With helicopters, airplanes, bulldozers and hand tools, firefighters feverishly worked to stanch the week-old blaze that was deliberately set to burn brush at Bandelier National Monument but had sliced through about 28,000 acres (11,330 hectares) like a white-hot sickle by this morning. The man who gave the OK for the so-called controlled burn was placed on leave Thursday.
The fire was still spreading this morning but at a slower pace as winds calmed. Winds were expected to gust up to 25 m.p.h. (40 kilometers per hour) but lose their earlier force.
``It looks like a war zone,'' Ed Pullian, a battalion chief with the Los Alamos Fire Department, said early this morning. He had slept just seven hours over the past three nights.
The blaze at one time surged so ferociously that firefighters dropped their hoses and equipment and ran for safety.
``It came roaring down like a freight train off the mountain,'' he said. ``We didn't have a chance. We kept retreating, retreating, retreating and kept getting overrun.''
Thursday, fire crews took advantage of nightfall, with its lower temperatures and higher humidity, to burn trees, grass and brush about five miles (8 kilometers) from town, hoping to create a scorched-earth zone that would stop the fire. Other crews doused homes with water, cut brush and dug trenches in still-standing neighborhoods.
``Today is a little better day for firefighting,'' said Jim Paxon, a spokesman with a federal-state interagency management team that deals with fires on public land.
Los Alamos, 70 miles (113 kilometers) north of Albuquerque, is essentially a company town for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which employs 7,000 people at buildings scattered throughout the city.
At the weapons lab, flames burned trailers and portable buildings, rolled past concrete bunkers containing explosives, and came within 300 yards (275 meters) of a plutonium-storage facility. Lab officials insisted dangerous materials were protected in fire-resistant facilities strong enough to withstand the crash of a 747.
``These materials are in the best place, given the fire,'' Johnson said after the flames passed by. ``There hasn't been the release of anything dangerous, again, there's not going to be.''
Danger was still posed by a hazardous waste area in nearby White Rock, where asbestos, low-level radioactive waste and PCBs are stored in steel drums and fiberglass compound containers.
Paul Schumann, an official with the lab, said possible health effects if the area catches fire range from short-term problems such as liver poisoning to long-term ailments including cancer, the result of inhaling plutonium particles.
The fire was about 5 miles (8 kilometers) away from the area Thursday night.
In Los Alamos, brick fireplaces and chimneys were the only things remaining of some homes while others escaped the fire's macabre dance, overlooking the destruction virtually unscathed. A basketball hoop remained intact on one driveway, its net singed but still hanging.
With the fires still burning, finger-pointing had already begun.
The fire was set May 4 by the National Park Service to clear brush near Bandelier, but raged out of control in the dry, windy conditions. Roy Weaver, Bandelier's superintendent, could not be reached for comment on whether he had seen a special National Weather Service forecast faxed to the park beforehand that said fire-growth conditions were at their highest.
``The data and the spot weather forecasts met the fire prescription,'' Weaver told The New York Times before his leave was announced Thursday. ``It's not like someone was just picking things out of the air.''
He said the fire team had received weather reports throughout the day, but the winds unexpectedly whipped up -- spreading the flames -- after the fire was started at 7:20 p.m.
Federal authorities pledged to investigate.
``Somebody made a mistake and obviously we have to find out who,'' Sen. Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico) said as he visited the fire zone.
Weaver, who gave the go-ahead for the fire, was on administrative leave with pay pending the outcome of an investigation.
About 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Los Alamos, over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a 350-acre (140-hectare) blaze -- possibly sparked by an airplane crash -- burned north of the Storrie Lake resort, state Forestry Division spokeswoman Terri Wildermuth said.
Another fire burned about 6,000 acres (2,425 hectares) in the Lincoln National Forest south of Cloudcroft, in the southern part of the state, fire information officer Gwen Shaffer said. The communities of Sacramento and Weed were evacuated.
advertisement
