B Y A N N A B E L L A FA R M E R a h f a r m e r @ s f r e p o r t e r. c o m
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ennifer Lindline, an environmental geologist and head of the Water Resources program at New Mexico Highlands University, sat in a meeting for the school’s 2022 Earth Day celebration. “It was about 11 or 12 that day when you started to see that cloud descending on the city,” she says. “And then people’s phones started blowing up.” That was the day the Calf Canyon Fire “blew up and started marching north,” Lindline says, then merged with the Hermit’s Peak Fire to become the largest blaze in state history. Highlands faculty, students and staff who live north of Las Vegas raced home to prepare for anticipated evacuations. Lindline’s vehicle shook, buffeted by “demon winds,” as she drove home that night amid a haze of smoke. She returned to school the next week to stories of friends, colleagues and community members whose homes had burned. By the following weekend, the fire was edging in on the city, threatening the United World College, Montezuma and the Creston Ridge. Evacuees flooded Highlands from UWC, and the university president moved the rest of the school year online. Meanwhile, things changed for Lindline and her two interns, Megan Begay and Letisha Mailboy, who are both Diné. They’ve been monitoring the Upper Pecos weekly since 2019, but the ritual took on new significance as the river choked with soot and debris. For Pecos residents, the river is everything. It provides drinking water all the way from its headwaters in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains nearly to the Texas border. It’s the lifeblood of the village’s economy, fueling tourism, recreation and fishing. It irrigates farms and ranches, and feeds 55 acequias in the Pecos area. Lives, livelihoods and traditional practices depend on a healthy river. Wildfire brings a host of consequences for a watershed. Some are widely-known, like flooding and contamination from ash, debris and fire retardant chemicals. But some are more subtle and insidious: The same mechanism that causes flash flooding after a fire allows less water to seep back into aquifers from rivers, streams and other above-ground flows. That means fire can have a lasting impact on New Mexico’s already scarce groundwater supply. Lindline and other water experts believe the state needs to start studying this phenomenon 12
JULY 13-19, 2022
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SFREPORTER.COM
As recent fires jeopardize New Mexico’s already scarce water supply, experts eye policy changes
to inform policy and fire management techniques down the line as climate change makes two things certain: more frequent, more intense fires and less water. Lindline, Begay and Mailboy visit the Pecos weekly to test its oxygen content, pH levels and turbidity. They meet on a bridge on Hwy. 223, and usually wade out to a grassy tussock toward the center of the river to use water-quality meters and collect samples.
The week of July 4, though, the river had swollen to submerge their usual vantage point, and it would have been dangerous to venture far from the bank. They clamber through willow thickets, squelching through mud and standing water where the river spread from recent rains. “About 10% higher than last week,” Lindline notes, wading ankle deep in the shallows. She points out the soot particles darkening the water and collecting in zebra stripes along the banks. The team started
monitoring the Pecos in 2019 when a mining company proposed an ore-extracting operation that could have contaminated the water. They wanted to establish a baseline as evidence in the fight against the mine, which was successfully defeated. “Every summer it’s a new threat,” Lindline says: The mine, overenthusiastic hikers and campers escaping their houses during the pandemic and now, the fire. She explains the immediate repercussions of fire to a watershed: Trees and vegetation that normally intercept rainfall, lessening its impact on soils, disappear, leaving hillsides and streambanks vulnerable to erosion. Floodplains change, and rivers and streams can start to take unusual paths, causing flooding and disrupting aquatic habitats. The severity of these impacts depends on the nature of the fire. “All fire is not the same,” says Amina Sena, forest hydrologist for the Santa Fe National Forest and Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) implementation team lead. Low-intensity fire is a powerful tool that rejuvenates landscapes, making way for new growth, she says. She’s already witnessing this process at work as low-intensity areas of the burn scar—including her own property—see a “vigorous rebirth of vegetation.” But in high-intensity areas it’s a different story. When a fire burns hot it “cooks” the soil, creating a “tin-roof effect” where water no longer filters into the soil but skims across the surface, running off and causing flooding. A wildfire guide produced by the New Mexico Forestry Division calls post-fire flooding “the biggest threat from wildfire.” It explains that this type of flooding usually happens during monsoon season when there’s heavy, localized rainfall on a burned area where the ground can’t absorb the rain. That’s been borne out in recent weeks as communities across the state and the Navajo Nation have seen major flooding take out bridges, wash out roads and damage homes and property. The burn intensity of this year’s fire determines the danger to the watershed and the people, wildlife and ecosystems that depend on it. Preliminary BAER team maps show that about one-third of the land affected by the fire is severely burned. Sena calls the intensity pattern of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire a “mosaic.” In some areas that burned hot, she says, there were dead conifers and debris piled 8 feet deep. Buildups like that can’t happen if the Forest Service wants to prevent more
