Most Los Alamos Residents Return Home

Most of the town of Los Alamos, evacuated ahead of a raging wildfire last week, was reopened for residents Monday. But the worst-hit neighborhoods and the biggest U.S. nuclear weapon lab remained closed indefinitely, officials said.

As firefighters continued to battle the northern spread of the blaze that has consumed more than 44,300 acres, officials decided its southern flank was contained well enough to allow people back into the town that adjoins Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“This will probably allow 7,000 people back into their homes,” Los Alamos County Commissioner Joe King told reporters.

The other 4,000 evacuees are still barred from returning to neighborhoods on the town’s western and northern sides.

Los Alamos was evacuated Wednesday just hours before the forest fire, which began as a deliberately set controlled burn to help avert just such disasters, spread into those neighborhoods. Officials say the fire destroyed 260 houses and apartment buildings, while leaving others right next door untouched.

Emergency crews were working to clear risks, including exposed electrical wires and asbestos, as well as to cap gas lines to destroyed buildings.

Included among the sites damaged is a cluster of sagging wooden buildings where U.S. scientists created the world’s first atomic bomb. Almost all of them have been destroyed by fire.

Five of the six buildings that were home to World War II’s top-secret Manhattan Project were reduced to a pile of rubble last week by the blaze.

“Those were some of the last really significant buildings from the Manhattan Project era,” said John Isaacson, who manages cultural resources at the lab. “We had really hoped to preserve them. It’s a real loss to our history.”

The buildings were known in the 1940s as V Site. They served as the center of operations for scientists who perfected and assembled the explosive lenses used to detonate the Trinity test device, the world’s first nuclear bomb.

The one building to survive was the project’s final assembly plant, said Ellen Bradbury, who heads the nonprofit group Recurosos de Santa Fe, which was raising money to save the structures.

That building was the most historically significant of the six, Bradbury said Monday, adding that her group’s fund-raising efforts will continue.

The buildings, like many others at Los Alamos from that era, were abandoned at the end of World War II. While others were torn down to make room for more modern facilities, V Site survived, mainly because its secluded location made demolition hardly worthwhile.

On Monday, National Guard units patrolled the streets as residents of the worst-hit areas were allowed back under escort for brief stops to collect whatever they could salvage or just to see the charred ruins of what had been their homes.

About 1,500 firefighters are still battling the blaze that blew up on May 4 when the U.S. National Park Service ignited underbrush in Bandelier National Monument.