By Andrew Hay
(Reuters) – The U.S. Forest Service said it started another New Mexico wildfire in 2022, bringing to three the number of blazes it sparked in the drought-hit state last year, including the largest in the contiguous United States.
The Cerro Pelado Fire began in April 2022 near Los Alamos when strong winds stoked a pile of burning logs and branches left from a controlled burn meant to lower wildfire risk, the U.S. Forest Service said in a recent report following a more-than-yearlong investigation.
The disclosure drew further questions about the Forest Service’s ability to safely conduct controlled burns in the warming U.S. Southwest.
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said the Forest Service had to abandon its “business-as-usual” approach to prescribed burns while climate change and extreme drought plagued the region.
“I am – again – outraged over the U.S. Forest Service’s negligence that caused this destruction,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement regarding the fire that burned over 45,000 acres (18,210 hectares) and destroyed 10 homes and other structures.
The agency blamed the Cerro Pelado Fire on strong winds and tinder-dry forests, as it did with two other blazes it started in April 2022. The other two merged into the largest wildfire in state history known as the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire.
“This investigation adds to the considerable evidence of how severely the Santa Fe National Forest was affected by extreme environmental conditions caused by historic drought in 2022,” Forest Service Southwestern Regional Forester Michiko Martin said in a statement.
The Forest Service paused prescribed burns nationally in 2022 as it investigated causes of the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire, which burned over 340,000 acres and destroyed 903 homes and other structures.
The agency implemented new procedures after it found poorly trained and ill-equipped staff faced pressure to meet prescribed burn objectives and failed to understand how climate change had dried out the landscape.
(Reporting by Andrew Hay; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
