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Firefighters battling fierce New Mexico wildfires may get help from Mother Nature
Roswell, N.M. — Cooler weather — and possibly rain — could bring some relief this week to firefighters battling blazes in southern New Mexico that killed one person, damaged hundreds of structures and forced thousands to evacuate.
Strong wind pushed the larger of two wildfires into the mountain village of Ruidoso, forcing residents to flee immediately with little notice. Weather patterns are expected to shift Wednesday with moisture from a tropical wave in the Gulf of Mexico, said Joshua Schroeder of the National Weather Service in Albuquerque.
“Today was really our last dry day,” he said late Tuesday. “Rains will then peak into Thursday and diminish by the weekend.”
Kaylee Greenlee Beal / REUTERS
On the downside, he said, some shifts in wind were possible later Wednesday, and rain could lead to flash flooding in newly burned areas.
Ruidoso and much of the Southwest have been exceedingly dry and hot this spring. Those conditions, along with strong wind, whipped flames out of control Monday and Tuesday, rapidly advancing the South Fork Fire into the village. Along with homes and businesses, a regional medical center and the Ruidoso Downs horse track were evacuated.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office confirmed one fatality as a result of the fire but said it had no further details.
The New Mexico Forestry Division said some 1,400 structures were estimated to have been lost to the South Fork Fire as of Tuesday. It was unclear how many were houses. The division said the blaze had consumed almost 24 square miles and was zero percent contained.
“They’re working along the edges of the fire. They’re trying to get some kind of containment and then also resources are engaged in structure protection which is getting ahead of the fire and doing what we can to try and save some homes,” George Ducker, the Forestry Division communications coordinator, told CBS Albuquerque affiliate KRQE-TV.
Kaylee Greenlee Beal / REUTERS
The other wildfire in the region, dubbed the Salt Fire, had spread to some 8-and-a-half square miles and was also zero percent contained, the division said.
Ardis Holder left Ruidoso with her two young daughters, her gas tank nearly on empty and praying that they’d make it out safely. She was sure the house she rented in the village she grew up in is gone, based on the maps she’d seen.
“We were already seeing where all the fire hit, it’s everywhere,” she said late Tuesday from a shelter in nearby Roswell. “If there’s something standing, that’s awesome. But, if not, we were prepared for the worst.”
Lujan Grisham declared a county-wide state of emergency that extended to the neighboring Mescalero Apache Reservation, where both fires started, and deployed National Guard troops. The declaration unlocks additional funding and resources to manage the crisis.
Nationwide, wildfires have scorched more than 3,280 square miles this year – a figure higher than the 10-year averages, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. About 20 wildfires currently burning are considered large and uncontained, including blazes in California and Washington state.
The exact causes of the New Mexico blazes hasn’t been determined, but the Southwest Coordination Center listed them as human-caused.
“We are deploying every available resource to control these fires,” she said.
While many older residents call Ruidoso home year-round, the population of around 7,000 people expands to about 25,000 during the warmer months, when New Mexicans and Texans from hotter climates seek the cool of the leafy aspen trees, hiking trails and a chance to go fishing.
Nestled within the Lincoln National Forest, Ruidoso boasts nearby amenities including a casino, golf course and ski resort operated by the Mescalero Apache Tribe. Horse races at Ruidoso Downs also draw crowds as home to one of the sport’s richest quarter-horse competitions.
Ruidoso residents fled Monday through traffic-clogged downtown streets some described as apocalyptic, with smoke darkening the evening sky, embers raining down and 100-foot flames in the distance climbing over a ridgeline.
The evacuation order came so quickly that Christy Hood and her husband, Richard, only had time to grab their two children and two dogs. Heavy traffic on the way out turned what should have been a 15-minute drive into a harrowing two-hour ordeal.
“As we were leaving, there were flames in front of me and to the side of me,” said Hood, a real estate agent in Ruidoso. “And all the animals were just running – charging – trying to get out.”
On social media posts, Ruidoso officials didn’t mince words: “GO NOW: Do not attempt to gather belongings or protect your home. Evacuate immediately.”
As Jacquie and Ernie Escajeda left church Monday in Ruidoso, they saw smoke rise above a mountain behind their house.
They kept a close eye on their cellphones and turned on the radio for updates. There was no “get ready,” nor “get set” – it was just “go,” Ernie Escajeda said. They grabbed legal documents and other belongings and left.
