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Thursday, November 29, 2007

Blaze's Likely Cause: People

By Laura Nesbitt and Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
    U.S. Forest Service officials are fairly certain that the Ojo Peak fire was caused by people.
    The blaze ravaged nearly 7,000 acres in the Manzano Mountains and is still not fully contained.
    "Although the exact cause has not been determined, it does appear human-caused," Arlene Perea, fire information officer for the Mountainair Ranger District, said Tuesday.
    An investigation team of Forest Service and law enforcement personnel will search the area beginning Friday.
    "With that country there will be lots of challenges," Perea said. "There's some really steep bluffs that they'll have to check."

Click to enlarge

    Perea said the team will be looking for a point of origin for the fire.
    "They'll be looking for anything out of place or out of the ordinary," she said.
    As of Wednesday the fire was still only 60 percent contained. An evacuation order issued to area residents last was lifted Friday. Seven structures were lost to the fire, including three homes.
    At the fire's peak last week, 175 personnel were fighting the blaze but that was reduced to about 30 earlier this week. As of Wednesday,, however, 12 additional firefighters had been requested because melting snow was making some access to steeper terrain possible.
    The estimated acreage burned remained at 6,969 acres.
    Sandia District Ranger Cid Morgan said now that the blaze is at least somewhat contained, the situation has become difficult in several ways.
    The fire is most active in wilderness areas that are "steep and treacherous," she said.
    For that reason, most of the fire suppression efforts are limited to the flat areas. Much of the access to the fire is on narrow dirt roads that are now in bad condition, rutted from the weather and from being used by heavy firefighting equipment.
    She also noted the cold temperatures and snow still on the ground in some areas.
    "Fighting fires in these kind of conditions is not fun ... it's really cold, you get wet," she said.
    The crews are concentrating on areas that might cause the fire to flare up again, or doing "mop-up," at this point, Morgan said.
    "Even though we got snow, the larger fuels are still very, very dry," Morgan said. "If we get a drying trend ... we could be off to the races again."
    Mountainair hopes to open a Red Cross unit in case of another emergency like the fire, Mayor Velta Gilley said.
    "It was very confusing on that day" regarding where evacuees were meant to stay and getting supplies out to firefighters, Gilley said Monday.
    Even though the American Red Cross set up a base of operations at Mountainair High School to accommodate evacuees overnight, it wasn't well used.
    The school had 35 evacuees in the early morning on Nov. 21, but they all found somewhere to stay by the next day.
    "Everybody found somewhere else to go," said Scott Snyder, director of emergency services at the American Red Cross in Albuquerque. "We were very fortunate that everybody had a place to go."
    Still, Snyder said, the school may not be the ideal place for a shelter in the case of future emergencies, because it may conflict with student use of the facilities.
    Snyder said he has been in contact with Gilley and will schedule a meeting to discuss an alternate location for relief services. He said one option is a seven-acre church camp on the east edge of Mountainair that was recently purchased by the town.
    Despite being trimmed back by Thanksgiving, volunteers still did a lot to aid evacuees and even firefighters, according to Robert Friedrichs, who managed the shelter on Thanksgiving Day.
    "We did have a lot of people coming in just trying to gather information," Friedrichs said.
    He said information in these situations is often scarce or unreliable; in fact, Freidrichs said one person that came in had been told their house had been burned down and was later informed that it wasn't.
    A number of people from the community asked if they could do anything to help out, Freidrichs said. He noted that there were no trained Red Cross volunteers in the area.
    "If there are volunteers in the community, we'd be happy to train them," he said. "So when something like this happens, then you have the response in 20 minutes instead of three hours."
    The Mountainair community will host a benefit bingo night for the Torres families and the Walters family, who lost their homes in the fire.
    Student councils from Mountainair schools will sponsor the event Tuesday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the elementary school gym.
    The Claunch-Pinto Soil and Water Conservation District will have a public meeting to make recommendations to homeowners to reduce the risk of fire and other prevention ideas on Dec. 10 at 6:30 p.m. at the Dr. Saul Community Building.