As fire looms, lab peers into blazes’ future

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — Public schools were closed and evacuation bags packed this week as a wildfire crept within a few miles of the city of Los Alamos and its companion U.S. national security lab — where assessing apocalyptic threats is a specialty and wildland fire is a beguiling equation.

People preparing to evacuate included a team of scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory who are tapping supercomputers to peer into the future of wildfires in the American West, where climate change and an enduring drought are fanning the frequency and intensity of forest and grassland fire.

“This actually is something that we’re really trying to leverage to look for ways to deal with fire in the future,” said Rod Linn, a senior lab scientist who leads efforts to create a supercomputing tool that predicts the outcome of fires in specific terrain and conditions.

The high stakes in the research are on prominent display during the furious start of spring wildfire season, which includes a blaze that has inched steadily toward Los Alamos National Laboratory, triggering preparations for a potential evacuation.

Laboratory officials say critical infrastructure is well safeguarded from the fire, which spans 67 square miles.

Wildfires that reach the Los Alamos National Laboratory increase the risk, however slightly, of disbursing chemical waste and radionuclides such as plutonium through the air or in the ashes carried away by runoff after a fire.

This year’s spring blazes also have destroyed mansions on a California hilltop and chewed through more than 422 square miles of tinder-dry northeastern New Mexico. In Colorado, authorities said Friday one person died in a fire that destroyed eight mobile homes in Colorado Springs.