But timber wasn’t the only thing making the landscape explosive. According to an analysis of the Department of Energy’s “1996 Baseline Environmental Management Report” by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety and the Nuclear Policy Project, the lab then had more than 2,120 “potential release sites” that included radioactive and hazardous waste disposal and spill areas contaminated with everything from radionuclides, high explosives, and heavy metals, to sewage and chemical spills. A contaminated reactor sat on the bottom of Los Alamos Canyon. A vault in Pajarito Canyon secured plutonium and highly enriched uranium. Water Canyon held significant residues of high explosives from a firing site. Shallow shafts in one “material disposal area” held some 40 kilograms of radioactive materials, including plutonium, from test explosions.1
Following World War II, as the fuel loads—both timber and nuclear materials—grew, so did the volatility of nearby fires. A 1954 blaze forced the evacuation of the town. In 1977 a firefighter died of a heart attack while running from the exploding La Mesa Fire. In 1996 a 16,500-acre fire, the largest in state history to that date, forced 48 firefighters in Bandelier into their fire shelters—one of the largest such deployments on record. Only a shift in the wind kept the fire from burning the laboratory. Two years later, in 1998, firefighters battling the Oso Fire, an arson about eight miles north of Los Alamos, said the blaze burned so intensely that the ground shook.2
The Jemez Mountains wrap around three extinct volcanoes. The largest is Valles Caldera, a 13-mile-wide volcanic bowl filled with lush forests surrounding a valley bottom of grasslands dotted with hot springs, volcanic domes, and steaming fumaroles. From the thick, high-altitude spruce and fir forests that cover the mountains’ northern and western peaks, to the ponderosa pine forests sprawling among the red rock, to the piñon pines, junipers, and grasses in the canyon bottoms, the landscape encompasses as diverse a variety of vegetation and geology as can be found in such a small swath anywhere in the West.
Cerro Grande, a 10,207-foot decapitated volcano that is the high point of Bandelier National Monument, looks out on the Valles Caldera National Preserve, the laboratory, and the town. Before sunrise on July 16, 1945, workers from Los Alamos hiked up the mountain to see a flash 200 miles to the south—the first atomic bomb test. Fifty-five years later the massive cloud rising from the exploding forests of Cerro Grande could be seen from the site of the test.3
On the evening of Thursday, May 4, 2000, 19 firefighters from the National Park Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was assisting the NPS, climbed the peak to burn a blackline, the first stage of a three-phase prescribed burn planned to continue through the following year to prevent a wildfire that might threaten the lab. The blackline burn was ornery almost from the moment they lit it. By the next morning it had overwhelmed the handful of firefighters controlling it, and fire slopped over the line. Hotshots, air tankers, and helicopters came to help. Backburns and fire lines corralled the blaze briefly, but heavy winds drove the fire hard. A second set of burns intended to help contain the initial slop-over instead leapt into the treetops and ran fast through Frijoles, Water, and Los Alamos Canyons.
The laboratory notified the Pentagon. Some 75 New Mexico fire departments raced to the city. Nonetheless, the following Wednesday, May 10, a vicious wind blasted the fire into the community, forcing the evacuation of 13,000 people, some of whom had been so confident the government wouldn’t let Los Alamos burn that they’d sat on their porches watching the blaze. A few workers at the lab weren’t so confident and left not only Los Alamos but New Mexico, fearing the fire could set off conventional explosives and release dangerous radiation. As the town’s residents evacuated, the roads were clogged by gridlock.
Some 7,500 acres—about one-quarter of the lab’s area—burned, along with 112 minor laboratory structures, such as office trailers and sheds. According to the laboratory, none of the buildings that burned contained nuclear materials or high explosives, although many firefighters and residents who confronted the blaze remain concerned about the potential exposure to various radioactive elements released by the fire.
The fire in town burned 239 homes. The prescribed burn that was intended to scorch about 900 acres over a year or more’s time instead torched 48,000 in a matter of days. It cost $1 billion to fight and recover from, making it the most expensive U.S. forest fire to that date.
