By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
It's out of the fire and into flood danger.
With the forest service nearly ready to call the Big Spring Fire contained, it is time to look at rehabilitating the forest, according to Mountainair District Fire Information Officer Arlene Perea.
Although not all of the effects of the fire are bad, there are still many problems to deal with, Perea said.
In spite of a few blackened or dead trees, some of the burned areas are green and open-looking. There are also landscapes of close-packed, dead, limbless trees reminiscent of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
"(The fire) opened up wildlife areas in some areas," Perea said as she drove one of the Forest Service's green, heavy duty trucks through the scorched landscape. "In other areas, it just absolutely nuked it."
The "nuked" areas are generally those with little to no vegetation and ash covering the ground, which prevents rainwater from soaking in. That is why the forest service is concerned about flooding.
Recent rains have hit the Big Spring Fire and resulted in heavy run-off through Apache Canyon, Tajique Creek and Torreon Creek. That's according to a news release reminding property owners of the possibility of flooding that was sent out by the Forest Service earlier this month.
There is a plan in the works to deal with the problem, however.
On a tour of the area, Perea pulled her truck into a collection of burned-out, knee high stumps that, when it is prepared, it will be a central point of erosion-control activity, she said.
Along the wooded edge of the area a few firefighters ran chain saws and eight young men and women in hard hats and soot-blackened clothes were busy dragging pieces of chopped wood into piles.
The teenagers, employed through the Forest Guild Youth Conservation Corps, are all hard workers, said their crew trainer, Dwayne Roberts. As the Mountainair girls' basketball coach and assistant coach for football, Roberts has worked with many of the teenagers for some time, he said.
"They work four 10-hour days per week," Roberts said.
He pointed out Emily Weidner, a thin young woman wearing glasses who had dirt smeared on her face. Roberts called her a "fireball."
Weidner clutched four bottles of water she was bringing to the firefighters.
Shutting down his chain saw for a short break, Tyson Tayler, who has taken charge as incident commander for the Big Spring Fire, explained why the charred stumps are left.
When the bulldozer comes in to clear the area, the blade has to have something to bite into, he said.
Perea said the area will be cleared by Friday and soon after that it will be a kind of loading dock for straw bales.
Seed mulch, composed primarily of straw, will be driven in by the semi-load. The bales, which weight about 1,500 pounds each, are loaded onto a net and picked up by helicopter then dropped in the forest where they are needed for erosion control.
The Forest Service estimates call for about 1,210 tons of mulch to treat 1,210 acres of the 5,478 acres burned in the fire. In addition, about 10 pounds of seeds per acre will be used on about 2,000 acres burned by the fire.
Treatment has already been done on 5,900 of the 13,709 acres that were charred by the Trigo Fire earlier this year, according to Perea.
The Ojo Peak Fire, which happened late last year, was primarily in a wilderness area so very little treatment was done there, Perea said.
E-mail Story
Print Friendly
...go to bookmarks
