LTE: Are We Sure, 25 Years After Cerro Grande, We are Adequately Learning To Live In The Dangerous Forests Of The 21st Century?

Courtesy of the Los Alamos Reporter
BY KATHLEENE PARKER
White Rock

What amazes me, 25 years after the Cerro Grande Fire, is that so many living in Los Alamos today—the young and newcomers—have no recollection of the days of endlessly howling winds, an enormous cloud of smoke obscuring the entire western horizon, both Los Alamos and White Rock evacuated and wildfire burning so violently that it sounded like giant helicopters overhead.

Perhaps worse, many who do remember those days of fire and wind, believe—wrongly—that Los Alamos no longer faces a threat from wildfire.

Today, many new residents have no clue what a “Cerro Grande” was or that the mountains west of town looked vastly different—heavily forested—in April 2000, or that by mid-May 2000, they were a blackened wasteland, devoid of any touch of green, from Cerro Grande, that rounded nub in the distant southwest, to nearly Abiquiu in the north.

That nub, incidentally, has a history of its own. It was to Cerro Grande that Manhattan Project workers drove, parked, smoked cigarettes and visited nervously in the pre-dawn hours of July 16, 1945.  Finally, a blinding flash of light told them that the first atomic bomb—their bomb—had successfully detonated at White Sands.

Cerro Grande’s other legacy was a disaster—long warned of, including another fire that almost burned Los Alamos—that left over 400 families homeless, did $1 billion in damages and launched Los Alamos into wildfire history as the site of the first “mega fire.”

Yet, “our” wildfire was soon, as also long-predicted, dwarfed by subsequent fires in what some researchers are calling “forests of gasoline.”

Nor are we grasping that today’s forests bear little similarity to the same forests 75 or 100 years ago, or that they must be lived in differently than the forests of 75 or 100 years ago, especially considering the ongoing “modern megadrought,” with that worsened by climate change.

More, we are failing to ask why insurance companies, more than government, are leading by demanding better building codes—or, in their absence, denying coverage—because towns should do more than face a fate similar to Paradise, California, in 2018, when wildfire killed 85 and destroyed 11,000 homes or when another one nearly wiped Pacific Palisades, in January, off the map.

And, those fates, but for a fluke, would have been Los Alamos’ fate in May 2000!

I became a correspondent, helping to cover Los Alamos, for the Santa Fe New Mexican in 1991. By 1995, I was being assigned stories featuring U.S. Forest Service Forester Bill Armstrong, who saw—he said it haunted him—that unnaturally high densities of sick, dry, often dying timber between Cerro Grande and Los Alamos Canyon were the equivalent of a fuse leading into the Atomic City.   He, on several occasions, took a New Mexican photographer and me into the Jemez Mountains to show us the danger.  Often, he said (back before the drought began), prophetically, “With the first hint of drought, this entire region will be on fire.”

Key is that mid-elevation forests—predominately ponderosa pine—in the American Southwest should average, at most, a couple of dozen trees per acre. Instead, due to 150 years of timber mismanagement—heavy livestock grazing, aggressive fire suppression, logging for profit rather than forest health—changed our forests over the span of several decades. By the 1990s, timber densities south and west of town (and in many of the Southwest’s mid-elevation forests) exceeded 2,000 trees per acre and those often tangled, sickly thickets of small, highly flammable trees.

Los Alamos first stepped into wildfire history when, in June 1977, the La Mesa Fire erupted on Bandelier National Monument’s west side. It blew explosively northeast (driven by a strong prevailing wind) as crews drove frantically along N.M. 4 trying to get ahead of it.  In the turmoil—in the “sheer horror of the situation”—a firefighter died of a heart attack. A Descanso still memorializes him at Bandelier’s entrance.

The fire’s advance slowed as it encountered N.M. 4, and there, Park Service, what was then Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory crews and others, managed to hold it. It ultimately burned 15,444 acres, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, but what was more defining was its off-scale intensity as a firestorm.   That launched research that determined that livestock grazing, fire suppression and logging had, without our realizing it, transformed the region’s forests into something unnatural and profoundly dangerous.

With the arrival of the railroads, thousands of sheep and cattle arrived in the 1880s and rapidly began to graze away grasses and brush, the small “fuels” that had long sustained essential groundfires. Research showed that groundfires, usually ignited by lightning, often burned along forest floors until the first winter snows.  They removed deadfall and forest-floor rubble but, most critically, they removed millions of tiny tree seedlings that sprouted in “pulses” during wet years, from seeds in cones dropped by the giant ponderosas—trees that rivaled today’s giant redwoods in size and fire resistance.

Tragically for the Southwest’s forests, after a deadly wildfire in the Pacific Northwest in 1911, the U.S. Forest Service implemented aggressive fire-suppression, meaning even fewer fires in forests desperate for fires.

Within decades, the tall, old, fire-resistant trees—the few that loggers hadn’t cut for their high wood yield—stood in seas of small trees and those, increasingly, in snarled, tangled thickets. Those millions, billions of small trees rapidly became “ladder fuels,” tall enough to carry fire into the treetops. “Crown fires,” “blowups,” and firestorms, rather than the essential groundfires, became the norm.

From 1995 to 2000, Armstrong was outspoken—via the news media, public meetings, and speaking to whomever would listen—and then, in 1996—at the very beginning the current megadrought—the Dome Fire exploded, in late April, on Bandelier and U.S. Forest Service lands just west of the Dome Wilderness.

What began as an apathetic plume of smoke, by late afternoon, transformed into hell on Earth, as the Dome Fire went into full blowup, to trigger one of the largest fire-shelter deployments in Forest Service history, as 32 firefighters fought for their lives in fire shelters. Nearby, a brand-new Jemez Springs fire truck was reduced to melted metal and plastic coating a blackened frame.

