But did the Village Voice’s aerodynamic bravado provide an accurate assessment? The Cerro Grande fire that nearly charred the
U.S.
According to Hindu
philosophy, humanity is entering the Age of Kali Yuga. It’s predicted as a time
of chaos, death, and purification. If things are not up to snuff in the
universe, it prophesizes, we can expect the revenge of the deities. And we can
expect the specialty of the age’s own deity, Kali herself, and that specialty
is fire.
Friday May
5: the wind picks up over New Mexico ’s Bandelier National Monument
Saturday
May 6-9: firefighters battle the blaze with helicopters, air tankers,
bulldozers, shovels, and rakes. The fire is dubbed the Cerro Grande, after the
nearby peak, and it is growing: 3,700 acres of park service and now national
forest are incinerated.
Wednesday
May 10: winds gust chaotically at 50 miles per hour. The fire leaps over
containment lines and flies toward the weapons lab. At the western edge of the
city, the blaze bursts into a firestorm in the treetops; firefighters hurl down
their gear and flee for their lives, their hoses bouncing wildly behind the escaping
trucks. Houses ignite. Some, the ones with propane tanks, detonate like bombs.
Loudspeakers blare: residents are given 15 minutes to evacuate. The fire
reaches three LANL research areas, including the weapons-engineering tritium
facility, Technical Area 16, also home to an enormous under-ground waste dump
called Material Disposal Area R.
The cloud
of sometimes brown, sometimes red smoke has been streaming northeast of Los
Alamos into the Chicano farming village
of Chimayó , up the mountain to the
forest pueblo of Truchas, and into southern Colorado ,
Oklahoma , and Kansas
It's 3
a.m. I'm at home in Chimayó conducting a psychotherapy session with a client on
the phone, and she is rapping away about her problems. The tube is on in the
background, soundless but shrieking black and white images of 100-foot ponderosas
bursting into flame. The smoke outside my window is blood red, and suddenly a
caption appears on the screen: THE VOICE OF SENATOR PETE DOMENICI. I butt in: "I'm
so sorry. Los Alamos is burning down. I have
to end the session." In all my
years of practicing psychotherapy, I have never done this. More red smoke wafts
by the window. Another tree explodes, and the senator tells us: The wind is
blowing at 60 miles per hour, the fire's headed for the lab, we are grounding
the slurry bombers, the firefighters are retreating, there's nothing more we
can do — except pray.
Pray? There
are 2,100 potential release sites in Los Alamos .
There's radioactive stuff the scientists just threw into the canyons back in
the 1940s. There are toxic dumps and decontamination facilities, incinerators
and radioactive waste pits, shops for machining radioactive materials and
decommissioned reactors. There's Tech Area 55, where weapons-grade material is
fashioned into radioactive batteries, and a storage facility where nuclear
weapons are shielded in concrete bunkers. There's Tech Area 15, a firing range
where 220 tons of depleted uranium and high explosives have been dispersed onto
open ground. And there's Tech Area 54, where 50,000 55-gallon drums containing
chemical and radioactive waste are waiting aboveground for shipment to the
Waste Isolation Pilot Project in southern New Mexico
As if in slow motion, I rise from the couch. I take out a nylon suitcase and, without emotion, place in it three pairs of jeans, three shirts, three sets of underwear, and my cowboy boots. I do not pick out a meaningful photograph. Not even a teddy bear. Nothing meaningful. Then I walk out the door, climb into my 1977 Honda Civic, and drive into the smoke.
As if in slow motion, I rise from the couch. I take out a nylon suitcase and, without emotion, place in it three pairs of jeans, three shirts, three sets of underwear, and my cowboy boots. I do not pick out a meaningful photograph. Not even a teddy bear. Nothing meaningful. Then I walk out the door, climb into my 1977 Honda Civic, and drive into the smoke.
