Containment of the 10K Fire in the Sandias skyrockets to 70% – KUNM News
While the wildfire in the Sandia Mountains has grown since it was first reported Monday, it held steady overnight and was significantly contained throughout the day Tuesday.
What’s being called the “10K Fire,” because of its proximity to 10K Trail, has burned five acres as of this evening, according to Cibola National Forest officials. It reached 3.5 acres by 9 p.m. Monday and stayed that size overnight. Officials said in this evening’s update that the growth since then was attributed to 15 to 20 spot fires being added to the main fire’s footprint.
The fire, which is north of Sandia Crest Highway and east of Ellis Trail, is now 70% contained — up from 0% as of this morning.
Crews from the Cibola National Forest, Mt. Taylor Ranger District, and Payette National Forest in Idaho worked throughout the day to reinforce fire lines, secure hot spots, and take down hazardous trees.
No evacuations have been ordered and no closures are in effect. Forest officials announced in what they said would be the last update on the fire unless the situation changes that all area traffic will be allowed after Tuesday’s shift.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
The US Energy Department is spending $26M to help find a temporary site to store spent nuclear fuel - Associated Press
Federal energy regulators have announced that they are spending $26 million to find communities willing to accept a temporary federal site to store spent nuclear fuel while a permanent repository is completed.
Thirteen groups made up of industry, academic, nonprofit, government and community representatives will each get $2 million to explore the most equitable approach to picking an interim site to store highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, according to a recent news release from the U.S. Energy Department. The approach will include a dialogue with residents and local governments, the department said.
This study is being conducted with the aim of creating a federal storage site independent of the two private sites proposed for southern New Mexico and Texas, which are embroiled in heated political and legal battles.
The lack of a permanent disposal site has created a dilemma for the federal government as it seeks a temporary hub to move the spent fuel piling up at 70 nuclear power plants in three dozen states.
Those who oppose temporary waste sites in their areas contend federal law — and now a newly passed New Mexico law — require a permanent repository to exist or at least be in the works before an interim one can be built.
New Mexico authorities have suspects in 1988 cold case disappearance of teen girl - By Susan Montoya Bryan Associated Press
It's been almost 35 years since Tara Calico disappeared during a bicycle ride near her home in New Mexico, but authorities announced Tuesday that they have enough evidence now to turn the case over to the district attorney's office for possible prosecution.
The suspects haven't been named and court records remain sealed. Authorities said they hope to provide more information as the case progresses.
Valencia County Sheriff Denise Vigil and other officials gathered at the courthouse in Los Lunas, about 24 miles (38.6 kilometers) south of Albuquerque, to provide an update in the case, which has become well-known within the law enforcement community and among parents worried about their children biking through the rural county.
The 19-year-old Calico, an avid cyclist, was last seen on a September morning in 1988 bicycling just a couple miles from home. Witnesses reported seeing her riding her bicycle along New Mexico Highway 47, with an older model truck following closely behind her. By the afternoon, when she hadn't returned for lunch, her mother reported her missing.
She vanished along with her bicycle, and was never found.
Despite having limited resources, Vigil said investigators never gave up on the case. Enlisting the help of federal investigators, she said the sheriff's office followed up on many theories, leads and tips that poured in over the years.
Vigil told reporters that Calico's family has suffered long enough and that while her parents are no longer alive, her two sisters and two brothers deserve to see justice.
"The people responsible will soon have to answer to this family and to the community who has never stopped thinking of Tara," the sheriff said.
The sheriff's office also received help from the Rocky Mountain Information Network, which provides investigative funding and analytical assistance for smaller law enforcement agencies. Officials did not provide any specifics about the evidence that was analyzed or what led to the break in the case.
In 2019, the FBI posted a reward of up to $20,000 for information regarding Calico's whereabouts, as well as the arrest and conviction of those responsible for her disappearance.
Family and friends have told authorities that Calico was a friendly girl who was both a superior student and athlete. At the time of her disappearance, she was working full time at a local bank and attending college.
Cormac McCarthy, lauded author of 'The Road' and 'No Country for Old Men,' dies at 89 - By Sue Major Holmes and Hillel Italie Associated Press
Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who in prose both dense and brittle took readers from the southern Appalachians to the desert Southwest in such novels as "The Road," "Blood Meridian" and "All the Pretty Horses," died Tuesday. He was 89.
McCarthy died of natural causes in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher Alfred A. Knopf said.
McCarthy, raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, was compared to William Faulkner for his Old Testament style and rural settings. McCarthy's themes, like Faulkner's, often were bleak and violent and dramatized how the past overwhelmed the present. Across stark and forbidding landscapes and rundown border communities, he placed drifters, thieves, prostitutes and old, broken men, all unable to escape fates determined for them well before they were born. As the doomed John Grady Cole of McCarthy's celebrated "Border" trilogy would learn, dreams of a better life were only dreams, and falling in love an act of folly.
