NO FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
Air Force works on mitigation, habitat restoration efforts
A mesa top in the Manzanos may be the most tranquil part of Kirtland Air Force Base.
A deer munches on grass in an opening between the trees. It doesn’t seem to be bothered by a few visitors milling about just a few yards away on this breezy July morning.
A group of men is operating machinery knocking down trees. The sound of chain saws can be heard in the distance.
This crew would like to keep this portion of the base 7,500 feet up in the mountains pretty peaceful.
As members of the Kirtland Wildland Support Module, they know full well the alternative.
“When you have a wildfire on a windy day, let’s say the middle of June, and say the winds are 25 miles per hour, there’s nothing to stop it until the winds stop or it hits something in the open,” module leader Robert Morales said. “By doing this, we’re creating a fuel break. When it happens, the fire’s going to hit the ground. It’s going to slow down quite a bit. It’ll give the fire
fighters a chance to come and make a stand. The retardant works a lot better if it’s here in the open.”
What they’re doing is thinning out a forest that’s pretty thick. Morales estimates there’s between 2,000 and 3,000 trees per acre on the Air Force’s portion of the mountain that borders U.S. Forest Service land and private land in the Cibola National Forest.
“That includes the old growth and the saplings,” he said. “We’ve got ponderosa pine, the piñon pine, juniper and also oak.”
That’s plenty of fuel for a large forest fire. And that is what happened almost 10 years ago on this area of the base that the Department of Defense withdrew for use from the Forest Service in the early 1940s during World War II.
The Main Fire raged on a portion of the Air Force’s land on the mountain, threatening nearby homes in August 2009.
The six-person crew has been working since early April trying to prevent something like that from happening again, while restoring habitat along the way.
The team is conducting wildfire mitigation and implementing a natural resources program, including ecosystem restoration, large fuel breaks and creating an open canopy of ponderosa, juniper and piñon.
Assistant module leader Greg Valdez said the ultimate objective is that if a fire is started on the military base, “we can make our best effort to prevent it from leaving the installation and going into forest service or private land.”
“It’s very time consuming because of the volume of trees and materials involved,” he said. “With a fire, it’s heat, oxygen and fuel, those are the elements you need for combustion. We’re removing one of the elements, which is fuel, to slow or stop the fire process . ... We’re removing one of the basic components that you have to have to have a fire.”
Mild wildland fire season
It helps that New Mexico is going through an unusually mild wildland fire season, according to Southwest Coordination Center meteorologist Chuck Maxwell, which frees up the module to work on mitigation efforts rather than battling fires.
The crew is also responsible for fire protection at Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis and Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo.
“Our (wildfire) season is pretty much winding down,” Maxwell said. “With the exceptionally wet and snowy winter and spring, there hasn’t been that much time to get things going now that the monsoons have started. It’s been one of the most tranquil wildland fire seasons here in a long, long time in terms of (fire) suppression.”
Maxwell said there were some fires burning around the state but they were “low intensity, blowing fuels off, but nothing making CNN. ... We should be right around peak season. It’s from the end of June to the end of July until the rains come. It would not be unusual to see smoke in the air, there’d be a large wildfire or more going on around in the state. The fact that that’s not occurring is comforting.”
Morales estimates the team has cleared approximately 70 acres so far with plans to do 5,000 acres total.
It seems like a daunting task, one that he and Valdez say will take decades to accomplish. It’s a job Morales admits he will probably not be around to see completed.
“We’ll flag a unit of maybe 15-20 acres,” Morales said. “That’s our target for the month. Once we get that unit done, we flag another unit. That way there is a beginning and end to our work rather than say, ‘My goodness, we’ve got about 5,000 acres to do.’ ... It makes it more manageable than thinking about how much work we need to do.”
He said his crew works on thinning the forest about six hours a day. It’s a little more than an hour trip each way to and from their base camp. They also spend as much as an hour some days doing maintenance work on their equipment, which includes three vehicles with masticators and a mulcher, along with chain saws.
“It can be pretty hard on the equipment,” Morales said.
They are beginning to see some of the fruits of their labor. They’ve thinned portions of the forest to about 200 trees per acre, with a goal of restoring the habitat to what it was like 150 years ago. With that progress is the return of wildlife to the land that they’ve cleared.
“As we open up the canopy, we’ve seen a lot of grass come in,” Morales said. “We see a lot of deer in the opening, because they really like the opening so they can see predators from a long way . ... I think it’s kind of neat.”
They’ve also seen turkeys and a bear. “We’ve had a bear here in camp messing around,” he said. “He knocked over the water tank. We have to make sure we keep everything bear-free.”
Morales said there are plans for prescribed burns in the Manzanos portion of the base, but he noted the project is not ready for that yet.
“In about two or three years, they’ll be ready for us to put fire on the ground,” Morales said. “Down in the lower part of the base, we plan to do the grassland. The problem we’re having on the lower areas is the juniper invasion of the grasslands. We’re hoping to eliminate some of that invasion with fire, slow it down a little bit before that area turns into a woodland.”