For those of us looking down from a nearby Forest Service road, it was an other-worldly sight. Trees simply vaporized or twisted and writhed like breathing creatures, as forces larger than human comprehension inspired inevitable descriptions of hell on Earth.  (That day I saw something that few humans ever see, and I’m also vividly aware that, today, journalists are kept at a distance from fire, perhaps much of why the public doesn’t adequately understand wildfire or what a firestorm is.)

As we watched, several huge airtankers furiously dropped fire retardant, not to extinguish the fire—mortals don’t extinguish such fires—but to keep the fire out of heavy timber directly north, near Cerro Grande.

Thanks solely to that effort and Los Alamos’ first small miracle—an unusual shift in the wind off prevailing, with it blowing eastward into Bandelier—Los Alamos was spared the fate it instead experienced four years later.

In 1997, Forest Service crews under Armstrong’s direction, thinned timber to what he believed were historical norms on several hundred acres north of Santa Clara Canyon, northwest of Los Alamos. The trees left standing were mostly mid-sized—the giants are mostly gone from the Jemez Mountains—but forest-floor rubble and small trees were removed. Then, in 1998, in 100-degree temperatures, the Oso Complex Fire ignited, but as it exploded out of Santa Clara Canyon, it encountered the thinned timber and quickly transformed into a gentle groundfire.

Armstrong saw that as Los Alamos’ only hope.  There are, literally, millions of acres of timber desperate for thinning but the obvious priority must be to protect populated areas. To that end, Armstrong wanted, in early 2000, to thin timber along the town’s borders with heavy timber, especially along Los Alamos Canyon and along Los Alamos’ western edge.

However, some Los Alamos residents vehemently opposed cutting trees—any trees, even in sick, dying forests—so, instead of timber thinning, Los Alamos made fire history.

On Friday, May 5, after a prescribed burn was ignited the evening of May 4, Los Alamos residents noticed a small chimney of smoke rising, lethargically, over Cerro Grande, but then—with a predicted “red flag” event—an enormous pyrotechnic cloud mushroomed skyward as the Cerro Grande Fire, on Sunday, May 7 made its first several-mile run—at speeds of over 50 mph—north, toward Los Alamos Canyon, where crews were frantically constructing lines and igniting back burns. There it stopped, late evening, to linger.

Only in areas closest to the fire were residents evacuated, until midday, Wednesday, May 10—another red-flag event—when the fire deftly jumped the canon and—as 11,000 townsite residents fled in the first modern fire evacuation and as national T.V. networks interrupted programming to provide coverage—Los Alamos began to burn in a firestorm driven by winds sometimes exceeding 80 mpg.

Nonetheless, Los Alamos caught a break.

Armstrong—based on our prevailing northeast wind—had predicted that as fire crossed Los Alamos Canyon, it would burn everything between Pueblo Canyon and the mountains—schools, churches, businesses, houses.  Instead, a miracle happened.

Just as the fire hit town, the wind shifted slightly off prevailing to blow due north.  This meant—rather than 65 percent of the townsite burning—the fire mostly brushed Los Alamos’ west side, although it did major damage along the town’s west side, and it drew a direct bead, south-to-north, straight up Arizona Ave., taking nearly every house. And it spotted into several other areas, igniting a wooden porch here or a picket fence there, to then burn houses.

Although “only” 235 structures burned, because many of those were duplexes, triplex and fourplexes, over 400 families lost their homes.

Now, the stark reality of numbers: Cerro Grande, nearly two-and-a-half times bigger than the 1996 Dome Fire, burned 43,000 acres. Two years later, in 2002, the Missionary Ridge Fire near Durango, burned 73,000 acres and generated winds that tossed large RVs about like toys, while southwest of Los Alamos in 2011, the Las Conchas Fire, was double that, at 156,593 acres. But that was 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, while a California fire in 2020, exceeded one-million acres.

So, why, despite so many starkly dramatic lessons from wildfire:

1.      Does Los Alamos still allow residential developments in heavy timber and with only one point of egress, something long illegal in Colorado, including the new clusters of high-density apartments along Trinity, uphill of heavy timber in Los Alamos Canyon?

2.      Why does White Rock remain as vulnerable to fire from the south as Los Alamos was in May 2000 and where is county leadership for “landscape-sized” solutions (fuel break and thinned timber) for the landscape-sized fires of today? In White Rock, that would mean thinning overly dense pinon and juniper—across White Rock’s entire southern edge—to densities like those in Santa Clara Canyon, or sense “p-j woodland” is so dangerously flammable, perhaps even fewer trees.

3.      Where is education—not through meetings, which few attend—but, ongoing, through media, social media and county fliers, until “fire” becomes part of our thinking and we understand that we live in “forests of gasoline?”

4.      Why, 22 years after Los Alamos burned from an escape prescribed fire, did similar factors contribute to the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Fire?  When are we as citizens going to stop blaming low-ranking people “on the ground” and demand federal leadership, at the highest levels, to transform prescribed burn from being the forgotten, underfunded, backward stepchild of federal agencies? We need prescribed fire brought into the 21st century and conducted solely by professional “national” crews—more than the Hot Shots, people with the highest possible training in fire dynamics, physics, weather, fuels, legal requirements of prescribed burn and, most of all, independent of local pressure to “just get it done?”

In short, 25 years after Cerro Grande, are we sure we are adequately learning to live in the dangerous forests of the 21st century?

Editor’s note. Kathleene Parker was a correspondent for the Santa Fe New Mexican, covering Los Alamos, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and timber and fire issues, for 13 years.