The heading of Los Alamos: as residents recover from 2000's devastating wildfire, trees are a symbol of all that they lost—and what they hope to restore

American Forests, Wntr, 2003 by Tim Wright

As twilight fell across the peak of New Mexico's Cerro Grande mountain that May night in 2000, an ignition team for the National Park Service began setting small fires aimed at thinning the overstocked forest. But what began as a routine prescribed burn ended as a massive wildfire that destroyed hundreds of homes and buildings and damaged one of the world's most sensitive and historic centers of atomic research. Before the smoke cleared, more than 18,000 people had been evacuated from the town of Los Alamos and Los Alamos National Lab, birthplace of the atomic bomb.

What the U.S. Forest Service calls the Cerro Grande fire-- popularly known as the fire at Los Alamos--was a flash point in a fire year that ranked as the country's worst in decades. When 2000 ended, the National Interagency Fire Council had counted 122,827 fires and 8.4 million acres of burned land.

At roughly 48,000 acres, the Cerro Grande fire doesn't even make it into that year's top ten. Yet, despite its smaller size, it was seared into the nation's consciousness because of the damage it caused, the damage it could have caused, and the fact that a federal agency was overseeing this prescribed burn-gone-awry.

In its wake, the fire left a landscape scorched by 3000-degree temperatures and a public outcry that prompted a year-long moratorium on federal prescribed burns. Ironically it was a backfire, set to contain the prescribed burn, that was caught by unexpected wind gusts and roared out of control.

Thanks in large part to mitigation efforts conducted by the Lab up to that point, no dangerous levels of hazardous materials were released when the fire swept across the grounds of what locals just call "the Lab." A total of 112 buildings were damaged or destroyed. In the pine-sheltered town of Los Alamos, however, the fire displaced more than 400 families and destroyed or damaged 280 homes. In its wake it left blackened forests and empty spots where neighborhoods had stood.

Seedlings Offer Hope

"Immediately after the fire, there was just shock," says resident Amy Lawrence, adding that things became tougher as time passed and townspeople had to deal with insurance companies, builders, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and endless paperwork. "FEMA gave out millions to help affected families recover, but there was a large part of you that was just angry."

Adds Liz Rutherford, who lost her family borne of 50 years: "It's not like they're coming in here and just dropping money. They're giving back what they took away."

Look across the stark black hills and around at the empty dirt pads with front steps to nowhere, and it's not hard to understand residents' anger and frustration. With so much of their lives tied up in bureaucratic knots, residents couldn't begin the rebuilding process. So when the nonprofit group Tree New Mexico began distributing free seedlings in devastated neighborhoods, the response was overwhelming. People seized on the opportunity as a sign of rebirth and one of the few tangible opportunities they had to begin rebuilding their lives.

Using a grant from AMERICAN FORESTS' Wildfire ReLeaf program, TNM organized a workshop on tree planting in the Los Alamos area. Officials from Los Alamos County and members of a local gardening group helped distribute 2,000 native trees along with tips for helping them survive. A second workshop in 2002 drew even greater participation and led to an outpouring of emotion.

"Many people were thanking me with tears in their eyes, talking about how the trees from last year were budding out and how much it meant to them to have us come back again," TNM's Executive Director Suzanne Probart says. "Everything they have had to do to recover meant filling out endless forms and more government bureaucracy. Our interactions were about planting and healing."

Ironically, the fire that started it all was part of an effort at healing--reducing the dangerous fuel load in forests surrounding Los Alamos, a situation brought on by decades of suppressed fire. The Los Alamos National Lab had begun its fire mitigation efforts two years earlier after an analysis of the Lab's vulnerability, which looked at weather patterns, existing fuel loads, and the projected path a wildfire might take. The report concluded that the fictional fire would release so much radiation that Three Mile Island would pale in comparison.

The Lab's fire mitigation efforts to that point spared the Lab and the town from that worst-case scenario. But when the fire roared into Los Alamos, simple single- and multifamily homes built when it was still a secret town in the 1950s and 1960s didn't stand a chance. With their flat roofs and wood construction, the homes were like stacked matches in a sea of ponderosa pine. Entire blocks of homes disappeared in a matter of minutes. Burning embers, rising in the heat and caught by winds, set spot fires across town, destroying individual homes in otherwise untouched neighborhoods.

When fire sweeps through a community, it takes more than just homes. Gone are familiar landscapes that form the boundaries of everyday life. And when catastrophic fire hits--like the wildfire that burned Los Alamos--the severity of the environmental damage stymies restoration efforts.