McCarthy's own story was one of belated, and continuing, achievement and popularity. Little known to the public at age 60, he would become one of the country's most honored and successful writers despite rarely talking to the press. He broke through commercially in 1992 with "All the Pretty Horses" and over the next 15 years won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, was a guest on Oprah Winfrey's show and saw his novel "No Country for Old Men" adapted by the Coen brothers into an Oscar-winning movie. Fans of the Coens would discover that the film's terse, absurdist dialogue, so characteristic of the brothers' work, was lifted straight from the novel.
"The Road," his stark tale of a father and son who roam a ravaged landscape, brought him his widest audience and highest acclaim. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was selected by Winfrey for her book club. In his Winfrey interview, McCarthy said that while typically he didn't know what generates the ideas for his books, he could trace "The Road" to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, early in the decade. Standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night as his son slept nearby, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future.
"I just had this image of these fires up on the hill ... and I thought a lot about my little boy," he said.
He told Winfrey he didn't care how many people read "The Road."
"You would like for the people that would appreciate the book to read it. But, as far as many, many people reading it, so what?" he said.
McCarthy dedicated the book to his son, John Francis, and said having a child as an older man "forces the world on you, and I think it's a good thing." The Pulitzer committee called his book "the profoundly moving story of a journey."
"It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, 'each the other's world entire,' are sustained by love," the citation read in part. "Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation."
In 2022, Knopf made the startling announcement that it would release McCarthy's first work in more than 15 years, a pair of connected novels he had referred to in the past: "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris," narratives on a pair of mutually obsessed siblings and the legacy of their father, a physicist who had worked on atomic technology. "Stella Maris" was notable, in part, because it centered on a female character, an acknowledged weakness of McCarthy's.
"I don't pretend to understand women," he told Winfrey.
His first novel, "The Orchard Keeper" — written in Chicago while he was working as an auto mechanic — was published by Random House in 1965. His editor was Albert Erskine, Faulkner's longtime editor.
Other novels include "Outer Dark," published in 1968; "Child of God" in 1973; and "Suttree" in 1979. The violent "Blood Meridian," about a group of bounty hunters along the Texas-Mexico border murdering Indians for their scalps, was published in 1985.
His "Border Trilogy" books were set in the Southwest along the border with Mexico: "All the Pretty Horses" (1992) — a National Book Award winner that was turned into a feature film; "The Crossing" (1994), and "Cities of the Plain" (1998).
McCarthy said he was always lucky. He recalled living in a shack in Tennessee and running out of toothpaste, then going out and finding a toothpaste sample in the mailbox.
"That's the way my life has been. Just when things were really, really bleak, something would happen," said McCarthy, who won a MacArthur Fellowship — one of the so-called "genius grants" — in 1981.
In 2009, Christie's auction house sold the Olivetti typewriter he used while writing such novels as "The Road" and "No Country for Old Men" for $254,500. McCarthy, who bought the Olivetti for $50 in 1958 and used it until 2009, donated it so the proceeds could be used to benefit the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research community. He once said he didn't know any writers and preferred to hang out with scientists.
The Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University-San Marcos purchased his archives in 2008, including correspondence, notes, drafts, proofs of 11 novels, a draft of an unfinished novel and materials related to a play and four screenplays.
McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee for a year before joining the Air Force in 1953. He returned to the school from 1957 to 1959, but left before graduating. As an adult, he lived around the Great Smoky Mountains before moving West in the late 1970s, eventually settling in Santa Fe.
His Knoxville boyhood home, long abandoned and overgrown, was destroyed by fire in 2009.
Legislature’s health panel picks top three topics for the rest of 2023 - Austin Fisher, Source New Mexico
The panel in charge of health issues at the New Mexico Legislature set its agenda for the rest of 2023, with an emphasis on child abuse and neglect, substance use disorder, and the health care workforce.
At its first meeting between legislative sessions on Monday, the Legislative Health and Human Services Committee sorted through input from lawmakers and the public about what topics it should consider.
After five hours, committee chair Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino and vice chair Rep. Liz Thomson, both Albuquerque democrats, landed on three priority policy areas they will reserve for two-day meetings scheduled to happen between July, August and September.
THE TOP THREE PRIORITIES OF THE LEGISLATIVE HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES COMMITTEE
- The Children Youth and Families Department, and the abuse and neglect of foster children
- Behavioral health, substance use disorder and homelessness
- The healthcare workforce
There were numerous other health policy topics the lawmakers plan to discuss this year which could come up in the remaining 18 days of meetings scheduled for October, November and December.
In all, the committee is expected to meet for 24 days during the rest of 2023, Ortiz y Pino said.
