Crews slow fires but brace for conditions to worsen
ALBUQUERQUE — More than 2,000 firefighters battling the largest U.S. wildfire dug back-up fire lines and rearranged fire engines around homes in northeast New Mexico this week in anticipation of a return to windy, dangerous conditions in the days ahead.
After a break in the weather allowed for significant progress on the ground and from the air in recent days, forecasters issued warnings for high fire danger from southern Nevada through parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado starting Thursday.
“The next three days are going to be the giddyup days,” fire behavior analyst Dennis Burns said Wednesday.
“Crews are out there working as hard as they can to get in line as quickly as possible,” he said during an afternoon briefing at the fire east of Santa Fe stretching northeast toward Taos.
Most of the large fires so far this spring have been in Arizona and New Mexico. The largest has raced across more than 471 square miles of forest that many fire managers have described as “ripe and ready to burn” due to a mega-drought that has spanned decades and warm and windy conditions brought on by climate change.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has said damage estimates for homes and structures could reach more than 1,000 by the time all the assessments are done.
On Wednesday, no new evacuations were ordered and some were relaxed. Burns said the biggest new concern was that thunderstorms packing lightning and strong down-draft winds would fuel the fire again Thursday.
Bulldozers and hand crews were building contingency lines near the town of Angel Fire east of Taos to make sure the flames don’t reach U.S. Highway 64 within about 25 miles of the Colorado line.
“If we are fortunate enough to dodge that bullet, the cloud cover will actually shade out the fuels and moderate the fire behavior a little bit, which is a good thing,” Burns said.
While the fire encompasses an area more than 1.5 times the size of New York City, fire managers said there are pockets of green within the perimeter that could still burn.
“We’re trying to go all the way around the edge of the fire and we want to keep the fire where it is right now,” Jayson Coil, an operations chief assigned to the blaze, said Wednesday of using bulldozers to cut wide lines that can block flames.
President Biden reaffirmed Lujan Grisham of support by the federal government and said every effort will be made to provide immediate help to people in the impacted communities.