The so-called Las Conchas Fire has charred nearly 93,000 acres of thick pine woodlands on the slopes of the Jemez Mountains since erupting on Sunday near the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and was collected to get New Mexico`s largest ever wildfire by day`s end.
"We`re seeing fire behavior we`ve never seen down here, and it`s very aggressive," Los Alamos County Fire Chief Douglas Tucker told reporters, adding that earlier hopes of lifting evacuations in the country by this weekend had been dashed.
Thick smoke billowing over the area prevented officials from obtaining the accurate aerial views they required for an afternoon update of acreage burned.
The state`s biggest blaze on record, the Dry Lakes Fire of 2003, scorched more than 94,000 acres of the Gila National Forest. By comparison, the largest blaze in Arizona, the Wallow Fire, has blackened 538,000 acres since it erupted May 29 of this year. It is yet burning.
The New Mexico fire, believed to have been sparked by a downed power line, has burned mostly in the Santa Fe National Forest and lapped perilously near to the Los Alamos weapons lab and adjacent town, home to around 10,000 residents.
Both have remained evacuated since Monday.
Laboratory and fire officials say no structures within the sprawling lab complex have been damaged, and no loss of radiation or other hazardous materials has been detected.
A firefighting force that has grown to about 1,200 people managed by Wednesday to carve containment lines about 3 percent of the fire`s perimeter on the easterly and southern flanks, keeping flames from invading the lab complex.
Those lines continued to take on Thursday even as the blaze, driven by erratic wind gusts of up to 40 miles per hour, grew bigger and advanced farther to the north, burning more than 6,000 acres of an Indian reservation, the Santa Clara Pueblo, officials said.
"We are devastated to see the end of our precious homeland," Santa Clara Pueblo Governor Walter Dasheno said in a statement, adding the reserve has lost two-thirds of its forest lands to wildfires over the past 13 years.
About 150 miles to the south, a separate wildfire caused by lightning blazed largely out of dominance in and round the Mescalero Apache Reservation. By evening, the Donaldson Complex Fire had burned nearly 73,000 acres, almost 7,000 acres of it on tribal land, and forced about 50 people to fly their homes, authorities said.
CONTAMINATED WASTE WORRIES
One business at Los Alamos has been the mien of some 20,000 metal barrels of plutonium-contaminated waste, such as old, tainted clothing and equipment, stored on a tree of the complex within about 3 miles of the fire`s edge.
Lab officials say most of the low-level radioactive waste is kept on pavement and the 55-gallon sealed drums are built to hold heat three times the temperature of a wildfire.
Still, crews worked to make a wider area round the depot site of vegetation, using industrial-sized mowers and large grinding machines called "Masticators" to cut grass, shrubs and small trees to mulch.
Similar measures were being interpreted in various other areas round the complex, including a power-line corridor near a radioactive liquid waste treatment facility and the lab`s explosive materials firing site. (Reuters)
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