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An aerial image shows homes destroyed by the Cerro Grande fire.

‘Forests of Gasoline’

New Mexico was taught lessons from the Cerro Grande Fire 25 years ago, but was anything learned?

by

Editor’s Note: May 10 marked the 25-year anniversary of the Cerro Grande Fire. Kathleene Parker, who covered the fire and spent 13 years covering Los Alamos, its laboratory and the timber and wildfire situation, was recently inspired to pen this article by the sight of a new cluster of apartments sitting above the edge of Los Alamos Canyon—heavy timber below it. Originally from Durango, Colo., Parker wrote a regional environmental publication for the Denver Public Library before covering Los Alamos. She’s now retired and lives in White Rock.

With the passing of the 25th anniversary of the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire on May 10—during yet another bone-dry spring of the Modern Megadrought—we should consider a wildfire variation of the adage, “Those who don’t learn from (fire and forestry) history are doomed to relive it.”

In the 1990s, Los Alamos and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) were warned, repeatedly, that they were vulnerable to wildfire.  

Today, Los Alamos and New Mexico in general, despite Cerro Grande and other fires, have not acknowledged or addressed the dangerous reality of today’s forests.

As a correspondent for the Santa Fe New Mexican in the 1990s, I authored multiple stories featuring foresters and wildland firefighters who saw Los Alamos’ peril.  I also witnessed, firsthand, the power and destruction of wildfires—Cerro Grande, Dome, Missionary Ridge, Los Conchas—in places I love.

In early 2000, because of ignorance about how dangerous nearby forests were, some Los Alamos residents objected to cutting trees to create “fuel breaks” (thinned timber) between heavy timber and town—any trees, even in forests desperate for thinning, even in severe drought. One said she’d rather see “the whole damn forest burn” than to see a single tree cut.  She got her wish, though, sadly, her home survived as her neighbors, who had wanted timber thinning, lost theirs in the Cerro Grande Fire.

But Santa Fe National Forest forester, Bill Armstrong, had persisted in his determination to thin timber along Los Alamos’ most fire-prone south and west sides—where New Mexico’s ubiquitous northeast-flowing prevailing wind would likely carry any fire that ignited south of town. 

He sometimes called to ask, “Could you do just one more story on the wildfire danger?”  

His main concern was thick tangles of overcrowded, sick, explosively dry timber between Bandelier National Monument’s 10,155-foot-high Cerro Grande (grand hill) and Los Alamos. He and other fire experts saw that as a timber fuse leading directly into town. He was also concerned about Santa Fe and White Rock, both surrounded by unnaturally heavy growths of piñon and juniper, woodlands that should look more like those around La Cienega and Santa Domingo.

I began to understand the ghastly reality of wildfire when U.S. Forest Service personnel and journalists, including myself, witnessed—closer and more shockingly than I ever dreamed possible—the almost other-worldly “blowup” of the April 1996 Dome Fire at Bandelier. 

That blaze triggered one of the largest fire-shelter deployments in Forest Service history, as 32 firefighters hovered under their aluminum foil and fiberglass shelters as the fire blew over.  A new Jemez Springs firetruck parked nearby—137 miles on the odometer—melted onto its blackened frame.

The blowup—in a bowl-shaped valley at the edge of the Dome Wilderness—was at once incomprehensibly horrible and incomprehensibly beautiful. Huge trees didn’t burn; they simply disappeared. Others twisted and writhed as though dying animals, a scene that spawned metaphors about hell on Earth. 

And between us and the blowup, as we looked down from a Forest Service road, huge air tankers dropped retardant. As one flew off for more, another replaced it and continued the measures. The hope wasn’t to extinguish the fire but keep it from backing north into heavy timber around Cerro Grande. Those efforts and dying winds spared Los Alamos in 1996.

New Mexicans, Southwesterners and certainly the news media—who endlessly, and wrongly, blame such fires on climate change (assumedly meaning if we all buy EVs, it will somehow thin too-dense forests)—have little understanding that today’s forests bear little resemblance to forests 100 years ago. 

Today’s forests have become what some experts call “forests of gasoline”—and they should be lived in accordingly.   

