MORA, New York – It started short, with a team of federal officials using drip torches to ignite a prescribed burn in the Santa Fe National Forest aimed at thinning dense pine forests.
But as April winds blew through the mountains of fragile, dry northern New Mexico, carrying the fire over its borders and soon on the path of another uncontrolled prescribed burn, it became one of the U.S. Forest Service’s most devastating mistakes in decades.
The resulting fusion of these two burns, called the Flames of Calf Canyon / Hermit’s Dandruff, now ranks as the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history. Still burning in an area of more than 341,000 acres – larger than the city of Los Angeles – the fire destroyed hundreds of homes and displaced thousands in a region where residents of the Spanish countryside settled centuries ago.
The painful losses created a reaction against the forest service and provided a basic test of how the authorities reacted when the prescribed incineration went wrong.
“I hope those responsible for this catastrophic failure do not sleep through the night,” said Meg Sandoval, 65, whose family settled in the region in the 1840s. She now lives off the shell of a pickup truck after her home in Tierra Monte was destroyed by fire.
“They ruined the lives of thousands of people,” she said.
With the exhaustion of patience in New Mexico, the stakes are huge. Drought and climate change have turned the western United States into a fire, leading to more devastating forest fires of all kinds. Based on ancient fire management practices, federal and government officials have imposed prescribed forest fires where natural fires have been extinguished for decades, trying to dilute the accumulation of vegetation that can cause catastrophic fires.
The Forest Service, which already conducts about 4,500 prescribed fires each year, wants to aggressively step up operations across the country. President Biden’s infrastructure package provides $ 5 billion for measures against forest fires, including removing flammable flora and increasing firefighters’ salaries.
But as forest managers lose control of some of the fires they have set in, public reaction is growing.
On May 20, after the New Mexico fire blast, Randy Moore, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, announced a 90-day break from prescribed firefighting operations in the National Forest, giving employees time to study the program and how it was implemented.
During an internal inspection of the April 6 incineration, forest service investigators found that fire chiefs had followed a plan within the approved limits. But a subsequent analysis of the weather and vegetation showed that “the prescribed fire burns in much drier conditions than they understood.”
The review, expected to be published this week, described a chaotic sequence of events in which nearby automated weather stations were offline, using forecasts from the National Weather Service instead of relying on “local experience” to understand changing wind conditions. and relative humidity fell “well below” the forecast range.
The study also found that firefighters “did not stop the fires or put out the prescribed fire after clear indications of high intensity fires” and that some used radio frequencies, which made them inaccessible several times. District firefighters have also felt pressure to “carry out the mission”, which may have led to greater risks, the review found.
Despite these problems, Mr Moore defended the mission in an interview, calling the prescribed burns crucial to reducing the threat of extreme forest fires. In 99.84 per cent of cases, he said, the burns were going according to plan.
“But the 0.16 percent that is coming out, we’re experiencing that now,” Mr Moore admitted. “Every time there is a lack of trust, it takes time to restore it. Words do not build that trust. Cases build that trust. “
During a brief visit to New Mexico this month, President Biden sought to allay some of the concerns. He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency would cover 100 percent of the cost of temporary housing and cleaning in the first 90 days after the forest fire damage, compared to the standard 75 percent. FEMA has distributed about $ 3.4 million to about 1,000 families, the agency said.
Mr Biden also voiced support for a bill to set up a fund to cover losses from the fire, money that is considered crucial in a place where much of the destroyed property is uninsured. But he warned that such a measure would likely need help from Republicans in the Senate. The office of the minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, did not respond to a request for comment.
Representative Theresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat who represents the fire-affected region of northern New Mexico in Congress, said she welcomed the administration’s actions to increase federal aid and take steps to mitigate potential floods in national forests, which is crucial as the monsoon season begins in the southwest, which carries the risk of floods and landslides in the fire-affected landscape.
But like many of her constituents, Ms. Leger Fernandez said she was furious when she learned that the forest service had started both fires. “How can you make the same mistake twice in the same neighborhood?” She asked.
Tanya Quan Simmons, whose home in the village of Cleveland was destroyed, said the insurance was expected to cover a small portion of her family’s losses related to mortgage payments and other debts. “The bank will get its money, then we are left with a piece of useless dirt,” said 53-year-old Quan Simmons.
Her insurance company said she and her husband needed to rebuild on the same plot, she said, “which is a joke based on the destruction and the real threat of flooding.”
Along with other New Mexico lawmakers in Congress, Ms. Leger Fernandez proposed legislation to better compensate fire victims. But she said her bill is unlikely to go through the two chambers alone, although it could potentially be included in other legislation.
Uncertainty contrasts with the reaction to a fire in 2000 that was staged by the National Parks Service and destroyed hundreds of homes in Los Alamos, NM FEMA quickly distributed cash to victims in addition to normal emergency aid, and Democrats and Republicans in The New Congressional Delegation of Mexico quickly won bipartisan support for a law allowing large compensation for fire victims.
Los Alamos, one of the richest cities in the West, has a large number of doctoral residents who work on the country’s nuclear arsenal and receive high salaries from the national laboratory there; some of the communities thrown out of this year’s fire among the poorest places in New Mexico.
Albuquerque’s Antonia Roybal-Mac was an aide to Pete Domenisi, a Republican senator known for his bipartisanship during the Los Alamos fire. She said today’s polarizing policy could block such aid from passing through the Senate, which is divided equally between Democrats and Republicans.
Ms. Roybal-Mack grew up in the area burned by this year’s wildfire. She said her family could have sold her father’s 360-acre ranch for several million dollars before the prescribed burns went out of control. “It costs nothing now,” she said.
Looking at the difficulties that many people in New Mexico may have in obtaining compensation, Ms. Roybal-Mack laid the groundwork for a mass tort case against the Forest Service.
Mr Moore, the head of the forestry service, declined to provide specific information on what his agency, part of the Ministry of Agriculture, could do to compensate the victims. The USDA, he said, is working as a “department” to see how it can provide assistance.
The 90-day break in prescribed burns ordered by Mr Moore, together with the inspections carried out by such operations, has led some forest fire experts to worry that they will be removed – which could lead to even more colossal fires in overgrown areas.
“We don’t necessarily have to look at someone who escaped, even though it was destructive and massive, as a reason to stop all prescribed burns,” said Rebecca Miller, a doctoral student in the West on Fire project at the University of Southern California.
But even some who support deforestation blame this latest tragedy directly on the long-term policies of the forestry service.
Patrick Deran has written a book about the Pecos River, the sources of which are threatened by the fire of Calf Canyon / Hermit’s Dandruff. He noted that in the 1890s, the forest around the river, now defined as a national forest, consisted mainly of “old forests”, as well as meadows, open parks and barren peaks.
An inventory from 1911 shows that a typical acre habitat of pine ponderosa has 50 to 60 trees. By the end of the 20th century, Mr Deran said, after a long national policy to put out natural fires that had risen to 1,089 trees per acre.
“Nature had done a good job, but no one acknowledged it,” Mr Deran said. However, if the government wants to take on the role of nature thinning forests, it must admit its mistakes, he said.
“If a man comes out and lights a fire on purpose and he escapes, he will probably go to jail,” he said. “The federal government must take responsibility for the people.”
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