“That sounds like a lot, but we also have, by my count, requests for 6,719 different topics to consider from the different advocacy groups, from legislators, from constituents, from any and everybody, because this committee’s purview is so broad,” Ortiz y Pino said.
Whatever the committee does, Ortiz y Pino said, their recommendations will have to be signed off on other parts of the state government.
“We’re not solving these problems ourselves; we’re making a major contribution to a solution,” he said. “I think we can do that, but it would involve some real give and take among ourselves, and willingness to put ourselves out, and to say what we really think, and then be willing to accept one another’s criticisms of it or disagreement with it.”
TENTATIVE MEETING DATES (LOCATIONS TO BE ANNOUNCED)
- July 10 through 12
- Aug. 7 through 9
- Aug. 28 through 30
- Sept. 18 through 20
- Oct. 16 through 18
- Nov 28. through Dec. 1
$2M for Black Fire recovery assigned to wrong agency - By Megan Gleason, Source New Mexico
New Mexico lawmakers approved $2 million to help repair damage inside and around the Gila National Forest caused by the Black Fire and flooding in 2022.
One problem.
That money was budgeted to the wrong agency. The error could cause a delay in getting aid to people devastated by last year’s catastrophic disasters.
The New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department was mistakenly allocated the money, according to its spokesperson Sidney Hill.
He said the money really should have gone to the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, which handles disaster recovery.
The emergency funds are supposed to be available for the state energy department July 1. Hill said the agency will then have to transfer the $2 million over to correct coffers at the New Mexico Homeland Security and Emergency Management by September.
It’s unclear what caused the confusion in the deposit.
This means there will potentially be an up-to two-month delay in getting these emergency funds to the right department, and then to affected communities.
State Sen. Crystal Diamond (R-Elephant Butte) represents some of the areas recovering, like Sierra and Hidalgo Counties, and tried to pass legislation with more immediate funding for those communities during the 60-day session.
She said, “no matter the bureaucracy that is delaying the process,” money needs to get out.
“We trust the state government to execute our legislative intent, yet this is another instance where we as legislators have to monitor these departments to ensure this funding for our struggling community makes it into the hands of those we appropriated it for,” Diamond said.
It’s not clear how the funding will be split up in southern New Mexico. The budget appropriation says the dollars are for “response and restoration” to the fire in the Black Range.
David Lienemann is the spokesperson for New Mexico’s emergency management department. He said if the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department sends the funds over to his agency, then officials would still need to put policies in place on how to distribute the funds.
Multiple counties had fire and flooding damage. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed emergency orders for four different counties in southern New Mexico after flooding last summer. However, not all counties actually sustained enough damage to receive the funds.
Justin Gojkovich is the Grant County emergency manager. He said the state hasn’t reached out about the $2 million allocated in the budget but stressed the county could certainly use that money.
One bridge in Grant County that was damaged by flooding would take around $3.5 million to fix, he said. That’s nearly double the state’s Black Fire relief allocation in the budget.
Gojkovich said the New Mexico Department of Transportation told him the bridge isn’t usable. Families that live on the other side of that bridge were trapped, he said, and the county put a low-water crossing in with rocks over the river. Still, he added, it’s impossible for people to cross when it rains.
“That’s what happened last year,” he said. “They were stuck on that side of the river until the water went down.”
Gojkovich said the budget issues with the state funds that could bog down repair aid is a mistake that’s unfortunate. But, he added, nobody’s perfect and he doesn’t get upset anymore when things work out like this.
“It kind of seems like everything we’ve been doing is met with some type of delay, which I’m not blaming on necessarily human error, specifically,” he said. “It’s a lot of factors that go into it.”
Acequia stewards in Grant County were struggling to get their own repairs going in time for irrigation season before spring this year. Disaster aid eventually came from private donations, the county and the state.
Gojkovich said the aid stewards did receive helped cover “band-aid repairs” that won’t last permanently when the next disaster sweeps through the region.
“If we get another pipe flow or a bunch of rain again, those are gonna be washed out,” he said.
People living in and near the Gila National Forest also sustained heavy damage. Ranchers in southern New Mexico have largely gone without state relief funds because of New Mexico’s anti-donation clause, which prohibits the state from giving money directly to communities in certain scenarios.
In the 2023 legislative session, Diamond introduced a $3 million relief bill with Sen. Siah Correa Hemphill (D-Silver City) that had a proposal to work around the anti-donation clause.
Diamond said in February that funds from this bill could go from the state to local soil and water conservation district officials, who could then get money to people like ranchers trying to fix up their private properties.
Correa Hemphill also said the legislation had an emergency clause, so money could immediately get on the ground if Lujan Grisham signed the bill into law.
The governor never signed the bill because it didn’t make it through the Legislature.
Instead, Diamond and Correa Hemphill got the $2 million that could be delayed due to the budget issue.
