by CKR
As the first week of May 2000 slid into the second, I had a bedroll and an overnight bag with some clothes and other stuff in the back of my Subaru Forester.
The Cerro Grande fire blossomed beyond the boundaries set for a controlled burn, but it was stopped by several thousand firefighters on the south side of Los Alamos canyon in an uneasy truce. The Laboratory was shut down; fires were smoldering at its edges, and the several thousand commuters from Santa Fe and the Valley would make evacuation more difficult if it became necessary.
The beginning of May is a windy time in northern New Mexico, and a front was due on May 10. That would be the make or break day, although the truce and lack of breeze lulled some residents into believing the fire was under control. Mornings tend to be calm, but thermals around the mountains mean that afternoon is the windiest.
As I drove to Sombrillo Nursing Home to check on my mother that morning, I noticed one state police car after another. It’s not unusual to see one in town, but I was thinking more about my mother’s agitation as she saw smoke pouring over the city and into the valley several days before. A stroke had taken her ability to speak, but she made her agitation and its cause clear. She was still agitated, not least because the dining area now contained a pile of garbage bags loaded with the supplies that sixty people in various stages of incapacitation would need if they had to be evacuated. The staff assured me that many people with pickup trucks had volunteered, that First Presbyterian Church in White Rock was their evacuation destination, and that I could stop by and pick up my mother if that was possible during an evacuation but they knew it might not be.
I could see wind in the trees as I drove home. I had KRSN, the local radio station, on, as everyone did now. KRSN would give us first notice of an evacuation. They were watching the wind gauge closely. I ate an uneasy lunch as the smoke climbed higher.
“The fire has crossed Los Alamos Canyon,” the announcer said. I thought that what I had in the car was enough, but now I felt an intense need for some emotionally-charged items around the house. I piled the last backup of my pc into a box along with some photo albums, then began walking around the house selecting pictures I particularly loved.
“North Community must evacuate now!” Okay, they’re doing it one part of town at a time. Maybe Barranca won’t have to evacuate. The announcer sounded both surprised and distracted. I put my news clippings from the past year’s Estonian song festival in the back of the car. It was getting fuller. I could leave any time now if I had to.
The phone rang. “Cheryl, Karl’s in at work. What should I do?”
“Well, I think you’ll have time to wait for him. They haven’t announced Barranca Mesa yet. I’m just about ready to go.” We exchanged phone numbers of where we planned to evacuate to and mobile phones.
As I hung up, the radio said “All of Los Alamos is to evacuate immediately.” I called Jane back. “I have a lot to pack anyway. We’ll be all right,” she said
One more quick swing through the house to say goodbye to everything I decided I couldn’t take with me. Close sliding glass doors and windows, lock up. Get in car. Deep breath, one last look. The buds on the tree peony were just about to open.
I was lucky, in the early part of the evacuation. State police stationed at the critical intersections directed traffic. Directed. They gave us no choice but to go down the Guaje Canyon road. Someone else would have to help my mother. I was behind a medium-sized truck, which was behind someone going slower than I wanted. Get out, get out! The smoke was blotting out the sky, the sun going orange and then black. A road grader sat off to the side. They had been planning for this; had to; San Ildefonso Pueblo had locked the gate on this road a long time ago.
And then we were at the main, paved road. I turned back up the hill toward White Rock. The slowpoke had pulled off to the side: a heavily loaded Subaru Outback, two or three kids, the mother leaning against the steering wheel crying.
Joyce had invited me to stay with her. Ann, in Santa Fe, called shortly after I arrived and invited us both to stay with her. No, we said, we’ll be fine here. I brought my overnight bag in. We settled on the couch and watched CNN watch the town burn. I went over to First Pres. My mother was comforting someone who was more upset than she was. Good. The staff was setting things up.
Joyce and I took a break for supper and walked over to a restaurant. A military truck full of uniformed people passed us. It seemed vaguely strange that they were on the back streets of White Rock.
White Rock is lower on the Pajarito Plateau than Los Alamos. The trees are sparser there. It seemed sufficiently far to evacuate.
Joyce was falling asleep on the couch at about one am, and I was considering getting ready to go to bed. The night scenes of fire in the canyons were spectacular. Pajarito Canyon—I had taken an environmental restoration crew down Pajarito Canyon to check it out a couple of years earlier. It took a full day to hike from its upper end to Pajarito Road. We saw historic signposts on the old wagon road and an enormous pile of bear dung and had to fight our way through the underbrush in places. Then we were escorted through the criticality facility by security guards in an armored vehicle. Now the upper canyon was a river of flames. The old signposts consumed. I hoped the bear was safe.
“We’ll have an announcement in about fifteen minutes,” the local newsreader said. Uh-oh, maybe better not change into my nighties yet. And then it came: White Rock must evacuate. Ann was glad to hear from us, even at that hour. Joyce packed up a few things and we were at Ann’s by three am.
The second evacuation really upset the applecart. Everyone knew where their friends were planning to go in case Los Alamos was evacuated, but for many of us, that was White Rock. It took days to find each other, even to find that my mother was now in an Albuquerque nursing home. One of the Indian casinos had provided their vans to transport the Sombrillo residents.
Red Cross shelters were set up in several places, including a casino, but they were less help in finding people than most of us expected. This was inconvenient, but everyone knew that nobody had died in the fire and few were injured. It’s much worse in the hurricane area, because many people were not evacuated and there are still areas that the rescue people haven’t been able to get to.
People in the area were incredibly generous, offering their homes and guest houses to the refugees, even to strangers. Hotels asked for token payment only from Los Alamos refugees.
It was several days before we could go back to our homes. The county had cut off gas and electricity to prevent secondary fires, so utility people from several surrounding states came in to turn our gas back on. Food had spoiled in refrigerators and freezers, which had to be replaced.
My mother could come back only after Sombrillo had been scrubbed to remove the smoke, about ten days in Albuquerque.
More than four hundred homes were destroyed. FEMA erected temporary homes for those who lost theirs. Only last year were the last FEMA temporaries removed. The rebuilding of homes and utilities still continues. Insurance settlements took as much as years. The federal government also provided damage settlements. Federal employees started that controlled burn and let it get out of control.
I’m talking about a town of 20,000 residents and a forest fire, which devastates and leaves. Flooding has much longer-lasting effects. It’s not clear that New Orleans will ever be pumped out. Some googling gets me these population figures:
New Orleans: 1,337,726
Biloxi: 50,644
Gulfport: 71,127
Mobile: 198,915
Those numbers total up to 1,660,000 people. Add another 20% for the people living outside the cities and you’ve got two million people displaced with their homes damaged. It’s hard even to think about where to put all those FEMA temporaries. Twenty-five thousand refugees will be moved from the New Orleans Superdome to the Houston Astrodome. That’s a lot longer distance than White Rock to Santa Fe.
It looks like entire towns, probably including New Orleans, will have to be rebuilt elsewhere. It will take years and tens of billions of dollars to deal with the consequences.