Video of a “controlled burn” carried out on Wednesday near the western boundary of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The laboratory explained on YouTube that “firefighters conducted the burn to remove fuel available to the Las Conchas Fire.”
Updated | 7:50 p.m. The Las Conchas wildfire in northern New Mexico has blazed through nearly 93,000 acres since Sunday and stands poised to become the largest in the state’s history, according to officials.
A U.S. Forest Service Web site with information on the fire includes a frequently-updated map showing the area currently affected.
According to firefighters, efforts near the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a nuclear research facility, were holding the fire at bay. As our colleague Kirk Johnson reported earlier this week, the lab was created during World War II as the cornerstone of the Manhattan Project, the country’s first nuclear weapons development program. Kevin Roark, a laboratory spokesman, described the plant’s present mission as ensuring the “safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.”
Controlled burns, like the one shown in the video above, have been set to deprive the fire of fuel, and water has been sprayed to moisten flammable materials. There were no fires burning on the laboratory’s 36-square-mile property Thursday.
“In my professional opinion,” Los Alamos County Fire Chief Doug Tucker said Wednesday evening, “there is a less than ten percent chance of spot fires on Lab property this evening, diminishing tomorrow.”
The Laboratory Director, Charlie McMillan, said Thursday that nothing unusual was appearing in area air samples and that the risk to the lab were “lower today than they were earlier in the week.”
Winds, however, were expected to reach 40 miles per hour later on Thursday, and the fire remained only three percent contained, so efforts to combat the flames continue. The lab, which has been closed since Monday, would stay shuttered through Friday, said a laboratory spokesman, Jeff Berger, though essential functions and personnel would remain.
Lab representatives are using the facility’s Twitter account to get information to the public and the press, and even to combat false rumors, Mr. Berger said. One recent update described firefighting measures near the Los Alamos radioactive waste storage and disposal facility, called Area G.
Earlier this week, The Associated Press reported that an anti-nuclear group, Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, “said the fire appeared to be about 3 1/2 miles from a dumpsite where as many as 30,000 55-gallon drums of plutonium-contaminated waste were stored in fabric tents above ground. The group said the drums were awaiting transport to a low-level radiation dump site in southern New Mexico.”
Officials at the laboratory at first declined to confirm that there were such drums at Los Alamos, but, as CBS News reported on Tuesday:
lab spokeswoman Lisa Rosendorf said such drums are stored in a section of the complex known as Area G. She said the drums contain cleanup from Cold War-era waste that the lab sends away in weekly shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. She said the drums were on a paved area with few trees nearby and would be safe even if a fire reached the storage area.
Laboratory representatives are also posting pictures of the firefighting efforts on the facility’s Flickr page, where a photo stream usually dedicated to experiments and lab equipment has become dominated by fire trucks, smoke and flames. (Earlier in the week, NASA posted this satellite image, of the blaze around Los Alamos on Monday.)
The laboratory’s Twitter feed also points to relevant video and information elsewhere on the Internet, like this time-lapse video of the fire posted on YouTube by a blogger named Michael Zeiler:
Mr. Zeiler explained on YouTube:
On this fourth day of the devastating Las Conchas fire which is threatening Los Alamos, New Mexico, the night sky finally cleared enough to see the flames licking all around the labs and the city.
This time-lapse video is comprised of 113 photographs taken 30 seconds apart. Each photograph is shown for one second. My vantage point is from my home on a ridge just to the north of Santa Fe.
You can see quick changes in the fires, stars in the sky, and emergency vehicles making their way on fire duties. The brightest lights are the headquarters of the Los Alamos labs and other technical areas are to the left. To the right is the Los Alamos town site. Below the headquarters is the suburb of White Rock.
Earlier this week, Mr. Zeiler posted this striking video of the fire on his YouTube channel:
Updated information on the fire can be found on the laboratory’s Web site and at an inter-agency site called New Mexico Fire Information.
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