The wind
is hurling itself toward the northeast. The evacuees have been sent south to
churches, high schools, and hotels in Santa
Fe
Things are
eerie out here. Silence and a fog of ash hover over the Chevy pick-ups and
low-riding Grand Ams creeping along Highway 76. I get to Española, the
Chicano-Indian town immediately down the mesa from Los
Alamos . A red-hot sun is just dropping behind the Jemez Mountains Sangre de Cristo
mountains to the east, is blanketed in black smoke. The faces of
my friends in Chimayó and Truchas pass before my eyes. Linda Pedro. Max
Córdova. Orlando and Mary. I do pray. I pray they have gotten out. In all,
11,000 people from Los Alamos will
evacuate. Another estimated 40,000 from
White Rock, Española, the villages, Indian pueblos, Santa
Fe , and Taos
The Abiquiú Inn lies
one hill beyond the smoke. The sign — VACANCY — cackles fire-red, and I
stop. An unshaven scientist type stands
like a battered alien at the front desk.
The clerk asks his address. "I don't think...I...have one," he
spits out. I tell her I'm on the run too, and she gives me a room for free.
I try to
turn on the tube. In some unkempt stab at bringing modernization to New Mexico Atlanta Albuquerque Los Alamos .
There are apparently only pine trees and private homes in Los
Alamos now.
Thursday
May 11: the wind is back at 60 miles per hour.
John Peterson of the Santa
Fe National Forest Los Alamos have been incinerated, 300 others are
damaged. Everywhere cars are melded into
pavement. LANL deputy director Dick Burdick survives when the fire blazes right
over his underground communications bunker. Reemerging to a scene of char and
embers, he says, "This is what Hell looks like."
It's a
catastrophe. A fire, yes. A terrible fire. But it also holds the possibility of
being a technological disaster, maybe on the order of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl Love
Canal
For
survivors of invisible contaminants, I learned, outrage and uncertainty are the
two predominant emotional ordeals.
Outrage because the harm was human caused; it didn't have to happen. The
Cerro Grande fire didn't have to happen: the park service didn't have to set
it, and the Department of Energy (DOE) didn't have to neglect its contaminated sites
all these years. Uncertainty because it is impossible to know what has happened
or what will happen. Has exposure taken place? To whom? Where? Will future health be affected? Are
the land and water contaminated? Uncertainty is attended by fear and
hypervigilance.
For me,
sitting all fearful and hypervigilant on my motel bed, uncertainty becomes the
name of the game. My only lifeline is to call a friend. Luckily for me, my
friends down in Santa Fe
Information
is what we need and don't have. Should I stay put at the Abiquiú Inn? Will the
wind shift? And most important, what's in the smoke? Uranium? Plutonium?
Americium? Strontium-90? Beryllium? Tuolene? Dioxins? Hydrochloric acid?
Asbestos? Is this the Chernobyl
I told you
Greg Mello is a Zen student. His most harrowing sesshin now lies before him. He
takes $300 out of LASG's waning coffers and rents a Cessna 152 at the Santa Fe
I'm
feeling less spiritual about it. I think the guy deserves a standing ovation.
The inn is
morosely quiet. The evacuees from Los Alamos
are stiff, the anguish seemingly stuck in the marrow of their bones. The wind
shifts from blowing toward the northeast to heading northwest. Primestar from Atlanta doesn't tell me this; I get it from Merida
The San Luis Valley of central Colorado
is like a displaced piece of Iowa , all flat
and spread out between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan
Friday May
12: this is the big day. The fire has penetrated LANL, and it's zero percent
contained. According to Lee McAtlee of LANL's Environment, Safety, and Health
Division, "Half of what you think it's going to do, it doesn't do. And
half of what you think it's not going to do, it sneaks up and does." It
sneaks up and rages, at 2000 degrees, toward three inflammable sites. TA 55,
home of the plutonium facility: the fire rips over the heads of the
firefighters, encasing them in Kali's rage. It closes in on all but one side,
and thanks to the vagaries of the wind and the courageous work of human beings,
it draws within inches of the razor-wire fence and stops. TA 54, where over a
million barrels could explode transuranic waste into the air: some truly deft
firefighting halts the inferno's advance within a half mile of the storage
areas. TA 18, where nuclear experiments provide enough materials to make
several bombs: the site is encircled by fire but not engulfed. New Mexico
Governor Gary Johnson calls the day "a miracle."
