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Sifting through the ashes—and questions—amid one of one of the worst fire seasons ever
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| Michael Darter |
Unfriendly fire: one of 235 homes incinerated by the Cerro Grande blaze in Los Alamos in May
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CHRIS KIRBY IS a large man with thick hands, the kind of powerful, unassuming guy the losing football team neglected to pick. Except, as a member of the Mormon Lake Hotshots, a crew of wildland firefighters out of Flagstaff, Arizona, he's had his share of losses too. Slouching into a folding chair inside the mess tent after hunting hot spots for 12 hours at
the Pumpkin Fire outside Flagstaff, Kirby looks a little more haggard as he thinks back to May 9, the day he and everybody else on the line at the Cerro Grande fire in northern New Mexico realized they were fighting a blaze that had gotten too big, too hot, too fast. "There was quite a bit of discouragement," Kirby said. "Everyone expected to lick it in a
couple of operational periods. We got our asses kicked." For such a complex fire it had a startlingly simple beginning. At 7:20 p.m. on Thursday, May 4, a crew of 25 firefighters began dripping burning gasoline and diesel fuel onto dry underbrush in the northwest corner of Bandelier National Monument, 33,000 acres of canyons and mesas situated just south of
Los Alamos, New Mexico. As the world knows now, it was supposed to be a small fire—a "prescribed burn" of only 1,000 acres designed to consume dead wood and prevent larger conflagrations. But within a few hours it was an out-of-control wildfire.
By Sunday, hotshot crews were rushing to halt the burn at the paved road that connects Los Alamos to the Pajarito Mountain Ski Area. With 30- to 50-mph winds blowing flames through timber turned bone-dry after a winter and spring of drought, there was no time to clear a line in front of the advancing fire. Instead, crews used drip torches to set
backfires along a five-mile stretch of the road to cut off the head before it leaped down the next canyon and into town. "We were practically running with the things, trying to stay ahead of the fire," Kirby recalled. "It's the fastest burn I've ever been in, but it worked. It stopped the head of that thing that night."
By early Tuesday, however, the buffer zone that had been created just 36 hours earlier was raked by extremely high winds carrying burning embers far below the ski-area road. "By now the wind is really jammin'," Kirby said. "The thing got up in the trees. Once it started crowning, no one was going to get ahead of that." Crew superintendents realized that
after five days they'd lost the fight. They loaded their crews into trucks, drove to Los Alamos, and watched for the next three hours as an inferno consumed the town, torching 245 structures, licking the flanks of the nation's largest nuclear weapons research laboratory, and ultimately denuding 42,878 acres of ponderosa pine forest. Viewed from above, the
once green mountains now resemble a vast graveyard of charred black toothpicks. Most of the 1,000 acres the park rangers had intended to burn were left untouched.
Add Cerro Grande to the list of fires that have erupted so far—including the blaze that consumed 192,000 acres of grassland and 11 homes near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington at the end of June—and 2000 is already one of the worst years for wildfires in U.S. history. Between January and early July, major burns in
Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Nevada, California, Texas, and Alaska had scorched more than two million acres, over half a million acres more than the comparable period in 1999 (see "Up in Smoke" map page 42). New Mexico and Arizona were hit with a nearly fourfold increase in
acres burned. And with dry conditions prevailing across much of the country, the prognosis for the remainder of the fire season, which runs through late November, is not good. High on everyone's list of ominous prospects is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in northern Minnesota, where a freak windstorm last summer turned half a million acres of
trees into a massive pile of kindling.
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