Miraculously, as opposed to the Lower North Fork Fire that grew out of a similar controlled fire in Colorado 12 years later, nobody perished in the Cerro Grande Fire. The lab reported that no radioactive material escaped during the blaze. But there was plenty of fallout.
ROGER KENNEDY HAD RETIRED as director of the National Park Service three years before the Cerro Grande Fire, but he watched it from his home east of Los Alamos. The blame for the fire landed squarely on some of his former employees—the ones who’d started the prescribed burn. “I saw people that were doing very hard work hung out to dry,” he told me a few months before cancer took his life in 2011.
In his storied career Kennedy had worked in five presidential administrations, was a White House correspondent for NBC, hosted his own Discovery Channel series, and ran the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He wrote more than a dozen books.
As investigators interviewed everyone involved in starting and fighting the fire, Kennedy dug through more than half a century of history. Nuclear threats, he discovered, had more influence on the United States’ relationship with wildfire than any of the firefighters in Los Alamos could have realized.
“The story,” he told me, “. . . extends to the entire arrogance of the scientific community after the development of the bomb. They didn’t understand what they were doing outside of the bomb.”
During World War II, newsreels and magazines showed European cities in rubble. Kennedy told me about a book from the National Fire Protection Association that showed photos of charred bodies and a map of “United States cities corresponding approximately to destroyed cities of Germany and Japan.” After seeing the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, worried that American cities were vulnerable to similar destruction.
“Teller feared atomic annihilation,” Kennedy told me. “You couldn’t grow up without images of Dresden, Rotterdam, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—the destruction of great cities by modern war.”
Teller, who had some experience with urban planning from his involvement with “atomic towns” such as Los Alamos, promoted a government program to move the population of American cities to rural regions. “In an atomic war, congested cities would become deathtraps,” Teller wrote in a 1946 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Dispersal of cities may mean the difference between extermination of one third of our population and the death of only a few million people . . . We cannot do this without government regulations, just as restrictive or more restrictive than those of the recent war years.”4
Other nuclear scientists followed suit. “Dispersal is the only measure which could make an atomic ‘super Pearl Harbor’ impossible,” wrote Eugene Rabinowitch, editor of the Bulletin, in one of a number of articles that promoted dismantling the nation’s “concentration of attractive targets.”5
After these articles appeared, Harry Truman called for “general standards with respect to dispersal, . . . in the allocation of critical materials for construction purposes, and in the making of emergency loans.”6
Plans for tax-subsidized dispersal included Federal Housing Administration loans and GI insurance, federal slum clearance loans, aid for highway construction, loans to industry, defense contracts, and tax concessions for those who moved from dense cities to what 50 years later would be known to firefighters as the wildland-urban interface. “People were induced by immense subsidies to find themselves homes as far away from industrial sites as possible—and thus some of them wound up in danger of another kind of fire,” Kennedy wrote in his 2007 book, Wildfire and Americans.7
Racia
l fears pushed population from some cities, while the mythology of the abundant West pulled people to the woods. The weather eased the path for the nation’s exodus. The 1950s and ’60s were unusually wet and cool decades in normally hot and arid western states. That made the grass greener, and less black, on the west side of the fence dividing urban and wild lands.
Still, federal policy drove the migration. “It is wrong to believe that postwar American suburbanization prevailed because the public chose it and will continue to prevail until the public changes its preferences,” wrote professor of social work and urban planning Barry Checkoway. “Suburbanization prevailed because of the decisions of large operators and powerful economic institutions supported by federal government programmes, and ordinary consumers had little real choice in the basic pattern that resulted.”8
President Dwight Eisenhower’s Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1954 allotted $175 million for the interstate system. That grew into the Highway Trust Fund, which spent more than $700 billion building highways over the next 30 years. The migration supported myriad industries: the building of homes and roads, power grids, dams, and water diversions. Shopping malls were both hearts of commerce and evacuation centers. The patriotic strategy turned into an economic engine. “Dispersal is good business,” Tracy Augur, of the American Institute of Planners, boasted to readers of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.9
Congressional representatives in rural states competed for the industry and development leaving the cities. The migration was soon driven more by barrels of pork than bombs of plutonium. “Billions of federal dollars were spent to induce millions of Americans to migrate out of cities and along highways into the suburbs and beyond—to the edges of natural systems that did not appear at the time to be as dangerous as they turned out to be,” Kennedy wrote.