With its
temperamental carburetor and miniature tires, the Honda miraculously rattles up
a rocky road to the North Crestone Trail. I take a deep breath and embark upon
what the innkeepers deem will be good for me:
a hike. I head across a meadow, just now coming alive with spring
wildflowers, and find a creek rushing down the mountain all cold and clear.
Fording it seems a task I am incapable of enacting. I sit down on the ground.
And then I see it. Lying on a piece of mica-flecked granite, a brand-new pair
of elk skin work gloves. My first thought is not: someone lost their gloves,
I'll return them. It's not: hot damn!
Free gloves! No. It's: Don't touch those things, they're radioactive. Then the whole thing hits
me. I burst into uncontrollable sobs. First, for the ponderosas and squirrels,
the trout and deer. Then I cry for the park service administrator responsible
for the burn, how unspeakably tortured he must feel. Next, the evacuees at the
Abiquiú Inn and all the hotels and churches in Santa Fe
Yet
another emotional ride accompanies this journey, and it isn't until I get
beyond flight mentality that I sense its emergence. This one is made of
conflicting realities, and the tension between them appears irresolvable. On
one side, the psyche wants to believe in the comfy reality of normalcy. The
fire is no big deal, it insists, that nasty plume of smoke foretelling doom is
a normal cloud from a normal forest fire. The officials, after all, say everything's
okay. My bodhisattvas at the inn, after all, seem untouched by fear.
Until
Saturday, when suddenly every guest sitting around the breakfast table is an
escapee from the fire. Conversation turns to Los Alamos .
Enter normalcy's nemesis: the stripped-down reality of crisis. An older woman
from Santa Fe Taos
of an epidemiological study a Los Alamos
artist did revealing an inordinate number of brain cancers in his neighborhood.
Everyone recalls cynically that, during Three Mile Island ,
the government did not deliver accurate information to the public. Nor during Love Canal
or Church Rock or Times
Beach
Meanwhile,
on the phone, Dr. 666 is the man with the details. Shadowing Greg Mello, he
seems to know whatever there is to know. Forty-two thousand acres are burned.
The fire is only 5 percent contained. Twenty percent of the city is gone, 30
percent of the lab. Indeed, Tech Areas 54, 55, and 18 emerge unscathed. But the
blaze eats up 300 sites with documented surface contamination, including Tech
Area 15 which is littered with chemical high explosives, toxic metals, and some
220 tons of depleted uranium. Tech Area 16's Material Disposal Area R burns
and, with it, solvents, beryllium, uranium, and barium. Many of the homes that burned were built
before 1980, meaning asbestos is flung into the wind. A Montana
hotshot crew of Arapahoe and Cheyenne
The
reality of crisis gouges into my being like fingernails in Play Dough. I awake
each morning gripped with the thought that I have lost my home to
contamination. I am eating like a wild boar and losing weight, sleeping ten
hours and waking up exhausted. Merida
In the
face of fear and no facts, rumors fly. A LANL scientist who lives 40 miles from
the lab measured his own house for radio-toxins — and fled. The state almost
evacuated Santa Fe New Mexico U.S. some high-tech
firefighting airplanes, and Washington
This blog is a book. Please feel free to read the next chapter now. Go to the Table of Contents under the introduction on the right side of the page and click on the next chapter.
[i] Part I of
Chellis Glendinning, “Fear and Loathing in Los Alamos :
On the Lam from the Cerro Grande Fire,” Orion,
Winter 2001.
