Las Conchas Wildfire – Day 8
Another good day with containment almost doubling and minimal fire expansion.
They are also reporting that Investigators Determine Cause of Las Conchas Fire:
Investigators believe the fire started after an aspen tree was blown down onto nearby power lines during a period of strong winds. The contact resulted in the line arcing, which then caused the tree to catch fire. Heat and flame caused the line to snap, which then allowed the burning tree to fall onto the ground where the fire spread into nearby vegetation.
Information from the current Las Conchas Wildfire InciWeb Page
- Date Started: 6/26/2011
- Location: Jemez Ranger District, Santa Fe National Forest; approximately 12 miles southwest of Los Alamos off NM 4 at mile marker 35, New Mexico
- Cause: Falling tree hit power lines
- Size: 123,563 acres [193 miles² 500 km²] based on infrared data
- Percent Contained: 19%
- Injuries to Date: 4
- Residences: 410 threatened; 63 destroyed; 3 damaged
- Commercial Property: 45 threatened; 5 destroyed; 3 damaged
- Outbuildings: 110 threatened; 32 destroyed
- Number of Personnel: Approximately 2,164 including 56 hand crews
- Equipment: 8 dozers, 81 engines, 30 watertenders
- Aircraft: 18 helicopters, 5 air tankers
- Incident Commander: Dan Oltrogge, Area Command Team 1
Evacuation orders were lifted for the City of Los Alamos at 8 am this morning. A flash flood warning was issued for the area north of NM State Highway 4.
Overcast skies and higher relative humidity continued to moderate fire behavior and assist firefighters in making good progress. Rain-producing thunderstorms began around noon today and are expected to continue into the evening. For some areas of the fire, crews pulled back to paved roads because heavy rains created dangerous road conditions. In some areas, winds produced by thunderstorms pushed the surface fire in all directions. Most of the growth was in the north and northwest areas, with some short-ranged spotting. Several areas within the fire perimeter continued to burn generating large amounts of smoke.
Firefighters continued to mop up and secure fireline on many sections of the fire today. Firefighters were able to burn fuels, which resulted in improved fire lines on the north end of the fire in the Valles Caldera. This effort was conducted by ground and air resources, which included five air tankers. Four of the air tankers were military C-130 MAFFS (Modular Airborne Firefighting Systems).
Firefighters continue to improve and prepare the southern control line along Forest Road 266. Minimal fire activity on the southern end of the fire allowed crews direct access.
Bearhead Peak experienced minimal fire activity today.
Fire crews and equipment remain in the Vallecitos de Los Indios and Sierra Los Pinos areas to provide structure protection.
Utility crews began repairs to restore power lines in Bland Canyon. Crews will continue to work on clearing the roads into Bland Canyon to allow local residents to return to their properties in the near future.
The condition of Forest Road 89 in Cochiti Canyon is very unstable. Numerous large diameter trees have fallen across the road. This coupled with the unstable soils on the hillsides that have collapsed into the roadway are making it extremely unsafe to move any type of equipment through the area. Opening the road to the public will not occur until the area can be restored. An alternate route for residents to access their property in Cochiti Canyon is being determined.
Firefighters will continue to prepare and complete control lines around the City of Los Alamos as well as maintain existing fire lines in adjacent areas.
Resource advisors from local pueblos continue to collaborate with the incident management teams to determine how to protect sensitive historical and cultural sites in the burned area. Twenty archeologists are working with crews and equipment to advise and provide input to plans. Archeologists will begin to conduct site assessments on high priority areas before monsoons arrive. Currently, the fire has burned over sites but almost no damage has resulted from suppression activities.
[For the latest information click on the Fire symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Fires” for all of the posts related to wildfires on this site.]
6 comments
Strange as it may seem, I am glad to see LANL reopening Wednesday. Apart from everyone’s rejoicing at the apparent avoidance of a potential disaster there, I actually have a very indirect connection with them: one of their researchers taught various sorts of discrete mathematics at Rice University while on sabbatical. He was a very patient man, and I learned a lot from him (all of which I have since forgotten, including his name). For Los Alamos, what he did was… well, actually, I don’t know, because he couldn’t tell us, for obvious reasons.
A lot of what they do us pure research. They do a lot of military stuff, but a good deal of that has wider uses, as when they used a military precision surveillance system to help evacuees find out what happened to their property. That is the sort of thing that would be invaluable to emergency management people throughout the US, and could be very useful to search and rescue operations.
The funding problems that many agencies have would be eased if they would demonstrate some of their capabilities, and the products of their research. If people don’t know that the assistance is available, they certainly can’t ask for it.
The funding problems that many agencies have would be eased if they would demonstrate some of their capabilities, and the products of their research.
My understanding is that the director’s breakfast menu is classified at Los Alamos, because… well, because. After all, anything that’s classified can’t be FOIA’ed and create a scandal, so the rule of thumb in any agency generating classified documents and research is to classify *everything*, even things that are of no conceivable use against America. If LANL had invented aspirin, it would have been immediately classified — don’t want them Commies err Islamists to get headache relief after all, right?
– Badtux the Unclassified Penguin
Yes. Badtux, and that is why people don’t think they get anything for their money, because useful products aren’t shared, they are classified. This is one of the reasons people talk about all of the things that started with the space program, because NASA actually shared some information and allowed some of its technology to be made available to the public.
GPS is a prime example of over classification. It is extremely useful for a lot of things that aren’t military, and yet the military fought telling anyone about it forever. People worked it out on their own, so you can’t even get royalties or licensing fees from the technology.
Having been immersed in the NSA where even the toilet paper is classified, one of my common complaints was that the only people who didn’t know certain things because of classification were the American people, and that just wasn’t right.
Yeah, it was like when Nixon was bombing Cambodia. That was classified. Excuse me? The Cambodians damn well knew they were getting bombed, you can’t exactly miss the fact that big-ass B-52’s are flying over your head and carpet-bombing your village! Yet the moment the press mentioned that, err, Nixon was bombing Cambodia, there was a flurry of attempts to silence or intimidate anybody who was leaking this “classified” information. Classified from WHOM? Certainly not the Cambodians, who knew they were being bombed. Certainly not the North Vietnamese, who knew they were being bombed. It’s all about protecting bureaucrats and politicians, not about protecting the USA, in the end…
But I get a feeling I’m preaching to the choir already, so… :).
You don’t make friends when you point out that the executive order that regulates classification specifically says it cannot be used to prevent embarrassment or hide crimes. I think we could go on all week about the abuse of those provisions now that Wikileaks has provided so many examples.