During the 50 years prior to the Cerro Grande Fire, Kennedy told me, one-fifth of the American population moved into the nation’s most flammable forests, chaparral, and grasslands. He described Boulder, where I’d just moved, as the “most fire-endangered city on the Colorado Front Range.” Boulder County’s population had grown from 48,000 to 278,000 in the second half of the twentieth century.
“Thousands of people are moving unwarned into firetraps every day,” he wrote. “Indeed, they are being encouraged to settle there by taxpayer subsidies.”
Those perverse financial incentives continue today. County governments benefit from the tax base of new developments, but when a big wildfire threatens those communities, it’s the federal taxpayer at large who pays for their protection. So city dwellers who face no threat of wildfire subsidize people to live in the country’s most flammable landscapes.
I asked Kennedy what would stop people from moving into the path of wildfires. “A lot of fires, a lot of death, and a lot of painful learning,” he responded.
WHILE HUMAN SETTLEMENTS CAN ENCROACH ON or retreat from Red Zones in a matter of years, nuclear leftovers linger for centuries.
In Ukraine, the Red Forest around Chernobyl is named for the rusty color the pines took on after radiation killed them. Plutonium, strontium, cesium, and other fallout from the 1986 explosion and fire in the nuclear power plant contaminate the woods. In 2011 researchers from Europe and the United States determined that a wildfire in the forests of Chernobyl would send that fallout back into the atmosphere, where it could spread far beyond the exclusion zone.10
And the risk of a large wildfire there grows yearly, reported Sergiy Zibtsev, the lead author of the 2011 paper and a Ukrainian forestry professor who has been studying the Red Forest for two decades. “In Ukraine, people just don’t realize how dangerous [big wildfires can be],” he said in an interview. “They have [the] completely wrong approach in the exclusion zone. They [think] that they can manage any fire, and this is a very, very big mistake.”
After the population moved from the “zone of alienation” and commercial activities were forbidden within it, the woods grew thick and tangled. Birds in the exclusion zone have smaller brains, trees show stunted growth, and wild boars as far away as Germany have dangerously elevated radiation levels.11 Radioactivity killed off many of the bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates, slowing the decomposition of needles, leaves, and trees by up to 40 percent.12 Those fuels have accumulated.
In the meantime, persistent droughts, longer summers, and decreased rainfall have primed the Red Forest to burn. “Here everybody [is] sure that we [are] already living in a different climate,” Zibtsev said.
After witnessing massive U.S. wildfires in 2005, Zibtsev grew concerned that a blaze in the Red Forest could create a nuclear disaster. Thinning the forest and preparing for fire could reduce the risk, but convincing the Ukrainian government of the threat proved difficult.
“It came back to that same old issue,” Chad Oliver, director of Yale’s Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry, said after visiting Zibtsev in the Red Forest and collaborating with him on the 2011 paper. “What if you knew something horrible was going to happen and couldn’t get anyone to listen to you?”
Oliver told his host, “These could burn any minute.”
Research by Zibtsev and Oliver showed that a fire that fully consumed the forest would blanket Kiev with radioactive smoke, leading to an increased risk of cancer there. Agricultural products up to 90 miles away from the fire would be so contaminated they couldn’t be safely consumed. And the stigma of radiation on the nation’s farms would keep other countries from importing even uncontaminated Ukrainian foods.
“The estimated cancer incidents and fatalities are expected to be comparable to those predicted for Fukushima,” a team of scientists wrote in 2014, noting that a wildfire in the Red Forest would rate high on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.13
A Red Forest megafire would expose firefighters to radiation both externally when the flames released it and internally through the smoke they inhaled. That’s on top of the peril they would face battling a blaze they are neither equipped nor trained to fight. The entire exclusion zone has only six fire towers and just one helicopter that doesn’t even drop water.
