New Mexicans Can Outrun Wind-Driven Firestorm but Not the Shock

With winds blowing and flames moving at what he thought was a safe distance to the west of his White Rock home, Franz Biehl, 65, flicked on the television news one last time before he went to bed about 1:30 a.m. Thursday.

He is glad he did.

“They were telling people to evacuate,” said Biehl, who within an hour left with his wife, Karen, for a Santa Fe motel. “Three or four friends lost homes [Wednesday in Los Alamos], and I felt so badly for those people. Now the feeling is, ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ ”

Across northern New Mexico on Thursday, more than 18,000 evacuees sought both shelter and a way to comprehend the unimaginable--a firestorm that threatened to engulf full towns nestled among picturesque canyons.

As the fires raged, callers to talk radio shows burned with outrage over the conflagration, started when a controlled burn went out of control. Emotions were more muted in the shelters, where people gathered in front of TV sets hoping that the smoking ruins they saw were not of their own homes.

Viola Stowe, safe from the wildfire ripping through her Los Alamos neighborhood, was with friends when she saw her home burn to the ground on live television Wednesday night.

Just hours before, the high school math teacher was cramming her Camaro with a bundle of clothes before joining a stream of cars out of town.

Tears came easily Thursday when she thought of what was left behind. A big red trunk filled with family photographs--snapshots of her two daughters and two sons growing into adulthood--lost forever.

“It was right there,” Stowe said from a makeshift shelter in the cafeteria of Espanola Valley High School, where she had taught geometry and algebra for 17 years. “I could have picked it up, easily, on my way out. But I didn’t.

“I still can’t believe this. I just cleaned the house. I just bought a new barbecue. . . . How am I going to make my car payment?”

Despite all she’s lost, Stowe, 51, said she is thankful. She and her college-age daughter escaped, and there have been no deaths reported. She saved her dog and she saved the violet dress she will wear to her son’s wedding in Costa Mesa in June.

“I have friends here, and almost everyone I know has offered me a place to stay,” said Stowe, still wearing the clothes she had on when she fled Wednesday.

For Bill Enloe, chairman of the locally owned Los Alamos National Bank, the fire turned to ashes a large part of the town he helped build.

“The bank financed 80% of everything in that town,” said Enloe, 52, his voice breaking in a telephone interview. “We have every intent of working with everybody else to build it back up. These are my friends, not people I lend to.”

The stakes extend beyond business. Enloe and his wife, Kathy, fled their home about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday after loading family photo albums, home videos and a few other personal possessions into their cars. Their younger daughter, 19-year-old Tracy, had just completed her freshman year of college on the East Coast. Now she has no place to spend the summer.

The Enloes had been in their new 4,700-square-foot home in the Ponderosa Estates subdivision of Los Alamos for five years. It had three floors, four bedrooms and a beautiful view of a canyon. It was set in a stand of pine trees. “I guess we’re paying for that now,” Enloe said.

There was no anger evident in Enloe’s voice, only a sense of complete shock, utter bewilderment. He did not jump at a chance to castigate the government for setting the fire as a controlled burn to clear away brush.

“No one is happy the park service lit this fire,” he said. “I know that they did not intend to cause this. But when they started this burn, everybody wondered why they were doing it. I still cannot answer that question. I know everyone in Los Alamos also feels the same way. It did not make any sense.”

Aaron Unice, 21, stood with a co-worker, Suzanne Wendelken, 21, in the cafeteria of Santa Fe High School, pressed into service as shelter for as many as 600 people. By dinner time Thursday, about 270 people had signed in, a Red Cross official said.

Unice fled his home in the western part of Los Alamos--the area heaviest hit by fire--around 3 p.m. Wednesday, grabbing his computer and some personal papers and pictures from the room he rents in a house with five other people.

He had moved to Los Alamos about six weeks ago and had not amassed enough possessions to be worried about losing much. So he worried for others.

“I was in the shelter last night,” he said. “I was looking around and seeing the faces of people who had the potential to lose homes they’d lived in for decades.”

The dislocations created some surreal images. At the Cities of Gold Casino and Bingo Hall in Pojoaque east of Los Alamos, gamblers shared a lasagna buffet with displaced families. At the Pojoaque Elementary and Intermediate School gym, people watched a small television set in the parking lot outside because the reception was bad inside.

At both shelters, counselors sought out those who looked like they needed to talk. But as Red Cross volunteer Jo Hillard said, “In these disasters people have to take care of their basic needs first before they start talking about it.”

Steve Klein saved his family albums but lost almost everything else. Klein, 29, spent Thursday night at the Cities of Gold Casino in Pojoaque.

“Some ass decided they wanted to do a controlled burn, so here I am,” said Klein, a pulse power technician at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“What can we do? Nothing you can do about it but start over. Everything else you write up in the history books.”

Klein sent his wife and two young children to Albuquerque earlier this week along with his parents, both retired scientists at the lab.

Many hotels in Santa Fe offered discounted rooms to evacuees, but they were booked quickly. “It’s kind of sad that we have to turn them away,” said a desk clerk at a Ramada Inn, where all 80 rooms were full. Many of those guests will have to check out today, she said, because the hotel is fully reserved tonight for tomorrow’s graduation at the College of Santa Fe.

Franz Biehl, who moved to Los Alamos from Los Angeles more than 20 years ago, in part to avoid the dangers of wildfires, was not sure where he would spend tonight after two nights in a Santa Fe motel.

His mind kept moving to the last few days, rather than the days ahead.

On Wednesday, as 11,000 residents of Los Alamos moved out, Biehl went to a White Rock shelter to see if he could offer a roof to any of the evacuees.

Hours later, he was an evacuee himself. “It’s unnerving to not know what’s happening to your house,” he said as he and his wife ate a dinner of curried pork at the Santa Fe High School. “These fires get so personal. It’s a real tragedy. It breaks your heart.”

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Times staff writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington and researcher Massie Ritsch in Los Angeles contributed to this story.