Residents of Los Alamos View Disaster

Made refugees by fire, hundreds of evacuated residents of Los Alamos solemnly returned Sunday in convoys of yellow school buses to the seared homes, blackened yards and still-smoking vistas of their abandoned town.

The 7,000 people of neighboring White Rock, which was undamaged, were allowed to go home.

The buses left Santa Fe for Los Alamos throughout the day, carrying counselors, clergy and 360 residents to the community of 18,000 that was emptied of life four days earlier. Only those whose homes were destroyed were allowed back up the winding roads to the remote city.

The trip home, however, was incomplete: Access was limited and most were forced to see the damage from behind windows as the buses slowly moved through town. The handful who did get off the bus photographed or videotaped the damage.

Burned-out cars sat near scorched trees. In one lot, a solitary, charred brick staircase climbed a story high. Nearby stood a pair of wooden bird feeders, apparently untouched by fire.

Judy Opsahl, a 64-year-old Red Cross volunteer whose home was still smoldering, said she was more worried about her neighbors than about her own loss. “We’re already starting to think about rebuilding,” she said.

Elsewhere, residents gathered for church services and Mother’s Day celebrations, searching for meaning in a fire that was intentionally set by the government to clear brush and grass, then, fed by winds, swept across a swath of northern New Mexico.

Jacki Mang spent the morning with her four children, ranging in age from 2 to 8, at a shelter in Pojoaque, N.M., where a Mother’s Day turkey brunch was arranged for displaced families. Her husband, Joe, was in Los Alamos helping with a database to track the fire’s damage.

“We got out of there with our lives and our kids,” she said. “No matter what comes of this, I have the most valuable things.”

The fire was still alive Sunday and had blackened a total of 42,000 acres. More than 1,000 firefighters were on the job.

The danger to Los Alamos and neighboring White Rock receded Friday after the fire had destroyed 260 homes and threatened the high-security Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the nation’s most important centers for nuclear weapons research.

The lab’s major facilities were unscathed, but the fire destroyed several trailers, a temporary building and workshops and offices that were part of the complex where the atomic bomb was built in the World War II Manhattan Project.

The U.S. Energy Department said Sunday that it had set up a fund for lab employees and contractors who lost property. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said the Northern New Mexico Fire Recovery Fund was authorized to accept donations from public and private sources.

Evacuated residents won’t be allowed to return permanently until at least the end of the week, emergency officials said.