Wildfire risk top concern for residents as county updates disaster plan
Document, meant to be overhauled every 5 years, to evaluate natural hazards to county with proposals for cutting risks
EDGEWOOD — The threat of wildfire weighs on southern Santa Fe County resident Tammy Scarlott-Maynard.
She lives in San Pedro, a community evacuated during the Golden Fire seven years ago. She was home with her 2-year-old when she looked out her window and saw the fire “seconds” before an officer knocked on her door, advising her to evacuate.
Fire is a top concern for many residents who are getting involved in Santa Fe County’s effort to update its Hazard Mitigation Plan, including those who attended a public meeting Wednesday in Edgewood.
The plan was first created in 2016 and adopted two years later, after state and federal reviews. The county must maintain the plan to qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency hazard mitigation grants.
The county intends to update the plan every five years, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the revision that should have occurred in 2021 or 2022. Instead, it began in January, county
Emergency Management Coordinator Ignacio Dominguez told residents at Wednesday’s meeting.
The updated plan, expected to number several hundred pages, will evaluate the risks of a wide range of natural hazards across the county and recommend “feasible and cost-effective” projects to reduce those risks, said Krystian Murray, a member of the consulting firm H20 Partners. The county hired the Austin, Texas-based firm for about $66,000 to help revise the plan.
A skim of the 2016 Hazard Mitigation Plan — a detailed assessment of just about every disaster that could affect
the county, finding it “vulnerable to several hazards” — is enough to get the heart racing.
The hazards deemed most significant at the time included dam failures, flash floods, potential hazardous materials-related incidents and fires.
All those risks have likely remained significant, Murray said.
Santa Fe County has multiple high-hazard dams that could be eligible for federal funding, Dominguez said. And the 2016 plan predicted a once-in-100-year-flood, or a “1% annual chance” flood, could cause $71 million in losses countywide.
Spills of hazardous materials such as radioactive waste is a concern due to the “sheer volume” of shipments moving across the county from Los Alamos National Laboratory — although none of a few dozen spills of hazardous materials over the past 50 years have been very damaging, the 2016 plan noted.
It estimated $3.5 billion worth of property in unincorporated areas of
the county was exposed to wildfire hazards, with about 18,000 people living in wildland-urban interface communities where fire risk is highest.
Between 1988 and 2015, the county had three fires of more than 10,000 acres, so it is “reasonable to expect that large scale wildfire could impact the County in the future,” the plan said.
The updated plan will, for the first time, assess the risks of “space weather,” or periods of high activity on the sun’s surface that can knock out internet, electricity and even radio signals, Murray said.
It also will newly incorporate climate change predictions.
Murray called climate change modeling a “huge part” of the updated plan. As average global temperatures rise, many local natural hazards are projected to become more frequent and severe, she said.
Hotter and drier conditions, for example, increase fire risk — which is already a focus of the existing mitigation plan, Dominguez said.
At Wednesday’s meeting, a handful of residents from Edgewood and surrounding communities said they have been forming evacuation plans, hosting neighborhood “annual fuel reduction parties” and renting livestock to reduce fuel loads on their land to mitigate fire risk. They pestered fire department leaders about what more can be done.
Scarlott-Maynard said during the fire she escaped seven years ago, everyone’s phones went out almost immediately.
“We have no cellphone coverage, and we have elderly individuals who live 10 to 15 minutes up the mountain,” she said. “If they’re not notified on time, they’ll die up there,” she said.
Reducing fuel for fires and coordinating with utility companies to improve tree trimming near power lines were two mitigation actions prescribed for the county in the 2016 plan. Other actions included improving public warnings for emergencies, dam monitoring, stream bank stabilization and the county’s capability to respond to an incident involving nuclear materials.
Santa Fe County has received no grant funding from FEMA for hazard mitigation since 2018, spokeswoman Olivia Romo wrote in an email.
Nonetheless, since then, officials have expanded the county’s emergency alert system, which can ping any phones in a set geographic area, and the fire department has expanded a program that helps homeowners make their properties more wildfire resistant, Dominguez said.
He and other leaders have encouraged public input on the plan to shape the county’s priorities going forward.
“We’re not trying to create projects we have no hope of accomplishing,” he said. “We want to accomplish these things.”
H20 Partners aims to complete a draft of the new Hazard Mitigation Plan by June, Murray said. Then there will be another two-week public comment period before the county submits the plan for state and federal approval.