Rain expected
Moisture from expected storms could help — but flooding might be an issue this weekend.
A surge of tropical moisture expected to bring heavy rain to Northern New Mexico on Saturday is good news for firefighters working to finish containing a 36,000-acre fire near Cimarron and crews dealing with other hot spots in parched forests.
The bad news is that downpours could cause flooding, especially around burn scars, as well as the possibility that lightning strikes could ignite more fires.
National Weather Service forecasters in Albuquerque say remnants of Tropical Storm Bud moving up from Mexico could drop a half-inch of rain on the Santa Fe area and almost an inch in the northeast section of the state, where the Ute Park Fire has burned since May 31. Firefighters had 95 percent of that blaze contained as of Thursday.
The tropical storm, which at one time reached Category 4 hurricane strength over the Pacific Ocean, hit the southern end of the Baja California Peninsula on Thursday morning and is expected to generate storms as far north as Kansas over the weekend.
“There’s always going to be that concern of flash flooding,” said Brittney Van Der Werff, spokesperson for the Southwest Incident Management Team handling the Ute Park Fire, which came within a mile of the village of Cimarron.
Now communities around the Ute Park Fire are preparing for a new danger: water.
“That’s the way we transition in New Mexico. We go from fire to flood in a matter of days, sometimes weeks if we’re lucky,” meteorologist Kerry Jones said in a conference call this week. “We have that concern. It doesn’t take a lot of
rain to cause flash floods.”
The reason rain on a recent burn scar is so dangerous, Jones explained, is that hot fires can make the soil under the forest floor water-repellent. Instead of absorbing rainfall, the soil acts more like pavement and water runs off quickly, which can cause flash floods carrying ash, mud and debris.
Some other recent burn scars in the state could see an even heavier deluge. For example, closer to the Arizona border, the Bluewater and Diener Canyon burn scars from April, and the Buzzard Fire, which is still burning in the Gila Wilderness, could see as much as an inch and a half of rain.
“Ordinary rainfall on a burned watershed, especially a new one, can be lifethreatening,” Jones warned.
New Mexico Department of Transportation spokeswoman Emilee Cantrell, said the agency is doing what it can to protect roadways from potential flooding. She said workers by Wednesday afternoon had put up 9,800 feet of concrete barriers along U.S. 64, which runs through the Ute Park burn area, to help block floodwaters and rock slides.
Locals in the village of Cimarron and staff at the Philmont Scout Ranch, a sprawling property that was partially scorched by the fire, have been preparing sandbags to use in the event of flooding.
“The town of Cimarron has flooded before,” Luke Martinez, who works on the village’s field crew, said this week. “You’ve just got to take it with the flow and hope for the best.”
But the fear of lightning strikes sparking
more fires in the drought-ravaged state is also very real, said Dwight Koehn, a hydro-meteorological technician for the National Weather Service.
“There will be plenty of lightning strikes, especially in the [Saturday] afternoon period,” he said.
That concerns Bruce Hill, Santa Fe National Forest spokesman.
“Unless there is a lot of rain associated with a lightning strike to help control or extinguish a fire, that could be a concern,” he said.
He said the expected moisture isn’t likely to be enough for the Forest Service to lift recent orders that closed national forest lands to public access.
“It’s gonna take a lot more rain that we would get in a weekend — any weekend — to make that happen,” he said. “There are people who think that if we get one good rain for a couple of hours, we may lift the closure. That’s not going to be the case because we’ve been too dry.”
Since June 1 Forest Service agents have issued 10 written warnings and 23 citations to people who breached the closure policy, he said.
While some may claim they did not know about the policy, Hill said, “Our publicity campaign about the closures has been pretty rigorous, so the public should be well informed by now.”