Crews Try to Tame Los Alamos Fire

More than 1,400 firefighters on Friday launched a fierce counterattack on a devastating wildfire as federal officials imposed a 30-day ban across the West on the controversial fire control tactic that accidentally led to the disaster.

Officials unleashed 16 firefighting aircraft, including planes, aerial tankers and helicopters, to lead the battle after blowtorch winds unexpectedly subsided into light breezes and lower temperatures. The planes had been grounded since Tuesday.

“We’re on the attack,” Los Alamos County Fire Chief Doug MacDonald shouted as “sky crane” helicopters hauling 1,000-gallon buckets of water clattered overhead. “We’re really kicking some butt out there.”

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, similarly shouting later as choppers dipped the huge buckets into a nearby duck pond, announced the immediate 30-day moratorium on the use of “prescribed burns” on most national park and forest land.

The term refers to the government policy of deliberately setting limited fires to clear buffer zones and thus, in most cases, prevent natural wildfires from spreading. The tactic backfired when a prescribed burn in nearby Bandelier National Monument on May 4 instead exploded into the most destructive fire in New Mexico history.

The Cerro Grande fire remained out of control Friday. The blaze ripped through pine forests and grassland parched by drought after consuming 32,000 acres--an area 18 miles north to south and 12 miles east to west--in the state’s rugged northern reaches.

“This fire continues to grow,” warned Jim Paxon, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service here.

Gov. Gary Johnson said that the immediate danger had eased for Los Alamos and other nearby towns. After days of seesawing estimates, he confirmed that the fire’s fury had engulfed 191 structures, containing about 250 dwelling units, earlier this week in Los Alamos. Most were burned to charred rubble. An additional 150 or so homes were badly singed or damaged.

Emergency officials said that the 18,000 residents who fled from Los Alamos and two other communities to escape the blaze--and who are now living in emergency shelters, motels and friends’ homes--should not expect to return home for another week.

Emergency crews have not begun to clean up the debris. Nor have they figured out how to restore gas and electricity to Los Alamos homes without risking new fires.

Even a quick visit home is banned for now. In a morning news conference, the governor said that the National Guard would start escorting evacuees back to their homes to pick up belongings today. But he backed away from that plan at midafternoon, saying that the town still is unsafe because of smoldering fires and downed power lines.

Firefighting “hotshot” crews poured into the area from as far away as Montana and Minnesota throughout the day. The reinforcements boosted the Park Service firefighting force from 800 to 1,400. An additional 250 county and state firefighters helped battle the blaze.

Soot-faced veterans of a 20-person fire crew, on the front lines of the fire since Monday, on Friday called the blaze the most wicked they have ever seen and criticized the initial response as too slow.

“We’re really on it good now, but the first two days it was slacking,” said Kyle Wheeler, 37, of Sapello, N.M. “They’ve got 10 [bull]dozers in there now. Where were they earlier this week?”

The U.S. Forest Service crew from Las Vegas, N.M., has spent the last five days hopscotching from hot spot to hot spot, including a day battling the flames that ripped through the compound of the Los Alamos lab.

On Wednesday, they were stationed atop a ridge above the fire’s most stubborn advance and were forced to flee for their lives as the flames exploded up the hillside.

“You should have felt the heat. I thought my ears were going to drop off,” said Cliff Pekoc of Las Vegas who, like the others, wore a bright yellow fire-retardant overshirt stained with ash and sweat. “It got so bad on Wednesday, we had to evacuate our camp.”

Using shovels, picks and special rakes, the 20 men spent most of their time just ahead of the fire line, cutting breaks through the trees and brush. More than once, flare-ups forced them to retreat to safe zones to the rear, said Lawrence Carabajal, leader of the crew.

“It’s one of the worst I’ve seen,” Carabajal said.

Brush fires appeared to grow fiercer in the neighboring Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, the nation’s leading nuclear weapon design and development facility. Heavy black smoke poured out of a wooded canyon behind the lab’s main administrative and research offices all afternoon.

Earlier, a grass fire roared up another canyon and burned to the fence line of the lab’s main plutonium storage facility, known as Technical Area 55, before it was extinguished. Kevin Roark, a lab spokesman, said that nothing was damaged.

Firefighters also beat back another blaze near the lab’s waste packaging area, where 55-gallon steel drums and fiberglass boxes of low-level radioactive waste and sludge are stored in fire-resistant fabric domes. Officials said that none of the drums was affected.

Lab officials said that the fire had burned a trailer and a pickup truck. But they repeated assurances that all other buildings--and, more important, all nuclear and other hazardous materials at the lab--were safe.

The Department of Energy sent in five emergency nuclear reaction teams to help test for radiation leaks from uranium, plutonium, tritium and other elements used at the lab. Department officials said that the effort was a precaution and not in response to a leak.

“All real-time monitoring shows no increase of radiation beyond background levels,” Roark said.

But Pete Maggiore, New Mexico’s energy secretary, said that he is sending in two of his own teams to sample air, water and soil around the lab. “We want to independently verify what the lab finds.”

He said the fire torched two of the state’s sampling sites but that other air monitoring sites outside the lab grounds had picked up “gamma readings that were above background” levels Thursday. He stressed that the readings did not indicate danger and that their source was unknown.

Maggiore also cited another possible problem: With vegetation burned off thousands of acres at the lab, soil contaminated with toxic and radioactive waste from the lab could wash into nearby streams and rivers.

“I’m concerned about sediment washing down into our watershed,” he said. “That will be a high priority before summer monsoons hit in early July.”

Scientists openly dumped hazardous and radioactive waste into nearby canyons in the 1940s and 1950s when the lab, where the first atomic bomb was built, was still a secret facility. The so-called legacy wastes have long created environmental cleanup problems at the lab.

Babbitt, the Interior secretary, said that the monthlong moratorium on “prescribed burns” would affect federally owned land west of the meridian that runs north from West Texas through Nebraska to the Dakotas. He indicated that the burns would resume after the 30-day period.

“This program is solidly conceived and is a very important part of Western land management,” he said.

Babbitt also said that he has ordered an investigation into the cause of the blaze and expects a report by Thursday. He said that an interagency review board then will decide what action, if any, is warranted.

He repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether the federal government is legally and financially liable for causing the damage because the Bandelier park supervisor had approved the May 4 burn. Babbitt said the U.S. attorney general and Congress will decide, not him.

Times staff writer Phil Willon contributed to this story.