An early warning system, modern firefighting equipment, and forest thinning would reduce the hazard, Oliver said. But those options are expensive.
In the summer of 2014, Ukraine expanded the exclusion zone, and the United Nations earmarked funds to develop a wildlife preserve there. But with the nation engaged in a civil war, the possibility that Ukraine would do much to reduce the nuclear threat of the Red Forest seemed remote.
ON APRIL 28, 2015, two days after the 29-year anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, an out-of-control wildfire spread into the exclusion zone, burning down an abandoned village and extending to within 10 miles of the mothballed nuclear plant. The fire didn’t burn into the most contaminated forest, and Ukrainian scientists measured only a slight increase in radiation. Two months later wildfires burned into the heart of the Red Forest. This time Ukrainian nuclear inspectors detected radiation of approximately 10 times normal levels.
“It’s like Chernobyl all over again,” Chris Busby of the European Committee on Radiation Risks said, describing the potential that the fires would send radionuclides absorbed by the trees back into the air.14
And from Japan to the Rocky Mountains, other wildlands were growing red.
IN MY HOMETOWN THERE WERE fears of fallout from less remote smoke.
Before it was raided by the FBI in 1989 and closed due to a litany of covered-up safety violations and crimes, the Rocky Flats Plant, eight miles south of Boulder, made small plutonium bombs that were the triggers for hydrogen bombs. During the plant’s operation, fires, accidents, and routine work dusted the surrounding land with radioactive particles. In the 1970s a federal government study found plutonium particles around the 10-acre site of the plant, and the Atomic Energy Commission found them throughout the Denver metro area. Cleaning up the Superfund site took 10 years and cost nearly $7 billion. The facility’s buildings were razed, and the U.S. Fish and Wil
dlife Service took over 80 percent of the sprawling grassland surrounding them and turned it into a wildlife refuge.
Eons of erosion from the nearby mountains covered the rocky mesa with a thin layer of soil that supports Colorado’s largest patch of dry tallgrass prairie, which contains smaller versions of the same species as the moister prairies of the plains states. Like that grassland, Colorado’s tallgrass is dependent on fire. But after the creation of the Rocky Flats Plant, no natural fires were allowed on Rocky Flats. Trees and invasive species encroached. The soil became anemic from the lack of flame-released nutrients. Animal species dependent on the fire-nourished grasses fell into decline.
Dave Lucas, the manager of the refuge, carries a Geiger counter whenever he travels through the grassland. He told me he has never measured dangerous levels of radiation, but sees impacts from the lack of fire every day. “Grassland birds are the fastest-declining species,” he said.
Mammals, like the threatened Preble’s meadow jumping mouse, are also slipping away. As we walked in the grass, Lucas pointed out a fabulously purple penstemon flower that would be more common, along with many others, if the grassland burned.
“It’s a fire-adapted, fire-dependent landscape,” he said. “You take any major factor out of play and you get a different ecosystem. Fire is a natural part of this habitat.”
In 2014 the Fish and Wildlife Service, in an effort to save the tallgrass, planned a prescribed burn on 701 acres of Rocky Flats. A dozen years earlier a 50-acre test burn spread smoke from the mountains to Denver. Although federal and state agencies noted no dangerous levels of radiation within it, a local antinuclear activist, Paula Elofson-Gardine, claims to have measured radiation up to 1,300 times the normal background levels.15
Homes were sprouting next to Rocky Flats in 2014. Candelas, a nearly 1,500-acre planned community, was still under construction when the burn was announced. All of its 2,500 homes would be within a mile of the site of the former nuclear facility, and many abutted the refuge. Although tests showed the grassland held minimal radiation and the fire’s smoke would be below federal limits for radionuclides, opposition to the prescribed burn exploded among both the new residents and antinuclear activists once aligned against the bomb plant.
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