Fire Starts in City Watershed

Throughout the afternoon, as aerial crews waited out a brief storm, their surveys showed it holding at around 5 acres.

"It's got a fair amount of fuel available, but we're keeping it at 5 acres so far," says Julie Anne Overton, acting public affairs officer for Santa Fe National Forest. "The plan is to hit it hard tonight from the air, and then first thing in the morning get some hotshot crews in there."

In a later press release update, forest officials said air tankers started dropping fire retardant around 5 pm, with the intention of boxing in the fire to keep it from spreading. They targeted the heel of the fire and its west flank.

By 9 pm, the Forest Service was reporting that the fire had spread to 15 acres and was 0 percent contained. Air operations concluded for the night at about 8 pm.

The fire, labeled the McClure Fire, poses a threat to the watershed and the McClure Reservoir 3 miles southwest of the fire and Nichols Reservoir farther west and downstream. Those reservoirs provide much of the city's drinking water supply and could see their water quality and engineering degraded by a severe fire in that area. The fire also threatens a communications tower used by EMS, fire departments, the FAA and law enforcement agencies.

"That's the reason that we're putting so many resources on something that's at this point 5 acres," Overton says.

The cause is not yet known. Initial reports, sent out at 2:30 pm after smoke was first reported at 12:21 pm, mentioned "isolated torching" and the fire moving at a moderate speed through heavy fuels, dead and downed timber and ponderosa pines.

Earlier this year, when Porfirio Chavarria, the city's Wildland Urban Interface Specialist, spoke to city councilors campaigning for official designation for the Greater Santa Fe Fire Shed to align resources around mitigating wildfire risks, he described a fire that would burn forests down to bare soil, which could feed into flash floods that could wipe out downstream communities and Hyde Park Road toward the ski basin.

Asked today if that's what we're facing, Chavarria said, "That's what they're trying to prevent. All the fire responders right now are trying to prevent it from becoming that catastrophic kind of wildfire. They're aggressively attacking the fire with aircraft and trying to keep it as small as possible."

That the fire is a high priority, even amid ongoing burns including the Dog Head Fire closer to Albuquerque, the Battleship Fire in the Santa Fe National Forest near the Jemez District, and the Gold Mine Fire in the Ortiz Mountains, is reflected in the resources immediately allotted to it. Those include three and a half hotshot crews, hailing from Wyoming, Nevada and Boise, Idaho, as well as multiple helicopters, air tankers and engines and the city's Atalaya Crew. Hotshot crews were stationed near Nichols Reservoir for the night, in position to hike to the fire first thing in the morning with the goal of digging a hand line to prevent it from spreading.

The terrain where the fire started is steep and densely forested, and lies in the area of the 17,200-acre watershed that has been closed to public since 1932. Recent years have seen the Forest Service hand-thinning 5,500 acres of the hillsides around the watershed in an effort to prevent severe wildfire from taking hold and wreaking millions of dollars in damage to the city's water system. The efforts have been aimed at recreating the conditions that appear to have existed in these forests for centuries before human intervention put a stop to them: which is to say, looser, park-like stands of ponderosas, rather than the continuous tangle of branches now often found. This portion of the forest, which lies in the Pecos Wilderness, hadn't been treated but lies near areas that have been.

There's no telling where the fire will move and what weather and terrain will press it to do, of course, but thinning and reintroduced fire in the form of prescribed burns has interrupted an otherwise continuous canopy of pine trees and broken up the fuel load. Those efforts should allow incident managers space and some measure of comfort as they send in ground crews Friday morning.

"The investments in thinning and prescribed fire that the city and the Santa Fe National Forest have made in the last few years are going to be tested and probably are going to pay off in an incident like this," says Eytan Krasilovsky, Southwest director of The Forest Stewards Guild, which has long campaigned for prescribed burns and fire management to recreate the ecosystems generated by the natural burn cycle before fire suppression began a century ago.

"If those investments hadn't been made, I think people should be very alarmed and concerned, but because they're in place, they give managers more options and decision space," says Krasilovsky, who has also worked as a wildland firefighter and maintains those qualifications to allow him to work on prescribed burns.

Thinning and reintroduced fire in the form of prescribed burns that has interrupted an otherwise continuous canopy of pine trees and broken up the fuel load should allow incident managers space and some measure of comfort as they send in ground crews.

"Any time you have to deploy ground and air resources, there's always a risk to the responders and their safety, so I think that's the primary concern in all of this," Krasilovsky says. "We just have to wait and see what happens with the weather and whatever the decisions being made are. We just need to wait and see."

As rain showers that arrived shortly after news about the fire tapered off, Fire Chief Erik Litzenberg told Santa Fe city councilors during a Thursday evening meeting, "The rain is a mixed blessing. It's certainly good. It helps with some of the firefighting. It's in heavy timber, so the rain only goes so far in heavy timber. That being said, it also stops the air assault."

"We are all sitting here with our fingers crossed on this," said Councilor Signe Lindell, "and we know that we have very, very, very well-trained people, and we are just really hoping for a very good outcome."

Julie Ann Grimm contributed to the reporting for this story. This is a breaking news story and will be updated as additional information becomes available.  A small wildfire has ignited in the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed, just upstream of McClure Reservoir and in the wilderness portion of the watershed. Because that area has not yet been thinned or treated with prescribed burns, the fire is considered at high risk of growing.

Santa Fe Reporter