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As the largest wildfire in New Mexico's history continues to blaze, federal forest officials have begun to worry about the upcoming monsoon season. Burn scars can lead to increased flooding, as well as release debris like ash into watersheds, which can stress water treatment plants.
As of Sunday, the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire remained at 50% containment and had charred over 300,000 acres in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range.
“When you think of a fire, you can’t think just in terms of when you put it out,” Ralph Lucas, an operations section chief for an incident management team deployed to fight the fire, told the Santa Fe New Mexican. “Sometimes that’s just the beginning. The post-fire effects are tremendous.”
Those effects include potentially catastrophic flooding, caused by a lack of vegetation to absorb runoff—runoff that carries ashy sediment into waterways and drainage areas during rainstorms. That ash could end up contaminating rivers, streams, lakes, acequias, and municipal water systems.
A U.S. Forest Service Burned Area Emergency Response, or BAER, team has already begun to assess which areas will be at highest risk, including Las Vegas, New Mexico, where over a hundred homes burned earlier this month.
“A large portion of their drinking water is served from surface sources that are directly downstream from these burned areas,” Phoebe Suina, a hydrologist whose environmental consulting company studies wildfire-impacted watersheds, told the Albuquerque Journal.
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I know my generation and even past generations haven’t entirely lived up to our end of the deal, otherwise you would be inheriting a country where every individual and every ecosystem is thriving. I know you all have the intelligence and foresight to move our world in a loving direction of progress, and for that, I thank you. ”