On Wednesday, May 10, 2000, as the Cerro Grande Fire, the first long-warned-of “mega fire,” moved into Los Alamos—with it all playing out, live, on national TV—it set previously unimaginable records for burn size and fire intensity.  It also triggered what was to become the first of many urban wildfire evacuations—that as New Mexicans opened their homes and hearts to Los Alamos.

The Cerro Grande Fire, in horrible irony, was ignited by a prescribed burn intended to prevent the Cerro Grande Fire.

The burn, set by Bandelier National Monument—though some Los Alamos residents begged that it not be lit—was in high-altitude grass and brush and was meant to prepare Cerro Grande for more thinning later. (From the top of Cerro Grande—a larger mountain than it appears—Los Alamos and its national laboratory rest immediately below and to the north.) The burn was lit Thursday evening, May 4, but hours later, on May 5, it was “declared”—not a blowup, not major flames, but behavior sufficiently beyond behavior allowed in the plan—that it was designed a wildfire. The Cerro Grande Fire was born.

A Type 3 National Park Service incident commander, Paul Gleason, a veteran of wildland firefighting, arrived from Denver to take command of the fire by controversially ordering more line ignited on the prescribed burn. It was a move he later told me he thought would contain the escape. However, fire had also left the prescribed burn area and moved into a pile of dead timber stacked below. Others later slammed Gleason’s approach, accusing him of trying to continue the burn instead of implementing full fire suppression. That would’ve included aggressive retardant drops on the burn and on the dead timber at a time when there was a Red Flag warning for Sunday.

Indeed, as that wind event hit, the escape quickly transformed into a massive wildfire that exploded off Cerro Grande and into heavy timber—the dreaded fuse leading into Los Alamos.

Several factors affect wildfire: fuels, weather, humidity and wind, especially wind. Cerro Grande was driven by what a U.S. Forest Service employee Kevin Joseph called at the time, “a Santa Ana-like wind event.” If the term is familiar, it’s because Santa Ana winds drove wildfires in Los Angeles last January. 

As Joseph and Bill Armstrong raced north in a Forest Service truck on NM-502 along Los Alamos National Laboratory’s west side, below and parallel to the fire, the blaze hit speeds that Joseph estimated at over 50 mph. He saw no other option but to radio for crews to rush Camp May Road to build defenses.

Camp May, the road to Pajarito Ski Area, climbs uphill parallel to Los Alamos Canyon. Crews were ordered to bulldoze timber along Camp May and ignite “backfires” as the fire approached—sucking air itself—in hopes of drawing the backfires toward it too, with them burning the fuels it needed to move forward. 

Some Los Alamos residents later blamed the backburn for the Cerro Grande Fire, which was absurd. What burned Los Alamos was the firestorm that, but for the backburn, would have burned Los Alamos Sunday night.

Indeed, that evening, the wind died, and the fire held at the south edge of Los Alamos Canyon, though residential areas just across the narrow canyon from the fire were evacuated.

Strangely, Los Alamos seemed to rapidly grow used to its unwelcome new neighbor, perhaps because the multi-agency Type 1 Federal Incident Team, which assumed command of the fire on Monday, May 8, said that, while everyone needed to be ready to evacuate, they thought they could hold the fire at the canyon. That became one of Cerro Grande Fire’s lessons. Over 11,000 “civilians” were just across a narrow canyon from a wildfire with another Red Flag Warning forecasted; yet, no immediate full evacuation was ordered.

Thinking, in Los Alamos on Wednesday, was perhaps typified by a photo, taken about noon, of a woman sitting on a bench at Ashley Pond, placidly munching a sandwich while clearly oblivious to a giant cloud of smoke and water vapor rising menacingly above her.  As another predicted Red Flag event hit, the fire mushroomed, easily jumped the canyon and was almost immediately into town. Traffic jams rapidly formed on Diamond, Central and other arterials leading off “the Hill,” as a town fled wildfire.

