Lab’s Nuclear Material Called Safe Amid Fire

Blinding yellow smoke swallowed part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory on Thursday afternoon as a fierce brush fire burned several hundred yards from Technical Area 55, the bland name for America’s most heavily guarded--and arguably most dangerous--warehouse.

“There it is,” Bill Richardson, the secretary of Energy, said with audible relief when the acrid smoke finally cleared. He peered out the van at the reinforced concrete complex that is the nation’s chief storehouse of plutonium used in nuclear weapons.

The highly radioactive material and other warhead components are safely entombed in steel vaults inside a structure designed to withstand fires, earthquakes and even a “direct crash from a 747,” said lab Director John Browne as he led Richardson on a tour of the worst natural disaster ever to hit America’s oldest and largest nuclear weapon facility.

But if all nuclear materials at the lab were secure, and Richardson and other officials insisted they were, the wind-driven fire that forced the evacuation of 18,000 people from three nearby towns and destroyed or damaged hundreds of homes over the last two days continued to rage out of control. Miraculously, no one has been killed or seriously injured.

Officials said that the fire was growing in every direction except west as winds gusting to 60 mph whipped the orange flames into a devil’s dance of destruction. Continued high winds and low humidity are predicted for today.

“This fire is doing what it wants to do,” Los Alamos County Fire Chief Doug MacDonald told Richardson inside an underground bunker used as the lab’s emergency command post. “It doesn’t have a place where it can’t go.”

Indeed, he said, firefighters had closed the road past the plutonium facility moments after Richardson visited. Earlier, the fire had swept across 788 acres in the lab’s southern section, burning the grassy tops off buried, foot-thick concrete bunkers used to store tons of high explosives. None exploded.

The fire also approached other sensitive buildings at the lab, including facilities used for critical experiments with nuclear materials, but Browne said that none was damaged.

“No buildings have been breached,” he said.

Of immediate concern was a waste storage facility in the fire’s path. Browne said that only a thin roof protects 55-gallon drums filled with low-level nuclear waste such as contaminated gloves. Firefighters sprayed foam along the road to keep the blaze away.

“Those structures are not fireproof,” Browne said. “They just keep the stuff out of the weather.”

Greg Mello, a longtime lab critic who heads the Los Alamos Study Group, said that he most fears pollution from vast quantities of hazardous and toxic chemicals stored at the lab. No such leakage has been detected, and officials said that continued monitoring has found no evidence of any radiation leaks.

The worst damage so far has been in the evacuated town of Los Alamos, where hundreds of bleary-eyed firefighters and emergency crews rushed down eerily empty streets Thursday to battle new blazes in houses and cars across the once-lovely mountainside town.

On Ridgeway Street, George Chavez, New Mexico’s fire marshal, watched a dozen firefighters spray with hoses and hack with axes at the smoldering ruins of half a dozen stately homes that had burned to the ground overnight. Chimneys and stone walls still stood, but otherwise, smoking, twisted rubble was all that remained.

Chavez said that the fire had gutted 113 homes in Los Alamos, which adjoins the lab, but that hundreds more were damaged. The wind suddenly gusted as he spoke, blowing stinging black grit and debris down the street.

“I think if winds prevail, the worst is yet to come,” Chavez said softly. “This fire won’t die until it runs out of fuel.”

Indeed, officials warned that the fire--which began as a deliberately set controlled burn last week and now has laid waste to more than 25,000 acres of northern New Mexico’s sere high-desert country--was fast approaching White Rock, a Los Alamos suburb that was evacuated before dawn Thursday.

Heavy smoke grounded airborne “slurry bombers,” which drop chemical retardant on forest fires, for a second day. MacDonald said that helicopters dragging giant buckets of water on long cables had tried to douse the fast-moving front.

“We didn’t touch it,” he said wearily. “That thing is really growing.”

Fire crews worked feverishly with hand tools and bulldozers to clear vegetation and carve firebreaks ahead of the fire. Thick smoke roiled out of a valley, and orange flames flickered and writhed on a distant hillside.

The fire seemingly chose its victims in Los Alamos. On 45th Street on the city’s northern edge, a bungalow stood untouched in the middle of a score of scorched shells and downed power lines.

The fire melted refrigerators, baked and blackened a yellow Corvette in someone’s driveway, twisted bicycles and bathtubs and turned trees into smoking skeletons. But a basketball hoop, complete with net, somehow survived the inferno and stood erect amid the devastation.

“One of my officers lives here,” said Los Alamos police Sgt. John Chicoine, pointing to the ruins of another home and shaking his head sadly. “Or lived there.”

Amazingly, a “For Sale” sign planted out front was unscathed.

National Guard troops in Humvees rumbled through the ghost town to prevent looting. Animal control teams rounded up pets and other animals to take them to safety.

Los Alamos long has billed itself as America’s “atomic city.” It was built on the edge of a rocky volcanic caldera in the 1940s to house the scientists and staff who developed and built the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Since then, it has designed and helped test nearly every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal.

The lab, which covers 43 square miles, has survived three previous wildfires since 1954, but none until now was severe enough to close the lab. It was closed Monday, and Browne said that he does not know how quickly it can reopen.

The National Park Service set the fire on May 4 to clear brush near Bandelier National Monument, but blowtorch winds soon drove the blaze into tinder-like brush and ponderosa pine forests. A special National Weather Service forecast faxed to the park earlier had warned that the fire danger was extreme.

On Thursday, the Park Service suspended its local supervisor, Roy Weaver, with pay, pending further investigation. Several members of Congress, as well as Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, said they would investigate.

“Somebody made a mistake, and obviously we have to find out who,” Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) said at a news conference at the tiny Los Alamos airport before touring the town.

Domenici sought to dampen rumors that the public was at risk from nuclear materials at the lab or that the Army was on standby to move the plutonium off the site.

“We’re not moving anything,” he said. “There’s nothing dangerous up here except the forest fire.”

Standing by his side, New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson did not appear entirely reassured, however. He said that fiery embers from blazing trees had jumped a mile at a time, leapfrogging and overwhelming firefighters who have poured into the area.

“We may just be seeing the beginning of a real catastrophe,” he said.

Mike Dombeck, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, agreed. “We’re sort of at the mercy of the weather right now.”

James Lee Witt, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said FEMA would assist anyone forced to flee the fire. “We’ll provide whatever resources the [state] government needs.”

In Washington, President Clinton expressed sympathy for those who had lost their homes. “This is a a very, very difficult situation, and I know that the prayers and support of all Americans will be with the people out there.”