New Mexico has suffered two serious forest fires caused by prescribed burns that escaped their intended acreage. The Hermit Peak Fire, and the Cerro Grande Fire both burned down hundreds of houses, displaced people, destroyed family property and soured many people on prescribed fire. Ironically, both fires also reinforced the need for more prescribed burning.
The Cerro Grande and Hermit Peak wildfires were caused by negligent fire crews that failed their primary mission out of haste and hubris. Rightly, the federal government is compensating the Hermit Peak victims (though too slowly).
In the big picture, the landscape around Santa Fe and northern New Mexico is fire starved and hungry for fire of any kind. Many of our local forests hosted frequent fires for millions of years before modern humans arrived with our fire fear and materialistic view of the woods.
Fire will find our forests no matter what. Fire is not optional, rather it is inevitable. Scientists are sure that fire burned over the forest floor every 15 years before 1890 in many New Mexico forests. Fires were set by lightning or people and they kept the forest and the grass healthy for diverse wildlife.
Sheep and cattle grazing starting in the 1880s ruined the grass cover that used to bring low fire to the woods and valleys. Thickets of trees grew in the bare dirt left behind by sheep. Those thickets of trees burned in Cerro Grande and Hermit Peak Fires at ferocious intensity.
Our collective mistake is in believing that fire is bad and that we can keep it away with fancy technology. The longer we suppress fire, the more explosive it becomes when lightning or humans starts it. What was remarkable about much of the land burned by Hermit Peak/Calf Canyon Fire was that it hadn’t burned for more than a century. The intensity of the fire was inevitable, the tragedy was that inept fire managers started the fire. Fire in that area would have happened sooner or later, but if a dirt bike had started it there would have been no compensation for property owners.
The US Forest Service is scrambling to correct the mistakes of generations of foresters who believed that all fire was bad until the 1990s. Overgrazing, logging, and fire suppression has left much of our forests in a mess and the only realistic way to correct these past errors is with prescribed fire. Thinning close to homes and towns needs to happen too, but the ultimate tool to protect wildlife habitat and ensure safety from future firestorms is prescribed fire.
The Forest Service is a human organization, but they took seriously the lessons of the Hermit Peak and the Cerro Grande Fires. After Hermit Peak Forest Service Chief Randy Moore paused all burning while a thorough review of practices happened. Locally, the Santa Fe Forest Supervisor now requires deeper reviews and supervision of all prescribed fires.
We don’t hear about the prescribed fires that go well. Less than 1% of prescribed burns escape. Most go exactly as planned and they nurture the forest and help protect homes. Tens of thousands of local acres need to burn and will burn. Our challenge is to ramp up prescribed burning over much larger areas before a dry, windy spring brings the next uncontrollable wildfire that eliminate forests and lay ruin to homes and towns.
Let’s give the agency’s a chance to prove they can learn and do what needs to be done. Any questions? Go look at the forests above Los Alamos or Mora to see what high severity fire does to a landscape.
Tom Ribe
