Lujan Grisham/Biden fire response doesn’t measure up
Johnson/Clinton acted fast in 2000, took responsibility, made NM whole
During the extreme drought in 2021, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a bill to encourage and increase the number of prescribed burns in New Mexico. It also lowered the liability level when one gets out of hand. If this standard were applied to the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire, those whose property and animals have been destroyed may not be eligible for compensation from those responsible. Fortunately, the governor’s new law does not apply when the federal government burns your house down.
In 2000, the infamous Cerro Grande fire destroyed 407 homes in Los Alamos and White Rock when a National Park Service prescribed burn got out of control. Bill Clinton was President. Gary Johnson was governor.
A comparison of the Clinton/ Johnson and Biden/Lujan Grisham handling of the Cerro Grande and the Hermits Peak/ Calf Canyon fires is a window into the competence of the two.
Nine days after the Cerro Grande fire started, Clinton declared 13 counties a disaster. It took Lujan Grisham a month to get President Biden to make his declaration. By that time, Hermits Peak was the secondlargest fire — and now it’s the largest — in the state’s history.
Fourteen days after the Cerro Grande fire started, Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt is quoted in the New York Times taking responsibility: “the combination of poor planning and bad decisions by the people in the National Park Service and the Forest Service led to a cascading series of events . ... Mistakes began with missing weather information and led to problems from the lack of firefighters, equipment and judgment about a situation that grew increasingly dangerous by the hour.” The same day, the department released a 40-page report on the fire.
As late as May 29, 2022, the Hermits Peak incident report still states, “... forecast weather conditions were within parameters for the prescribed fire . ... ”
A Freedom of Information Act request for information about Hermits Peak, similar to the Cerro Grande fire report, was requested by IntegrityNewMexico.org. The USFS responded it would take months if not years since they are processing requests from 2017 and 2018.
The Clinton/Johnson team was accountable and quickly issued a report, but not the Biden/Lujan Grisham team.
In less time than it took the Forest Service to admit the cause of the Calf Canyon fire, the Cerro Grande Fire Assistance Act was signed into law. Sen. Pete Domenici introduced it and Sen. Jeff Bingaman co-sponsored this legislation compensating the Cerro Grande fire victims.
According to a Government Accounting Report (GAO), New Mexicans were compensated $587,647,000. Pueblos were compensated for the damage to their cultural sites and given the equipment to do the remediation themselves in culturally sensitive ways. People with insurance were paid, then the government dealt with the insurance companies.
GAO found no fraud with the Cerro Grande fire. The legislation allowed people to sue, but few did because the government efficiently made them whole. In contrast, on Facebook, N.M. House Speaker Brian Egolf’s law firm is soliciting Hermits Peak/ Calf Canyon victims to bring lawsuits. Does this reflect his estimation of the Biden/Lujan Grisham team’s competency?
Another question: Did the governor’s new law favoring more prescribed burns during a historic drought have the effect of overriding common sense?
Denise Greenlaw Ramonas worked on energy and a wide range of issues in the United States Senate as a professional staffer for Sen. Pete V. Domenici. She served as the assistant secretary of the Senate for two majority leaders and was elected the first female chief clerk of the N.M. House of Representatives. She was on Domenici’s staff during the Cerro Grande fire and worked on that legislation.