heavy timber between Bandelier National Monument’s Cerro Grande and Los Alamos Canyon, represented a fuse leading directly into Los Alamos. He predicted that if fire came, it would leap Los Alamos Canyon and burn everything—schools, churches, houses, businesses—between Pueblo Canyon and the mountains, then go on to burn most of North and Barranca mesas, or 65 percent of the town.

But in May 2000, Los Alamos was spared the fate of that happening—the sort of thing that Pacific Palisades experienced last January. Just as the Cerro Grande Fire—the first long-predicted “mega fire”—hit town, the wind shifted off its usual northeast prevailing to, instead, blow due north, causing the fire to mostly brush the town’s west side, though over 400 families were left homeless and over a billion in damage resulted.

During the Cerro Grande Fire, tree densities on the mountains west of town, historically at 200 or less per-acre, were at 3,000 or more. The forest bore no similarity to the same forest, say, when the Los Alamos Ranch School was founded in 1917.

Historically, forests throughout the mid-elevations of the Southwest were semi-open savannas dotted with huge—almost Redwood-sized—fire-resistant ponderosa pines. (The area now thinned for fire safety along N.M. 502 west of Los Alamos National Laboratory shows a rough approximation of past densities.) That ended with the arrival of railroads in the 1880s that brought thousands of cattle and sheep that soon grazed away grasses and brush needed to fuel the essential low-burning ground, or “housekeeping,” fires that were essential to keep tree densities low.

Worse, in 1911, the Forest Service implemented aggressive fire suppression, meaning even fewer fires in lands desperate for fire. The tall, old, fire-resistant ponderosas—the few that loggers hadn’t cut—soon stood in seas of small trees, often in thickets so dense they couldn’t be walked through.

Then, in the 1977, a major “blowup” at Bandelier National Monument signaled something badly wrong with the Jemez Mountains’ and the Southwest’s forests. Those millions of small trees were becoming “ladder fuels,” tall enough to carry fire, of whatever ignition source, into the treetops to create a blowup, or fires of ever-greater intensity, acreages and danger.

In 1997, Forest Service crews thinned, to historical norms, several hundred acres of timber north of Santa Clara Canyon northwest of Los Alamos. In 1998, during 100-degree temperatures, the Oso Complex Fire explode from Santa Clara Canyon, into that thinned timber to, in turn, instantly transform into a harmless ground fire.

That kind of thinning was what Armstrong had wanted along Los Alamos’ fire-vulnerable south and west sides in early 2000. But some residents vehemently opposed cutting trees—any trees, even in sick, dying forests—and Armstrong’s buffer for Los Alamos didn’t happen. Instead, Los Alamos made fire history.

On May 5, after a prescribed burn began on May 4, people noticed a small chimney of smoke on Cerro Grande, then more smoke, then—with a predicted “red flag” event on Sunday, May 7—an enormous pyrotechnic cloud mushroomed skyward as the Cerro Grande Fire made its first several-mile run—at speeds approaching 50 mph—toward Los Alamos Canyon, where it stopped, late evening.  Only areas of town closest to the fire remained evacuated, until midday Wednesday, May 10–-during another red-flag event—when the fire quickly and easily jumped the canyon and, as national T.V. networks interrupted programming to provide coverage, Los Alamos began to burn.

Consider, Cerro Grande Fire, nearly two-and-a-half times bigger than New Mexico’s previous biggest wildfire in 1996, burned 43,000 acres. In 2002, Colorado’s Missionary Ridge Fire, near Durango, burned 73,000 acres and exploded with forces strong enough to pick up RVs, while to Los Alamos’ southwest, the 2011 Las Conchas Fire, doubled that, at 156,593 acres, with that soon dwarfed by the 2012 Whitewater-Baldy Fire at 325,136 acres (another doubling), followed by the 2022 Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Fire at 341,735.

These are “landscape sized” fires, requiring landscape-sized solutions and new ways of learning to live in forests of gasoline. While “defensible space” is something property owners should strive for—as Pacific Palisades and Altadena tragically learned—that was little help against fire driven by hurricane-force winds—winds, incidentally, similar to those in Los Alamos on May 10, 11 and 12, 2000.  

Of note, despite Walton’s criticisms, the only voice of reason seems to be insurance companies who refuse to insure towns that won’t work to protect themselves. Despite the lessons of the Cerro Grande Fire:

1.  Los Alamos still has developments—many allowed by the county since Cerro Grande—in heavy timber and with only one point of egress, a safety issue long illegal in Colorado. This includes the clusters of new high-density apartments along Trinity above heavy timber in Los Alamos Canyon with only one way out for residence!
2.  White Rock is as vulnerable today to fire from the south as Los Alamos was in May 2000. Where is leadership from county hierarchy (fire department personnel can’t do it alone) for reasonable landscaped-sized thinning, like that in Santa Clara Canyon, of pinon and juniper south of White Rock—not clearing, but thinning to historical norms?
3. Where is education—not through meetings which few attend—but through ongoing media, social media and county fliers, until “fire” becomes part of our thinking, and we learn to live wisely near “forests of gasoline?”
4.  And, 22 years after a prescribed burn ignited the Cerro Grande Fire, why did similar factors come into play on the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Fire? When are we going to stop angrily, and irrelevantly, blaming low-ranking people “on the ground” and demand federal leadership, from the highest levels, to bring prescribed fire into the 21st century with “national” burn crews—the equivalent of Hot Shots who only do prescribed burns—with the highest possible training in fire dynamics, weather, fuels, legal requirements for prescribed burns and absolutely independent of local pressure to “just get it done?”

We hear about methane from gas stoves not being allowed to contribute to climate change, but where is leadership to avoid the “carbon footprint” of towns burning because we don’t understand that just waiting for a plume of smoke on the horizon won’t suffice?  

Parker, of White Rock, was a correspondent for 13 years, covering Los Alamos and timber and fire issues in the Jemez Mountains for the SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN.