What the forest service lost Thursday, June 30, when fire spread through lands of the Santa Clara pueblo, wasn’t a battle with fire. I’d learned from their own local website that all fire fighters can do with big fires is try to direct the flames away from human targets. It's always the hurricane fed monsoons that actually extinguish them.
What they lost was the trust people like me had developed last summer when their website gave honest reports on a fire in rough country in the Jemez to the north. That credibility had increased with their reports on the Wallow fire in Arizona and the Pacheco fire near Tesuque.
I wasn’t angry at any particular person, but at the display of cultural values that have been evolving in the decades since Ronald Reagan until they threaten to overwhelm any alternatives.
There was first the suspicion that the forest service was undermanned for a catastrophic fire season. Modern managers have learned to detest labor intensive enterprises and replace them with better managers of machines. Government doesn’t have to hire businessmen or business school graduates to get this attitude in their employees: it’s what the young absorb growing up.
A Congress willing to barter funds to help people whose towns were destroyed by tornados is only a culmination in a trend of budget cutting.
At its height the Wallow fire had something like 4,000 people fighting it. There were less than 800 with the Las Conchas fire Wednesday, before reinforcements arrived. That same day, there were still 1,320 people fighting the 538,049 acre Wallow fire, 530 assigned to the 10,116 acre Pacheco fire, and 326 fighting the 72,650 acre Donaldson fire started by lightening Tuesday in Lincoln county. And these weren’t the only fires burning in Arizona and New Mexico this week.
Realistically, there are only so many people the government can keep trained and ready for what is seasonal work. In the past, the National Guard would have been used as a highly disciplined additional resource. That stopped when George Bush the elder converted the National Guard into the regular army in Kuwait.
We learned the consequences of they’re not being available when hurricanes hit New Orleans in 2005, but we’ve only responded by deploying even more men overseas.
Our Tea Party supported governor has been willing to call them out, but either she or their commander can visualize no role for them greater than standing guard. That’s all they did for the first few days they were utilized when we had no power last winter. With this fire, their primary purpose seems to have been aiding the evacuation of Los Alamos. It was the sheriff and the state Livestock Board who helped move animals from dangerous juniper grasslands in Lincoln County.
The perception of modern business and modern warfare is that people can be replaced with machines, especially in situations were aereal support is more effective. The problem is various types of planes cost money to buy, require skilled crews to use and expend fuels that are sensitive to inflation.
The most recent incident reports indicate Las Conchas has18 helicopters, Donaldson has 5 helicopters and 3 air tankers, and Wallow has 2 helicopters and air tankers available if needed. The last update for Pacheco on June 28 indicated they had 9 helicopters.
It wasn’t simply the problems with not having enough resources to fight the fire that made me angry It was the outside managers who appeared to be more interested in protecting their careers than in fighting the fire, something that may have been necessary given the level of politicians and power involved when the lab feels itself in danger.
The local fire information website stopped being informative. Indeed, for a few days, we were directed to another website altogether, the national Incident Information System. At the bottom of each entry there’s a form with standard categories like Basic Information, Current Situation and Outlook. The second item includes Fire Behavior. Whoever has been updating the information has been including Fire Behavior for the Wallow, Pacheco and Donaldson fires, but not for Las Conchas.
Each day the fire fighters have been issuing maps of the fire based on the nightly infrared reconnaissance flights. One June 27 they issued both a PDF and a Jpeg (picture) version of the map. On June 28 the map was a Jpeg, on June 30 and July 1 they were PDF’s that were not readable by older versions of Adobe, and on July 2 they returned to Jpegs.
On Tuesday the 27th, the map showed the fire edge, location of previous fires, and points of intense heat where the fire was the most active and points of isolated heat where it may have been preparing to spread. Since the fire had not spread north of Los Alamos, no territory to the north was shown.
On Wednesday, the map still showed the areas of intense and isolated heat, but no longer showed the previous fire scars. At the time, the fire was active to the west of Los Alamos and so nothing to the north was included.
A later map of Wednesday added a third day’s spread and showed the boundaries of Santa Clara pueblo lands for the first time.
The map for Thursday when the fire spread north did show the footprint of the Cerro Grande fire, but gave no place names. Instead of the daily growth, it showed only the perimeter of the fire. The only way you could tell the general location of the pueblo was with the county line.
On Friday the map again showed only the fire perimeter, but this time it included the spatial organization of the fire fighters. The legend didn’t explain all the symbols used, but Santa Clara appeared to be divided between two groups by the county line.
On Sunday, the map returned to its original format, showing the growth by day with a clear indication of what was destroyed when it entered Santa Clara land. It’s useful to finally have information I can use to know what it is I’m seeing and smelling, but it appeared two days after it was needed.
Those changes in format, those omissions or delays in information suggest some blunder was made in predicting the behavior of the fire, and that ever since men have been denying an error that could easily have been made in allocating scarce resources to fight a fire growing in all directions.
At 8:30 Thursday morning the Incident Information System reported
“Firefighters are monitoring long-range spotting, which have been seen as far north as the Santa Clara Pueblo. Firefighters will also be dealing with unfavorable winds which may result in extreme fire behavior and continue to push the fire to the north. Firefighters will continue scouting for potential fire line and burnout opportunities to prevent the fire from spreading.”
At the same the local Wordpress blog said “As of Thursday morning, fire crews reported the northern finger of the blaze is extending northward toward the Santa Clara Pueblo.”
Later that same day the Santa Clara suggested that that “long-rage spotting” or “northern finger” had “exploded across the western third of the reservation” producing the smoke visible from my back porch.
That night, the fire fighters described that as short runs with “spotting less than 1 mile occurred on the north head of fire” and then said it had crossed “moved northeast past NM Hwy 144 and spread into parts of the Cerro Grande burn area.” 144 in fact is a forest road west of Los Alamos and may represent the western side of the fire’s movements, but it does not appear on the maps they publish or on many other state maps.
Once the Santa Clara issued their press release, they have not been mentioned in the daily reports, except by obscure references to forest road 144 and the Cerro Grande scar.
Indeed, once the pueblo said they had “attended briefings and given recommendations and data to the Incident Command” and “repeatedly asked that adequate resources be devoted to the north end of the fire” another cultural game began: the one that says how dare a minority claim to be a victim.
Right after they issued their press release, the lab issued one in which the lab director discussed all the real victims of the fire, those who worked for the lab and lost their homes. They still had their lives and their way of life, but the loss of a tangible private asset made them the greater victims. He even listed the communities involved. In order they were: “Cochiti, the Jemez mountains, Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Pueblos and communities to the North.”
Then, like Princess Di, the lab director stopped in at “the Santa Claran Event Center in Española and the Cities of Gold Casino in Pojoaque” to personally meet with refugees from Los Alamos. He noted “one of the messages I heard loud and clear from evacuees was that many of them are isolated from information sources and they do not have a good understanding of what is happening at the Laboratory.”
The forest service also held community meetings in Jemez Springs, Cochiti Pueblo and at Santa Clara. They said local residents “received updated information on the fire and had their questions answered.”
On Friday they also began adding that “archeologists work with our dozers, graders and hand crews to minimize damage to sensitive areas.” They now also report “All firefighting crews receive a daily briefing on sensitive historical and cultural sites within the fire area.”
However, when they list the sites that are closed they don’t mention Puye Cliffs. It was damaged by the Cerro Grande fire and only reopened in May of 2009. The nearby recreation area is still closed. When I drove by Saturday there was check point indicating only authorized people could go beyond the gas station.
I suspect the basic problem, apart from not having enough resources, managers who are under extreme political pressure from a narcissistic lab, and directives that use economic criteria to define priorities, is that many do not understand the difference between the forest as a recreational alternative to urban life and its existence as an extension of an agricultural life rooted in a migratory past.
Economic impacts are easy to define. Los Alamos has more than 12,000 people and the lab employs many more from places like the Española valley. The Pueblo is less than 1,000. Measuring the comparative social and psychological impacts is impossible.
The real shortage hasn’t simply been firefighters, money, or time to respond. The real problem is there’s been no rain, was almost no snow, and the storms we’ve had so far have been better at starting new fires and taking out power than quenching flames.
Notes: Daily postings at nmfireinfo.wordpress.com and its link to the Incident Information System. Information is updated often, even in an existing report, and old postings are discarded.
Los Alamos National Laboratory. “”LANL Director Expresses Concern for Communities Across the Region,” 30 June 2011 press release.
____. “LANL Director Visits Los Alamos Evacuees,” 1 July 2011 press release.
Santa Clara Pueblo. “”Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land,” 30 June 2011 press release.
Pictures Taken the Day after an Unrecorded Event
1. Looking towards Los Alamos, 1 July 2011 about 7:03pm.
2. Driving into the afternoon void on highway 84/285 somewhere between Tesuque and Camel Rock, 1 July 2011 about 6:03pm.
3. The air turned brown from smoke coming down from Los Alamos as the road entered Pojoque; taken at La Puebla exit, 1 July 2011 about 6:17pm.
4. Looking west towards Santa Clara lands, 1 July 2011 about 7:36pm.
5. Looking north towards Española, 1 July 2011 about 7:37pm.
6. Sun coming in the car window between Tesuque and Camel Rock, 1 July 2011 about 6:03pm.
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