Cerro Grande Fire

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The smoke plume on May 11, 2000 reaches the panhandle of Oklahoma (NOAA image).

The Cerro Grande Fire was a disastrous forest fire in New Mexico, United States of America that occurred in May 2000. The fire started as a result of a controlled burn that became uncontrolled owing to high winds and drought conditions. Over 400 families in the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico lost their homes in the resulting 48,000-acre (190 km²) fire. Structures at Los Alamos National Laboratory were also destroyed or damaged, although without loss or destruction of any of the special nuclear material housed there. Amazingly, there was no loss of human life. The US General Accounting Office estimated total damages at one billion US Dollars.

1 Prelude
2 Origin
3 Timeline
4 Aftermath
5 Image gallery
6 See also
7 References

[edit] Prelude

Although low-intensity wildfire is a natural part of the ecosystem of western forests, fire suppression began to be widespread in the late 19th century just as land-use patterns (e.g. grazing) limited the cover which had formerly carried low-intensity ground fires. High-density concentrations of small trees and thick underbrush provided a path for a natural periodic ground fire to leap into a high-intensity crown fire.

Large fires have occurred on the Pajarito Plateau approximately every twenty years. Following the 1896 fire, fires in the 1920s, the 1946 fire, and the 1954 Water Canyon Fire, the 1977 La Mesa Fire served as a wake-up call. Fire roads were improved as were fuel breaks, and trees were thinned. La Mesa burned 15,000 acres (60 km²) in Bandelier National Monument, but accelerated a change in attitudes toward managing fire within the National Park Service.

The 1996 Dome Fire burned 16,500 acres in nine days and threatened the southern section of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Dome fire was spectacular, with flame lengths of hundreds of feet, and underscored the problems of passivity and neglect. The Interagency Wildfire Management Team was formed by representatives of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos County, Bandelier National Monument, Santa Fe National Forest, State of New Mexico, and Pueblo agencies. But no amount of planning could control the weather, which provided abnormally high precipitation in the early to mid-1990s followed by several years of severe drought.

The consequence of these effects was that by 2000, conditions were nearly ideal for a major forest fire in the region. Deadfall in the forest had a moisture content lower than that of well-cured firewood. The heavy rains and snows of the mid-1990s had produced luxuriant undergrowth, while the onset of drought toward the end of the decade had dried it out and made it flammable. The stage was set for exactly what happened at Cerro Grande.

[edit] Origin

The fire originated as a controlled burn that was part of the 10-year Bandelier National Monument plan for reducing fire hazard within the monument. The starting point was high on Cerro Grande, a 10,200-foot (3110 m) summit on the rim of the Valles Caldera not far north of New Mexico State Highway 4, the main highway through Los Alamos County. Like many mountains in the Jemez, Cerro Grande was mainly covered with coniferous forest, composed largely of ponderosa pine and aspen trees, with a characteristic meadow -- rincon -- on its southern slopes near the summit. This grassy area also represented the headwaters of Frijoles Creek (Rito de los Frijoles), which flows southeast into Frijoles Canyon and on to the Rio Grande, passing en route the main tourist areas at Bandelier. The plan for the burn (see the NPS summary below) called for initial ignition ("Phase 1") to be in the rincon, followed by flanking fires ("Phase 2") along the slightly higher country east and west of Frijoles Creek. Ignition of the Phase 1 burn was scheduled for May 4, 2000.

In the aftermath of the disaster, Bandelier officials came under intense criticism for this plan, and particularly, for proceeding with it in the face of what appeared to be powerful contraindications. The main bone of contention was wind. The Jemez Mountains are prone to strong winds in the spring that frequently exceed 50 miles per hour (80 km/h). Critics insisted that the likelihood of such winds while the controlled burn was in progress was so great, and the risk of resulting loss of control so severe, that the burn should never have been attempted at that time of year. At the same time, Bandelier officials faced a most disagreeable dilemma. Proceeding with the burn risked disaster if control was lost, as indeed happened; but failure to do the burn might also be disastrous, because the entire southern slope of Cerro Grande was tinder-dry and ready to ignite catastrophically in the event of a lightning strike (hardly unusual in the Jemez in the spring) or human carelessness with fire. The same winds that militated against starting the controlled burn might then drive the uncontrolled fire toward Los Alamos, with terrible consequences. In any case, the controlled burn was indeed initiated on May 4, and things rapidly got out of hand.

