Tour Reveals a Fierce Los Alamos Firefight

A wildfire repeatedly threatened critical nuclear weapon facilities inside the Los Alamos National Laboratory over the last three days and was far more harrowing than officials previously had acknowledged, a tour of the still-smoking site revealed Saturday.

Nearly 100 firefighters battled most of Friday night, for example, in a fierce struggle to protect a complex where scientists test highly radioactive materials to study how nuclear explosions occur. Three fires had roared down a canyon and converged on the facility.

A day earlier, intense flames and heat twice roared over the lab’s underground emergency command headquarters, forcing those inside to flee for safety, according to Stanley Busboom, the lab’s safety director.

“This whole area was fully involved with flames for the better part of a day,” he said.

The lab’s heavily armed security force was also forced to retreat Thursday when the fire raced toward the lab’s main plutonium storage facility. Officials said they didn’t fear a security breach since the compound was surrounded by flames and thus was inaccessible.

The fire had leapfrogged the road known as “Plutonium Alley” that leads to the site, which produces the “plutonium pits” that serve as fuel in a nuclear warhead.

Firefighting crews battled from sunrise to sunset Thursday to keep the conflagration from reaching the plutonium storage facility’s fortified concrete compound. At one point, wind-driven flames swept over 25 firefighters who refused to retreat.

“We had one heck of a firefight to try to keep the flames away,” said Doug MacDonald, the Los Alamos County fire chief. “It blew right over them. . . . They had fire all around them, all around them. And they didn’t pull out.”

Pocked black earth, charred trees and smoldering brush Saturday showed the war was won about 50 feet from the facility, known as Technical Area 55. Officials insisted that the plutonium and other nuclear materials were locked into buried vaults under heavily reinforced concrete and were never in danger.

“Our plutonium facility . . . was designed to withstand both man-made and natural disaster,” said Gene Tucker, the lab’s deputy director of security.

More than a week after the National Park Service started the blaze to remove dry brush and grass, the fire that had destroyed 260 homes and threatened the lab remained dangerous.

The blaze in the nearby canyons and valleys was still only 5% contained. It spread in all directions Saturday, reaching Indian land. Officials were concerned that the fire might reach sacred tribal sites in Santa Clara Canyon.

Winds picked up later Saturday, and a dry cold front was expected Monday, bringing higher winds.

About 500 firefighters still battled the blaze Saturday inside the heavily wooded 43-square-mile laboratory complex. Most of the fires were confined to the steep canyons that slice the property and are filled with juniper and pinon pines.

But embers still flickered into orange flames along the ground at several places along Pajarito Road, the main route within the lab.

And later, as the wind unexpectedly picked up, helicopters dumped huge water bladders to douse flare-ups that pumped thick plumes of smoke into the sky.

Flames also reached about a half-mile from the lab’s packaging and storage facilities for radioactive waste, which contain only low- and mid-level waste. About 20,000 steel barrels and fiberglass boxes of contaminated gloves, lab coats, beakers and other radioactive trash are stacked on metal pallets inside fabric-covered domes.

The fire burned several trailers, sheds and vehicles but caused no damage to major structures, lab officials said.

By all accounts, the Friday battle to save the lab’s critical nuclear testing facility, known as TA-18, was especially heroic. Scientists use the site to test uranium and plutonium for explosive “performance,” said Dick Burick, the lab’s deputy director for operations.

The flames shot down the Pajarito Canyon and converged on 95 firefighters determined to let the fire go no farther. All week long, fire crews had smothered the facility with a bath of fire-retardant foam up to four times a day, hoping to douse airborne embers that have rained down and ignited fires up to a mile away.

As the flames approached, the crews feverishly cut fire lines, set backfires and manned their hoses. They finally extinguished the blaze about 300 feet from three heavily reinforced concrete “kivas,” where the plutonium testing is conducted.

Burick said the buildings and their radioactive contents were never at grave risk, insisting the bunkers were built to withstand greater assaults than a rampaging forest fire.

“The fire came down, burned some of the grass but never came in,” said Burick. “It never got inside the fence.”

