The fires reached our beloved ski hill (which was miraculously spared during the Cerro Grande fire of 2000) last night. We could see the flames even from our house 8 miles down the road from Los Alamos. They have a team in place this AM to protect the main lodge and they believe they can. Spot fires are now as close as 1/2 miles from houses on the Western perimeter of the townsite. The size is now 60,000 acres burned in less than 48 hours.
Today the forecast is for yet another extremely windy day. Our only personal saving grace (here in White Rock) is that the winds will be out of the S, SW that will keep the fires away from us down in White Rock but it could bring them more towards Los Alamos. Due to the constant high winds they have not been able to get any aircraft up to assist with water drops so its strictly boots on the ground firefighting. All of the labs HE (High Explosives, we do alot of HE testing/experiments still) are stored in concrete bunkers underground. All nuke materials are stored in 3ft thick walled concrete vaults underground.
We have a lot of waste that has been moved offsite since the last fire to the underground WIPP repository down in Carlsbad, NM and all remaining drums are stored way down the road away from the main lab only about a mile or two from White Rock. They are strictly low level (solid) rad waste no liquids at all. So much has changed in the last 30 years as to the handling, treatment, and recycling of liquid waste that it's the least of our worries really.
A fire going over a nuke facility would be a huge concern but the lab has done an incredible amount of thinning of trees and other fuel sources to increase the defensible space that we are actually in a pretty darn good position compared to back in 2000.
Today is a make or break day for the fire depending on the wind direction. It could be pushed over the same area that burned back in 2000 which would make it much esier to get control of. Those areas had just started to grow back and green up so there is not much to burn really in comparison to other areas that were spared in 2000.
So appreciate the continued thoughts and prayers for the people who are risking their lives to fight the fire and the people who may lose their homes over the next day or so.
Just had an air crane helicopter fly over head so that's really good to see. We need some air tankers ASAP.
All for now.