Assuming it didn’t just vaporize trees, the fire left them bent grotesquely northward by its explosive impact. Residents in the Western Area, where the fire entered town, heard what they thought was a huge helicopter hovering low overhead, then realized that they were instead hearing the fire.  One resident said the blaze looked like a giant blast furnace—one without walls—moving bizarrely along, incinerating everything it touched

Armstrong had long believed that when fire hit, all of Los Alamos between Pueblo Canyon and the mountains—the hospital, schools, churches, homes—would burn, with the fire then moving through timber east of the golf course to burn houses and a school on North Mesa, while also moving north to burn houses on Barranca Mesa.  

But Los Alamos caught a break. Just as the fire hit, the wind shifted off northeast prevailing to instead blow due north, meaning fire only grazed Los Alamos’ west side. The Cerro Grande Fire destroyed 235 structures, left over 400 families homeless, killed pets left behind and did over $1 billion in damage. Los Alamos dodged townwide devastation, while LANL’s nuclear stores remained safe.

After the fire, residents returned to see the entire eastern slope of the Jemez Mountains blackened—not a blade of grass or bit of green anywhere except in the canyons—from Cerro Grande in the distant south to where the fire burned out of town in the north.  Some areas burned so hot that everything was gone, no blackened trees, no stumps, just soot and ash.

Some said it looked like an atomic bomb had exploded—irony not lost on the town that developed the first atomic bombs.

Much of what we know about today’s dangerous forests is due to research done in the Jemez Mountains, science long overdue to be applied for us to live more safely in today’s forests.

Forgotten today is that the Cerro Grande Fire moved through a forest of densities often over 3,000 trees per acre—a legacy of 150 years of timber mismanagement—that should have been 150 to 200 trees per acre. That’s especially true as drought, worsened by climate change, continues, with it important to remember that the Southwest over the last 2,000 years has experienced many severe droughts, sometimes lasting 60-80 years.

The first wakeup call about the danger of the region’s forests came when the June 1977 La Mesa Fire—ignited by motorcycles illegally on a mesa in Bandelier—quickly grew from a small plume of smoke into a fast-moving “blowup.”  In the nightmare, a firefighter is memorialized by a Descanso at the park’s entrance. He died of a heart attack likely caused, another firefighter said later, “by the sheer horror of the situation.”  

The La Mesa Fire, the largest in New Mexico to that date, burned 15,444 acres, but its intensity told foresters and scientists that something was terribly wrong with the Southwest’s forests.

In an office at Bandelier rests an enormous slice of wood from pre-logging days ponderosa pine. Cut years ago, the pine it came from was of a size common throughout higher elevations of the Southwest. That cut, so large in circumference it might be from a giant redwood, reflects several hundred years of that tree’s life and of regional fire history.

Throughout prehistory, the region’s mostly enormous ponderosa pines were scorched often by fire, but—as the cut shows—only superficially.  That’s partly because of ponderosa’s fire-resistant bark and partly because fires were almost solely low-burning ground fires. Such “housekeeping” fires removed forest-floor rubble and millions of seedlings that annually sprout in the region’s forests, meaning fire limits tree numbers to a few towering giants with branches far above the ground, interspersed with only occasional smaller trees to form savannas in the high elevations of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado.

Things shifted in the late 19th Century:    

Railroads arrived in the 1880s bringing huge numbers of livestock to graze forests where “multiple use” was the new priority. They grazed away the grass and brush needed to fuel ground fires. Soon, seedling numbers were exploding.

In the early 1900s, aggressive fire-suppression began, based on the incorrect belief that all fires—even small ones—are bad.   

Logging took only the fire-resistant giants but left the small trees.

Forests rapidly converted from savannas to forests of ghastly densities, filled with tangled “dog-ear thickets” and “ladder fuels” that, today, readily carry fire into forest canopies, creating dangerous crown fires.

As Armstrong warned 30 years ago, “With the first hint of drought, this entire region will be on fire,” something fire acreages today dramatically confirm:

The 1996 Dome Fire—in April, unprecedentedly early for fire—burned 16,647 acres.

The 2000 Cerro Grande Fire, the first long-warned-of mega fire, was 43,000 acres.

The 2002 Missionary Ridge Fire, ignited north of Durango, Colo., burned 73,000 acres and blew over Vallecito Lake, at night (when fire should “lay down”), so violently that it picked up boats and RVs, parked in the drought-parched lakebed for safety from fire, and tossed them into surrounding mountains. One firefighter died.