The crispy outline of a fire hose, left behind as the flames exploded toward the line of firefighters, showed how fickle and life-threatening the untamed fire was.

During a highly controlled bus tour for the press Saturday, lab officials offered assurance after assurance that the wildfire never triggered a nuclear threat and that the compound’s stockpile of hazardous materials was secure and safe even during the worst of the fire.

“We have had no contamination. We have not had any radioactive release at this site or at the lab,” Tucker said.

However, the fire torched three canyons on the lip of the facility where liberal supplies of radioactive waste were dumped during the days of the Manhattan Project, said Lee McAtee, deputy division director of environmental safety and health.

McAtee said the Department of Energy has spent millions of dollars to clean up “historical contamination”--making the canyons safe enough for hikers--but said there are still hazardous remnants.

McAtee said air monitors had picked up “very slight increases” in radiation but not enough to cause concern.

He said the increase was “consistent from what we’d expect” after a wildfire and was natural. But he conceded that some may be suspicious.

“I understand the lack of credibility on the part of the lab,” he said. “I know there’s a lot of mistrust in the community.”

One of the biggest potential environmental threats will come with the summer rains, when hazardous material washed away in runoff could pool downstream near homes and threaten water supplies.

“Within the next day or two, we’re going to start looking into that,” McAtee said. “Right now, we just don’t know the extent.”

The Department of Energy spent years trying to locate all of the old official and unofficial dump sites, scouring lab records and interviewing former employees, to map the contamination for cleanup, he said.

Next week, crews will inspect every documented dump site to check for contamination--and may call for additional cleanup if necessary.

Lab director John Brown said it would take weeks for the lab to fully reopen. He said none of the damage would significantly hamper the lab’s chief mission, which is to certify the safety, reliability and safe stewardship of America’s nuclear arsenal.

In neighboring Los Alamos, officials said they could not predict how soon residents would be allowed to return home. About 18,000 people were evacuated from Los Alamos and nearby towns on Wednesday and Thursday.

In the devastated neighborhood in western Los Alamos, utility crews used cherry-pickers Saturday to inspect charred power poles. The ruins themselves continued to smolder in places, and loose pieces of sheet metal shrieked in the wind.

“They’re assessing the area so that when we start allowing people back in, we’ll have electricity in the area,” said Los Alamos Police Officer John Chicoine. “We want to make sure people are absolutely safe before we let them back in.”

Increasing winds pushed the fire northward Saturday into remote regions of the Santa Clara Indian Reservation, advancing nearly a half-mile every hour and sometimes blazing 100 feet into the air.

Members of a 100-man fire crew from the surrounding Pueblo tribes spent the last two days on the southern edge of the reservation, scrambling to save the prized ruins at Puye Cliffs from the fire’s wrath.

The Black Mesa crew was forced to do most of its work solo, since firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service concentrated manpower elsewhere, said Dale Martinez, one of the crew leaders.

They spent most of Friday night cutting firebreaks to protect the wild lands threatened by the fire, a scattered landscape of uninhabited canyons filled with yucca and other plants that play a significant role in Pueblo religion, Martinez said.

“We tried our best to save what we could, but the fire was just too much for us,” said Martinez, who lives at the San Ildefonso Pueblo just 10 miles from the fire. “There was no stopping it. The winds are pretty strong. There’s just no telling where it’s going to go.”

The terrain in that part of the reservation is mostly rocks, scrub brush and other vegetation hearty enough to survive the New Mexico heat, all scattered over plunging hillsides that make firefighting difficult.

“It was rough going, and we were eating lots of smoke,” said Harold Trujillo, 29, who came down from Taos to join the crew.

“We finally had to pull out. You can’t put nothing in its path. Too dangerous.”

Other members of the Black Mesa crew spotted a burned deer carcass and charred snakes, all too slow to escape the fire as the wind carried it north.

Emmett Archuleta, 39, said the flames jumped their breaks with alarming ease, forcing them to retreat to the north to plow other 6-foot-wide breaks.

“We did this a couple of times before we gave up,” said Archuleta, who lives nearby at the Picuris Pueblo. “The winds just carried the embers right over, and the fire started all over again.”