Stiff winds fanning dangerous wildfires
SANTA FE, N.M. >> Thousands of firefighters labored to slow the advance of destructive wildfires in the Southwest as residents braced for dangerously dry, warm and windy conditions in northern New Mexico and adjacent areas that have made the blazes hard to contain.
At least 166 homes have been destroyed in one rural county in northeast New Mexico since the biggest fire burning in the U.S. started racing through small towns east and northeast of Santa Fe on April 22, the sheriff of San Miguel County said.
Authorities on Friday morning urged people to immediately leave a string of sparsely populated canyons and forests on the fringes of the Santa Fe National Forest northwest of Las Vegas, New Mexico, where nearly 1,000 firefighters and emergency personnel were deployed.
Flames were driven forward by steady winds that were expected to persist until Friday evening. A weather update from the U.S. Forest Service described gusts as high as 66 mph.
In a Friday afternoon briefing for the Santa Fe National Forest, operations Chief Jayson Coil said that intelligence gathered from a plane, before winds picked up, reinforced their concerns.
“The fire is moving faster than we originally had anticipated under these conditions and we still have not reached the peak of the wind,” Coil said.
One expert warned that the conditions across the drought-stricken region were a recipe for disaster on the wildlands where some timber is drier than kiln-dried wood.
“It's a very, very dangerous fire day,” fire behavior specialist Stewart Turner said at a briefing on the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest in Las Vegas. “It's a day that as a firefighter, we'll write about, we'll read studies about.”
Matthew Probst, Las Vegas-based medical director for the health clinic network El Centro Family Health, said the nearby fire has swept through impoverished communities already frayed by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Here, you're losing meager homes, but it's everything. It's all they had,” said Probst, a coordinator of county health services for wildfire evacuees.