On Tuesday, the couple got a call from friends who are on vacation in Utah but have a home in Ruidoso that they’ve been told was destroyed, Jacquie Escajeda said.
“They lost their home,” she said. “There’s only one home standing in their whole little division that they live in, so there are a lot of structures lost. We have no idea if we’re going to have a home to go to.”
Public Service Company of New Mexico shut off power to part of the village due to the fire.
Lujan Grisham said cellphone service had been affected in some communities near the fire, and mobile cell towers were being set up to restore communications.
Amid highway closures, many evacuees had little choice but to flee eastward and to the city of Roswell, 75 miles away, where hotels and shelters quickly filled. A rural gas station along the evacuation route was overrun with people and cars.
It’s been said the best meals come from the heart, not from a recipe book. But at this USDA kitchen, there’s no pinch of this, dash of that, no dollops or smidgens of anything. Here, nutritionists in white coats painstakingly measure every single ingredient, down to the tenth of a gram.
Sheryn Stover is expected to eat every crumb of her pizza; any tiny morsels she does miss go back to the kitchen, where they’re scrutinized like evidence of some dietary crime.
Stover (or participant #8180, as she’s known) is one of some 10,000 volunteers enrolled in a $170 million nutrition study run by the National Institutes of Health. “At 78, not many people get to do studies that are going to affect a great amount of people, and I thought this was a great opportunity to do that,” she said.
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It’s called the Nutrition for Precision Health Study. “When I tell people about the study, the reaction usually is, ‘Oh, that’s so cool, can I do it?'” said coordinator Holly Nicastro.
She explained just what “precise” precisely means: “Precision nutrition means tailoring nutrition or dietary guidance to the individual.”
The government has long offered guidelines to help us eat better. In the 1940s we had the “Basic 7.” In the ’50s, the “Basic 4.” We’ve had the “Food Wheel,” the “Food Pyramid,” and currently, “My Plate.”
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They’re all well-intentioned, except they’re all based on averages – what works best for most people, most of the time. But according to Nicastro, there is no one best way to eat. “We know from virtually every nutrition study ever conducted, we have inner individual variability,” she said. “That means we have some people that are going to respond, and some people that aren’t. There’s no one-size-fits-all.”
The study’s participants, like Stover, are all being drawn from another NIH study program called All Of Us, a massive undertaking to create a database of at least a million people who are volunteering everything from their electronic health records to their DNA. It was from that All of Us research that Stover discovered she has the gene that makes some foods taste bitter, which could explain why she ate more of one kind of food than another.
Professor Sai Das, who oversees the study at Tufts University, says the goal of precision nutrition is to drill down even deeper into those individual differences. “We’re moving away from just saying everybody go do this, to being able to say, ‘Okay, if you have X, Y and Z characteristics, then you’re more likely to respond to a diet, and somebody else that has A, B and C characteristics will be responding to the diet differently,'” Das said.
It’s a big commitment for Stover, who is one of 150 people being paid to live at a handful of test sites around the country for six weeks – two weeks at a time. It’s so precise she can’t even go for a walk without a dietary chaperone. “Well, you could stop and buy candy … God forbid, you can’t do that!” she laughed.
While she’s here, everything from her resting metabolic rate, her body fat percentage, her bone mineral content, even the microbes in her gut (digested by a machine that essentially is a smart toilet paper reading device) are being analyzed for how hers may differ from someone else’s.
Nicastro said, “We really think that what’s going on in your poop is going to tell us a lot of information about your health and how you respond to food.”
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Stover says she doesn’t mind, except for the odd sounds the machine makes. While she is a live-in participant, thousands of others are participating from their homes, where electronic wearables track all kinds of health data, including special glasses that record everything they eat, activated when someone starts chewing. Artificial intelligence can then be used to determine not only which foods the person is eating, but how many calories are consumed.
This study is expected to be wrapped up by 2027, and because of it, we may indeed know not only to eat more fruits and vegetables, but what combination of foods is really best for us. The question that even Holly Nicastro can’t answer is, will we listen? “You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make them drink,” she said. “We can tailor the interventions all day. But one hypothesis I have is that if the guidance is tailored to the individual, it’s going to make that individual more likely to follow it, because this is for me, this was designed for me.”
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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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