Considering himself luckier than virtually everyone else in this historic government-lab town, David Trujillo stood on the lip of a magnificent canyon Thursday afternoon and hosed down his family’s home, very possibly in vain.
Across the gorge from Trujillo’s $450,000 house, thick white smoke billowed from the wildfire raging just beyond Deer Trap Mesa. The 53-year-old nuclear scientist had sneaked back into Los Alamos earlier Thursday, with the help of a friendly police officer, circumventing an evacuation order.
He quickly piled family heirlooms and antiques into a 1976 Ford Bronco. Yet, he lingered around the house for hours longer.
“I don’t know what else I can do,” said Trujillo, fretting over a hose nailed to his roof, which was sending a broad waterfall cascading over the garage as the dry heat from the fire radiated toward the home.
The whole area smelled like a giant campfire.
Ponderosa pines on the finger-like mesas on which Los Alamos was built seem to be rich fuel for the wildfire. Many needles on the pine trees were browned and brittle after a winter of below-average snowfall and an unseasonably warm, dry spring. Residents described hiking amid the brush that is now aflame as “walking on talcum powder.”
As of Thursday, flames had not threatened historic sites in central Los Alamos, the top-secret World War II town where the physics that produced the world’s first atom bomb was refined by some of the age’s greatest scientific minds. Foremost among those structures is the log Fuller Lodge, where the scientists who introduced the Atomic Age had sought relaxation.
New Mexico State Police checkpoints set up downhill from Los Alamos’ 7,355-foot plateau detained everyone but reporters and officials from what remains a company town.
Trujillo wasn’t deterred.
After a sleepless night at the hotel in Pojoaque, the Vietnam veteran tried, unsuccessfully, to hitch a ride with his old National Guard buddies. A Los Alamos County police officer finally agreed to ferry Trujillo to his home, with instructions to remain there no longer than an hour.
“I just begged,” Trujillo explained. “Not a lot of people have this opportunity.”
At first, Trujillo scurried to take advantage of his chance. He quickly rounded up southwestern Indian artifacts–Navajo, Zuni, Hopi–and curtly cut off well-intentioned callers with this succinct explanation: “Can’t talk. The house will probably burn. Gotta go.”
When the officer didn’t return after an hour, Trujillo fidgeted. Furniture he couldn’t fit into his car was piled together in the front yard. Then he moved to divide it across the lawn. “I have to diversify,” Trujillo said.
A neighbor in Trujillo’s upper-income area on the Otowi Mesa hiked across two canyons to circumvent the checkpoints and salvage documents he had forgotten at home.
Otherwise, the streets of Los Alamos were left to fire trucks, police cars and workers cutting off gas lines. Some homeowners had left lawn sprinklers on. Accomplishing what he could, Trujillo finally retreated to his family, which had taken shelter in nearby Santa Fe.
Some evacuees had to move twice within 24 hours. Evacuees in nearby White Rock, barely 12 hours after escaping Los Alamos, were told they hadn’t gone far enough.
On Wednesday, Anna Caspersen accepted evacuees free of charge into her Castillo del Alma, a bed-and-breakfast in White Rock.
“We had people in our living room last night, watching their homes burn,” Caspersen said at about 4 a.m. Thursday. “If this were an act of God or nature, it would be different. We look at this as an act of a very, very irresponsible bureaucracy.”
National Park Service officials started the wildfires May 5 in an effort to burn off potential tinder for a lightning bolt or a smoldering campfire.
On Thursday, federal agencies were importing public-relations officials from neighboring states to put a spin on the out-of-control “controlled burn.”
“The fire’s going to do what the fire wants to do,” said Kay Roybal, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Forest Service.
Roybal, brought in from Arizona to help staff a federal fire-information center, said the government hereafter would label its brush-clearing efforts “prescribed burns.”
“You really can’t control fire,” she said. “We found that out the hard way.”
“Let me say something to all the employees at Los Alamos: Your jobs are safe. We will recover,” said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. “This community helped us win the Cold War and we’re going to stand by you.”
With little time to gather their possessions, 9,000 residents fled from the high-desert mesas of Los Alamos on Wednesday. They left behind an eerily quiet scene, a Western ghost town of immaculately maintained lawns and trimmed bushes.
After fires destroyed as many as 200 homes and singed the federal lab in Los Alamos, there was little optimism Thursday.
Most of those ordered to leave Los Alamos County found refuge with friends or family in Santa Fe or in Albuquerque, 70 miles south of Los Alamos. Those who thronged the motels of Santa Fe and the Indian casino and hotel in the tiny pueblo of Pojoaque apparently were united in anger at the authorities they hold responsible for the blaze.
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on Thursday ordered an investigation to determine how a National Park Service controlled burn-off in New Mexico became an uncontrolled wildfire that has destroyed houses and buildings in the town of Los Alamos and threatened the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory.
National Park Service spokesman David Barna said the agency will take “full responsibility” and likely will compensate property owners for damage, though approval from the Justice Department will be needed.
“We’re sorry for our involvement,” he said. “We’ll take full responsibility. We’re appalled at the property loss.”
A controlled burn in California about a year ago got out of control and burned down 29 houses, Barna said, noting that the Park Service moved immediately to compensate local residents for the damage.
Barna said there were conflicting reports over whether the local superintendent in New Mexico had been warned by the U.S. Weather Service to expect high winds before commencing the burn-off.
“Our investigation will determine that,” he said.
The Interior Department, which operates the Park Service, said Thursday that Roy Weaver, superintendent of Bandelier National Monument, where the fire originated, had been placed on administrative leave.
A similar controlled, or “prescribed,” fire set by the Park Service on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon was fanned by high winds into a wildfire Wednesday, requiring the evacuation of all North Rim residents and visitors as it continued to burn out of control. A firefighter and seven tourists were trapped at Cape Royal, Ariz., on the North Rim, and were awaiting rescue by helicopter.
Controlled fires have been a National Park Service practice since 1968. To date, 3,746 have been burned over 892,412 acres within Park Service jurisdiction. Of these, 38 got out of control.
In the last five years, there have been 1,153 controlled burn-offs over 372,698 acres. This year, before the Los Alamos incident, 102 “prescribed” fires had been conducted over 43,629 acres without incident.
According to a Park Service statement, the main goal of these burn-offs is to reduce the amount of flammable brush and other vegetation in the forests and so prevent major conflagrations.