The 2011 Las Conchas Fire, southwest of Los Alamos, burned 156,593 acres, much of it at an acre per second.

The 2012 Whitewater-Baldy Complex Fire (two fires, one in Arizona, one in New Mexico that merged) burned 297,845 acres and, for days, sent smoke rolling into Albuquerque, 250 miles away, so dense that streetlights came on midday.

In 2022, the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Complex Fire—both caused, in one way or another, by attempts at forest thinning with fire and the largest wildfire in New Mexico history—burned 341,735 acres between Santa Fe and Las Vegas in the south to within 15 miles of Angel Fire in the north. Pyrotechnic plumes exploded along the length of the Sangre de Cristos for weeks. Also, in 2022, the Black Fire, in the Gila Mountains, burned 325,136 acres, while the Cerro Pelado Fire near Los Alamos, a “mere” 45,605 acres, was barely a footnote among 2022 fires.

The 2020 August Complex Fire, in California, or 38 smaller fires merged and, at 1.3 million acres, became the first “giga fire.”

The overriding lesson—one not learned—about such “landscape-sized” fires is that they require landscape-appropriate solutions:  

Reduced fuels or totally removed fuels on towns’ boundaries with forests.

Existing developments urged to reduce timber, new developments not allowed until timber is thinned.

Building codes—some, as towns do nothing, now required by insurance companies—requiring fire-resistant materials and “fuels” (trees, bush, decks) away from structures.  

In Colorado, developments with only one exit are illegal, but they still exist in New Mexico.

Proper training: Los Alamos’ firefighters trained in urban firefighting were ill-trained to fight Cerro Grande. Today, Los Alamos, with five fire stations, has one of the best equipped, best trained, fire departments in the nation, including crews trained in both urban and wildland firefighting.

Stop condemning prescribed burn crews and utility companies who unintentionally ignite a long-predicted fire. Instead, it’s time to demand municipal, county, state, and federal leaders who acknowledge and aggressively address the wildfire threat. Sadly, no presidential administration in recent years has. Since millions of acres of dangerous timber cannot all be addressed immediately, we need a priority: effective defenses for towns before a prescribed burn is lit and before a blowup. 

Leadership to find markets for millions of acres of timber thinned mechanically.

Prescribed burn has long been the forgotten stepchild of agencies that prioritize fighting wildfire. Prescribed burns, 25 years after Cerro Grande, remain underfunded, political and poorly conducted.  We need prescribed burns that acknowledge that forests today, with one misstep, will explode. Instead of local Park Service or Forest Service personnel doing burns “on the side,” we need highly trained national crews—that only do prescribed burns—with them extensively trained in fuels, weather, legal requirements for prescribed burn and with absolute independence from local pressure to “just get it done.” A factor in Cerro Grande’s escape was that “contingencies,” or emergency crews designated in the burn plan, were not nearby when they were needed.  Yet, 22 years later, the same thing happened on the Hermit’s Peak burn, with contingencies in distant Taos.

In 1998, Bill Armstrong invited a photographer and me to see where the Oso Complex Fire, north of Los Alamos, had recently burned over 5,000 acres with a blowup in Santa Clara Canyon. As it blew out the canyon, the fire hit several hundred acres of thinned timber—not clearcut, just densities reduced, ladder fuels removed—and dropped to the ground to burn harmlessly through.

That was what Armstrong had wanted in Los Alamos, an example of which today exists in an area thinned along NM 502 west of LANL. If thinning had happened before May 2000, except for “spotting” into town, Los Alamos might have been spared. Yet, even as Los Alamos smoldered in 2000, Armstrong was confronted by an angry resident as he attempted to thin a remaining dangerous stand of timber.

Why, since, have towns like Ruidoso, Cloudcroft, Las Vegas and Silver City not been helped to understand what their most fire-vulnerable areas are and how to create defenses accordingly?  Why is the Los Alamos bedroom community of White Rock, with heavy timber to the south, as vulnerable today to fire as Los Alamos was in 2000?

As well-known author William deBuys said in May 2000, “A town that leads the world in PhDs per capita never thought the matter through. Good luck to the rest of us.”