The United States Forest Service (USFS) has confirmed that one of its burns in New Mexico went out of control early last month and later merged with another fire, to become the second largest blaze in state history.
Daniel Encinias standing next to his camping trailer in a New Mexico evacuation area on Tuesday said he will rebuild his torched home.
“We’re displaced because of something that was done by forestry,” said Encinias, 55, using the term common in the area for the USFS. “All I say is fix what’s messed up …”
Encinias is among more than 10,000 evacuees from the fire that has torn through centuries-old villages in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains 48km (30 miles) northeast of Santa Fe and burned the house Encinias had built from the ground up.
Like other people camped nearby, a trailer and truck are all Encinias has left. He has no home insurance. He is relying on help from his extended family and his community.
He, his wife, three children, four dogs and eight cats are crammed into the trailer at the Storrie Lake State Park where he plans to go ahead with his daughter’s high-school graduation party.
The fires in New Mexico are part of a dozen blazes now burning in the southwestern United States. Experts say climate change is causing wildfires to become more common and widespread in the US.
According to statistics compiled by the National Interagency Fire Center, there are currently 12 uncontained fires in five US states burning through 112,977 hectares (279,172 acres) of land. The vast majority of the area affected is in New Mexico with six fires across 95,439 hectares (235,835 acres).
On Tuesday, New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham asked President Joe Biden to sign a disaster decree to compensate families and restore watersheds and forests.
“You have a federal government who is certainly partially to blame for the situation we are in,” Lujan Grisham said.
The fire has further strained relations with the US government in villages that saw Spanish colonial land grants stolen by 19th century American speculators and subsistence use of ancestral forests restricted by the USFS.
A spokeswoman for the USFS Santa Fe National Forest, where the fire started, did not respond to requests from Reuters for comment. The second fire that the burn merged with is under investigation.
In the past, homeowners have sued government agencies for controlled burns that went wrong. It is also common for people who have lost homes to receive payouts through emergency funds.
The fire in one of the poorest US states is raging in two counties where household incomes are half the national average. Many of the lost homes are trailers on family land next to older adobe mud-brick homes, said Paula Garcia, who heads a state irrigation association.
At a Tuesday fire briefing, Las Vegas, New Mexico, Mayor Louie Trujillo bristled at officials’ description of burned houses as “structures” and said firefighters were defending a centuries-old “herencia” or inheritance.
“That land is spiritual, those houses are spiritual, it’s sacred land,” Trujillo said. The blaze threatens Trujillo’s historic city of 14,000 as well as villages more than 48km (30 miles) north.
Back at the state park, Michael Salazar says he fled with his truck and trailer from a fire that destroyed 10 of 11 homes in his Tierra Monte area. He linked the destruction to the controlled burn.
“I just hope the government stands up and says, ‘Yes we do these things for a reason, they do get out of control, and we are going to try to help you,'” said Salazar, 55, as firefighting helicopters hovered over the nearby lake to fill up with water.
