Talk:La Mesa Fire

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Fire Portal La Mesa Fire is part of WikiProject Fire Service, which collaborates on fire service-related subjects on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
Assessment comments This article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.
Suggested article edit guidelines: To help us prioritise our workload, and in readiness for Wikipedia:1.0, we need to assess our articles for Quality. If this article is Unassessed, please assess it. See the Article Classification for instructions. If you disagree with a rating, you can change it or discuss it at Article Classification. After assessing this article's quality, please make sure it to add it to the Lists at Article Classification, following the grading scheme detailed there.

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject New Mexico, an attempt to better organize and improve articles related to the U.S. state of New Mexico. Join us on our project talk page.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale. If you rate the article please leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

The references on the La Mesa Fire at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico in 1977 contain an error. It states that there were no fatalites, but there was one fatality as firecrews "cut and run" as the fire exploded into a firestorm. A Bandelier National Monument employee suffered a heart attack and died. A traditional New Mexico marker, a descanso, indicates the place where he died near the entrance to Bandelier National Monument. This fire was one of the first of an explosive new kind of firestorm in ponderosa pine forests and was one of three fires, the first in 1954, the second the La Mesa fire and the third, the Dome Fire, that warned--or should have--Los Alamos of its vulnerability to catastrophic firestorms. That reality came to pass in May 2000 with the "millenium fire," or the Cerro Grande fire, the first "super fire" of the 21st century.