We just emerged from one of the driest winters on record in New Mexico and as the usual spring winds sweep the state, fire officials watch the situation closely and with worry. The possibility of a large fire this summer looms large. The past big fires in northern New Mexico happened because of big fuel accumulations in our long abused forests and because of accelerating climate change. Fire is not the only thing killing Southwest forests.
Not only are we seeing these big fires like Las Conchas and Hermit Peak/Calf Canyon, but we are also seeing mass die-offs of trees in New Mexico and Colorado. Bark beetles kill tens of millions of trees because the trees are weak from the warming and drying of the climate. Fire and bark beetles go hand in hand and other diseases like dwarf mistletoe are killing trees as well. Recent research finds that 50% of the forest between Wyoming and northern New Mexico has died due to temperature related mortality. Some scientists predict that most of our forests will be dead in the Southwest by 2050.
The climate is getting warmer largely because of people burning fossil fuels and the air pollution that results. None of this is news. As air temperatures rise, the air can hold more water vapor and evaporation from trees and the soil increases. In the Southwest where the relative humidity is already normally low, the evaporation from trees is worse than it would be in a humid area.
We are seeing living trees being stressed as the warmer atmosphere evaporates more water from the tree’s leaves than the soil and roots can supply to the tree. This is the vapor deficit and if trees experience high temperatures with drought, then their water plumbing system in the tree fails and the trees die. Larger trees are more vulnerable to vapor pressure deficit. Nate McDowell here at LANL has been pinpointing the exact physiological mechanism of tree death related to high temperatures and vapor pressure deficits.
At the same time, the dry soils and dry living trees lead to ideal conditions for hot, active fires. As temperatures increase, fires become more active, and scientists see the size and severity of fires increasing with temperature and more frequent wind events. As temperatures increase, the atmosphere is more unstable and wind increases, making for firestorms like Las Conchas and Cerro Grande.
These realities affect all forests in the West. We are seeing Giant Sequoia that are 3500 years old succumb to fire in the Sierra Nevada. A 3000-year-old alligator bark juniper in upper Bandelier was killed by the Las Conchas fire. So, the ferocity of these firestorms is unprecedented.
The Las Conchas Fire was a much bigger firestorm than the Cerro Grande Fire. It started from a tree falling on an electrical line southwest of the Valles Caldera National Preserve on June 26, 2011. Bandelier’s engine crew was the first on scene and they did their best to contain the fire, but it got in the treetops almost immediately and burned 46,000 acres in one day, burning an acre per second. It ran right toward Los Alamos, then split into two heads, one running toward Cochiti Canyon and the other north along the mountains above Los Alamos. Had the Cerro Grande fire scar not acted as a buffer, the Las Conchas Fire most likely would have hit Los Alamos from the west with much greater ferocity than the north-running Cerro Grande Fire had years earlier.
The Hermit Peak Fire was an avoidable disaster. The FS sent out a crew of 31 people out to burn 1200 acres in a dry, windy area near Las Vegas, NM. Just like at Cerro Grande they started to burn around the top of their sloping burn unit near the El Polvanire Campground. They had a crew on each side of the unit burning down the hill. Within an hour they had spot fires outside their control lines and people were pulled off the fire line to run around putting out the spot fires. Eventually some of these spot fires got too big to fight by hand and they called for aerial support but it was so early in the fire season, the helicopters and air tankers were not locally available yet. Within 4 hours, they declared their prescribed burn a wildfire and it roared away toward Las Vegas, ultimately burning 341,000 acres and burning 900 structures. This was the Hermit Peak/Calf Canyon Fire.
When Trump II first began, Elon Musk starting to fire wildland firefighters in large numbers across the West. Of course Elon Musk knows nothing about fire or public lands. The South African has probably never heard of the National Parks or the Forest Service. But someone told Elon that we have to have firefighters and someone else frantically started to hire them back. Some came back but many did not. Who would take a dangerous underpaid job when Donald Trump is threatening to fire you at a moment’s notice at any time for no reason other than a general hostility to all federal agencies regardless of the function they serve. Elon has apparently left the Trump regime but he left lots of right wingers behind to continue the destruction of federal agences.
Putting our heads in the sand and following people who deny global warming is not going to work out for humanity. Trump’s climate change denial is an article of faith among the far right in the US and he is working hard to compel the private sector to join this nonsense and he is intimidating academia into abandoning honest science. The longer we delay dealing with the situation, the more it will cost in lives and money. We need to stick with our science and act together regardless of short-term political problems. We don’t have time for backtracking.