[edit] Timeline

4 May 2000 Prescribed burn was begun in the late evening.
5 May 2000 Control lines were burned through on east side during late morning. Wildland fire declared in early afternoon and a Type 3 incident command established for fire suppression.
6 May 2000 Fire line constructed using pre-existing control lines.
7 May 2000 Fire behavior became increasing erratic with spotting by noon.
8 May 2000 A Type 1 incident management team assumed command in the early morning. Los Alamos National Laboratory closed until further notice.
10 May 2000 The town of Los Alamos was evacuated at noon. That evening, 235 homes in Los Alamos were destroyed.
11 May 2000 The nearby community of White Rock was evacuated shortly after midnight, including many evacuees from Los Alamos.
15 May 2000 Evacuation order was lifted.
18 May 2000 Los Alamos residents were allowed to return.
22 May 2000 Los Alamos National Laboratory began phased reopening.
6 June 2000 Cerro Grande fire was declared contained.
20 July 2000 Cerro Grande fire was declared extinguished.

Sunday: May 7, 2000	Monday: May 8, 2000	Tuesday: May 9, 2000	Wednesday: May 10, 2000
Thursday: May 11, 2000	Friday: May 12-19, 2000

[edit] Aftermath

A Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation Team (BAER) was assigned to assess the damage and to implement a rehabilitation plan to reduce further natural resource damage. During July 2000, approximately 7000 hydromulching and hydroseeding flights by Air Tractors were carried out on 1,600 acres (6.5 km²) of the burned area to reduce erosion and speed revegetation. A particular concern was the possibility of flooding in areas downstream of the burned zone. The town of Los Alamos, the national laboratory, and the lower parts of the burned area are all sited on the Pajarito Plateau, an area of extensive canyons and mesas in which surface runoff tends to concentrate in the canyon bottoms. This tendency was exacerbated in Cerro Grande's aftermath by the fact that the soil in the burned areas had become hydrophobic, raising the specter of drastically increased water flow in the streams in the canyons that the existing streambeds may not have been able to handle. This concern, coupled with the prospect of monsoonal rains that typically begin in about July in the area, made it urgent to deal with the possibility of flooding. In the event, the monsoon of the summer of 2000 was not particularly intense, and damage from flooding was generally minimal.

The presence of Los Alamos National Laboratory in and downstream of the burned area posed several unusual problems in remediation, beyond the ones resulting directly from destruction of some of the institution's buildings by fire. One of the most serious involved the Los Alamos Critical Experiments Facility (LACEF), a remote site for conducting research in nuclear criticality safety that housed substantial quantities of special nuclear material. The LACEF laboratories were built in the bottom of Pajarito Canyon, another of the many canyons of the Pajarito Plateau, and there were concerns that flooding might reach the laboratories and endanger the nuclear materials stored there. These were met by construction of a large, temporary "dry dam" upstream of LACEF to temporarily sequester surges of flood waters that, it was thought, might result if an intense thunderstorm happened to rain heavily on the terrain drained by Pajarito Canyon. No such storms or floods actually happened, but the dry dam, which had an incongruous appearance in its setting, remained for several years until vegetation had recovered sufficiently to retain runoff. Other problems arose from soot generated by the fire, which seeped into buildings, shorting out electrical equipment and clogging HEPA filters necessary to the operation of clean rooms at some of the laboratories. Resolving these problems took several years in some cases.

Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) mobilized to provide relief to the residents of Los Alamos who had been burned out of their homes. A compound of portable buildings was emplaced in a part of the town that had not been reached by the fire, near the county fairgrounds. This afforded some relief to residents, some of whom were able to move into this temporary housing by the end of June 2000. However, there were complaints from residents about the timeliness and thoroughness of the FEMA response. The temporary structures have now been removed and most of the displaced residents have settled into new homes, although reconstruction of the burned area continues as of 2006.

A re-examination of forest fire prevention techniques was already in progress at the time of the Cerro Grande Fire and received added impetus from the damage the fire inflicted. The far larger Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona, as well as several other fires in the western United States in 2002, completed the process of bringing forest fires into political focus, leading to the establishment of the Healthy Forests Initiative in 2003. This initiative remains controversial, and its applicability to the relatively sparse forests of the Jemez Mountains that were consumed in the Cerro Grande Fire is unclear. It is certainly clear, however, that significant thinning of the coniferous forest of the Jemez has occurred in the years following Cerro Grande.

Santa Clara Canyon, devastated by Cerro Grande, remains closed to the public along with the Puye Cliff Dwellings. The people of the Santa Clara Pueblo who formerly earned income through tourism now operate the Big Rock Casino in Española, New Mexico. A forty-member forestry crew with members from the Eight Northern Pueblos has built 3,000 small dams (to minimize pollution of Santa Clara Creek), and planted one million trees on 3,500 acres (14 km²).

[edit] Image gallery

Smoke Plume and Helicopter	Helicopter refilling from LA reservoir	Burning home in Los Alamos	Destroyed homes in northwestern Los Alamos
Destroyed homes on Arizona St.	Camp May road and LA reservoir	Blackened hills west of Los Alamos	Forest soon after the fire