High winds return to fan N.M. wildfires
LAS VEGAS, N.M. — After a few days of calm allowed some families who had fled wildfires raging in northeast New Mexico to return to their homes, dangerous winds picked up again Sunday, threatening to spread burning embers that could ignite new fires and complicate work for firefighters.
More than 1,500 firefighters were on the fire lines at the biggest blaze east and northeast of Santa Fe, which grew another 8 square miles overnight to an area more than twice the size of Philadelphia. The National Interagency Fire Center said full containment wasn’t anticipated until the end of July.
The area’s largest rural town — Las Vegas, N.M., population 13,000 — appeared safe for now thanks to fire lines dug by bulldozers and other priority preparations last week. But the northern and southern edges of the blaze were still proving tricky for firefighters to contain, particularly given winds as fast as 50 miles per hour, fire spokesperson Todd Abel said.
“It’s been a challenging day. The winds have picked up; they haven’t let up,” Abel said Sunday evening.
A red-flag warning was in effect, kicking off what fire officials predicted would be another “historic, multi-day wind event that could result in extreme fire behavior.”
A few helicopters were able to gather new information from the air on the spread of the flames early Sunday “but they won’t be up there very long because of the winds out there,” Abel said.
“The wind is incredible. It is precedent setting, the amount of wind we are going to have and the duration we are going to have it,” he said Sunday.
“They are predicting the wind to blow all day today, through the night, all day tomorrow so that is a long time for our fire,” he said.
Thousands of residents have evacuated due to flames that have charred large swaths of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northeastern New Mexico — a total of 275 square miles.
Ryan Berlin, fire information officer, said Sunday afternoon the city of Las Vegas itself is “very safe at this point.”
“We even started to repopulate a section of town already,” he said. “Our concern right now is on the southwest portion of the fire which the wind is helping us out, sort of, because it’s blowing the flames back into the fire.”
But Wendy Mason with the New Mexico Forestry Division warned that “by no means” is anyone “out of potential danger.”
“Just because the winds are coming from one direction doesn’t mean they can’t change direction so it’s better to be prepared and have residents ready to go,” she said.
“Any new fire that starts has a good potential of becoming extremely active and any ongoing fires we’ll also see extreme activity because of this historic combination of fire weather that we’re seeing right now,” she added.
Abel said the good news was that additional fire crews continue to arrive from around the West.
Nationwide, close to 2,000 square miles have burned so far this year, with 2018 being the last time this much fire had been reported at this point, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. And predictions for the rest of the spring do not bode well for the West, where long-term drought and warmer temperatures brought on by climate change have combined to worsen the threat of wildfire.