A smattering of summer rain gave a boost to firefighters battling a huge forest fire near Los Alamos, the desert birthplace of the atomic bomb, giving authorities enough confidence to allow about 12,000 people to return home for the first time in nearly a week.
Residents rolled into town Sunday morning, honking their horns and waving to firefighters as the word got out that the roadblocks were lifted and the narrow two-lane highway cut into the side of a mesa leading to Los Alamos was open. They had fled en masse Monday as the fast-moving fire approached the city and its nuclear laboratory.
“It’s scary, but all of the resources here this time, they were ready. They did a magnificent job,” said Michael Shields, eyes tearing up as he returned home to his apartment in the heart of the town.
The town was last evacuated because of the 2000 Cerro Grande fire. That time, residents returned to a town that had lost 200 homes, several businesses and had to cope with damaged utilities and other county enterprises. This time around, residents were returning to a town that is completely intact, although the fire destroyed 63 homes west of town.
Meanwhile, hundreds of employees of the Los Alamos National Laboratory were returning to prepare operations and thousands of experiments for the scientists and technicians who were forced to evacuate days ago. Among the work put on hold were experiments using two supercomputers and studies on extending the life of 1960s-era nuclear bombs.
Employees were checking filters in air handling systems to ensure they weren’t affected by smoke and restarting computer systems shut down when the lab closed.
“Once we start operation phases for the laboratory, it will take about two days to bring everyone back and have the laboratory fully operational,” Lab Director Charles McMillan said.
An aircraft monitoring the area near Los Alamos has picked up no sign of unusual radiation levels, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez announced Sunday. She said flights by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plane in the past week showed radiation levels are the same as they were before the fire.
Although the threat to Los Alamos and the nation’s premier nuclear research lab had passed, the mammoth wildfire raging in northern New Mexico was still threatening sacred sites of American Indian tribes.
Hundreds of firefighters were working Sunday to contain the 189-square-mile fire as it burned through a canyon on the Santa Clara Pueblo reservation and threatened other pueblos on the Pajarito Plateau.
The area, a stretch of mesas that run more than 15 miles west of Santa Fe, N.M., includes Los Alamos and the nuclear laboratory.
Authorities said the fire, burning for eight days Sunday, has been fueled by an exceptionally dry season in the Southwest and erratic winds.
Crews have managed to keep the fire in Los Alamos Canyon several miles upslope from the federal laboratory, boosting confidence that it no longer posed an immediate threat to the facility or the nearby town. Crews were helped by rain Saturday afternoon that slowed the fire.
“Hopefully we’ll get two to three more days like this and we’ll be fine,” operations chief Jayson Coil said.
The blaze, the largest ever in the state of New Mexico, reached the Santa Clara Pueblo’s watershed in the canyon this week, damaging the area that the tribe considers its birthplace and scorching 20 square miles of tribal forest. Fire operations chief Jerome Macdonald said it was within miles of the centuries-old Puye Cliff Dwellings, a national historic landmark.
Tribes were worried that cabins, pueblos and watersheds could be destroyed.
“We were also praying on our knees, we were asking the Creator in our cultural way to please forgive us, ‘What have we done?'” Santa Clara Pueblo Gov. Walter Dasheno said. “Bring moisture so that the Mother Fire can be stopped. But that was not meant to be.”
About 2,800 tribe members live in a dusty village nestled in New Mexico’s high desert, near the mouth of Santa Clara Canyon where aspen and blue spruce forests provide relief from the dry desert and ponds provide water for irrigation. The canyon is north of the town of Los Alamos.
Pueblo Fire Chief Mel Tafoya said it was unclear whether cabins in the canyon or the ponds survived the blaze. Members of the state’s congressional delegation have promised federal help for the tribe pending a damage assessment.
The tribe also worried that 1.5 million trees planted after the 2000 fire have been destroyed, and called for emergency federal relief.
To Santa Clara’s south, Cochiti Pueblo was also worried about damage to ground cover affecting its watershed.
Archaeological sites at the northern end of the blaze at Bandelier National Monument hold great significance to area tribes. About half of the park has burned, Bandelier superintendent Jason Lott said.
