The sprawling Cerro Pelado wildfire that encompassed more than 60 square miles in the spring of 2022 and nearly reached Los Alamos was not caused by climate change, but by the U.S. Forest Service during a prescribed burn that went awry.
According to an Associated Press report, the fire began April 22, 2022, and came within a few miles of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the surrounding residential area. By the time it was contained roughly two months later, burned 45,605 acres. There were no evacuation orders and no fatalities, although three residential properties and several commercial buildings were destroyed.
In tracing the roots of the blaze, investigators determined it began with a burn of piles of forest debris commissioned by the Forest Service. The burn became a holdover fire, smoldering undetected under wet snow for months without betraying signs of heat or smoke.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham stated she was “outraged over the U.S. Forest Service’s negligence that caused this destruction.” Last spring, the Forest Service stopped all prescribed burn operations for 90 days in order to conduct a review of its procedures and policies.
This is not the first time that prescribed burns led to fiery chaos – the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire that swept through residential areas of Los Alamos and across 12 square miles of the laboratory campus started as a prescribed burn and ended with the destruction of 230 homes and 45 structures at the lab. In 2011, another fire burned at the fringes of the lab but did not do significant damage to the campus buildings.
“The warming climate is making our forests more vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires,” said U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM). “That’s a reality that our Forest Service can and must urgently respond to when deciding when and how to do prescribed burns. We cannot catch up to this reality if it takes nearly a year to even make the findings on the Cerro Pelado Fire public.”
Photo: Aveffinix / Wikimedia Commons