Local soil and water conservation districts in southern New Mexico are still trying to get part of the funding pot.
Jennie Bierner is the manager of the Sierra County Soil and Water Conservation District, one of the entities hoping to get funds and distribute them to affected areas. Like Gojkovich, she said she hasn’t heard anything from the state about where the funding is or how her district can use it.
Bierner is waiting for the state’s guidance on how to move forward with recovery efforts.
“We can’t do anything if we don’t have the money,” she said.
Los Alamos labs contractor settles state violation; has federal notice for more issues - By Danielle Prokop, Source New Mexico
As contractors at Los Alamos National Lab resolved allegations of mislabeling hazardous waste in 2020 after a New Mexico Environment Department inspection, federal overseers recently reported additional significant safety violations from 2021.
Triad National Security, LLC is a contractor that manages the national lab, including LANL’s plutonium weapons program. Triad is co-owned by the Battelle Memorial Institute, Texas A&M University System, and the University of California.
On May 31, Triad and New Mexico’s environment department agreed to a $20,000 settlement, after the agency alleged Triad violated state laws during a 2020 inspection.
Environment department inspectors said Triad failed to label containers of hazardous waste, universal waste batteries and free liquids. There was also a failure to provide secondary containers for free liquid hazardous waste. NMED issued a notice of violation nearly two years later in July 2022.
According to the settlement, Triad did not admit to any of the allegations, but paid the civil fine to “avoid further legal proceedings.”
FEDERAL OVERSEER FLAGS 2021 SAFETY VIOLATIONS
On May 25, the National Nuclear Security Administration issued a preliminary notice of violation after a series of events that occurred between February and July 2021 at LANL’s plutonium facility.
The NNSA, an arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, is responsible for the nation’s nuclear weapons. It oversees the national laboratories production, testing and development of the stockpile.
The NNSA labeled the five safety breaches against Triad and Los Alamos labs as “Severity Level II violations” with a high safety significance.
Level II violations “represent a significant lack of attention or carelessness towards responsibilities of (Department of Energy) contractors for the protection of public or worker safety,” according to a letter to Los Alamos labs director Thom Mason.
When asked how the public and workers can trust Triad in the wake of nuclear safety violations, a laboratory spokesman gave the following written statement.
“The Laboratory takes the incidents raised by the Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments seriously and undertook corrective actions to address them when they occurred in 2021. We will continue to work closely with DOE EA as we prioritize the safety of our workers, the public, and the environment,” the written statement said.
Violations included an issue when fissionable materials were placed in a drop-box and violated “criticality” safety posting limits, which are to help prevent fission chain-reaction accidents.
A glovebox – which is supposed to allow people to handle dangerous materials – breached on March 3, 2021, allegedly contaminating three workers’ skin with radioactive material.
“Triad did not immediately recognize that a glove had breached and that a worker had contamination on their hands,” the federal violation notice said. “As a result, the worker spread contamination to surfaces, personal protective equipment, personal clothing and skin of some workers in the room.”
The NNSA cited staffing shortages, noting that one person was given four roles.
“With all these responsibilities and distractions, self-monitoring was not performed when the individual exited the glovebox,” the violation notice said. That allowed the contamination to spread to two other people before being detected.
On March 31, 2021 flooding occurred in a vault with fissionable materials.
NNSA said Triad failed to inform the lab’s operations center that the vault water bath required filling. During the process, Triad deviated from approved procedures by blocking open a spring-loaded valve, “bypassing its safety feature.”
“This ultimately caused water to overflow onto the vault floor because the worker was not present to close the valve,” the violation notice said.
A second flooding event on July 19, 2021 happened after work was inappropriately delegated to unqualified workers, the NNSA said. The workers did not manipulate the valves in the right sequence, and did not notify the LANL Operations Center property to respond to the alarms.
“These errors resulted in one of the valves being misaligned, allowing water to inadvertently enter the ventilation system,” the violation notice said.
The flooding included glovebox ventilations systems and a glovebox containing fissionable material. Triad issued a memo two years before cautioning that misaligned valves could flood the ventilation systems, NNSA noted in the letter.
NNSA said both flooding incidents shared a problem of insufficient staff to complete facility rounds.
The violations totaled more than half a million dollars, $571,187 to be exact. However, NNSA withheld $1.4 million from the Triad contract “in part for deficiencies related to the events,” the agency said it would not seek further civil penalty for the violations.
Triad is required to submit a written reply, which can contest the violations.
New Mexico set to roll out $690M in taxpayer rebates after budget surplus - Associated Press
New Mexico expects to start distributing $690 million in rebates to eligible taxpayers as early as next week, state officials announced Monday as applications for a separate tax relief program opened.
Any state resident who filed a 2021 state tax return and was not declared as a dependent on someone else's return will receive their rebates automatically, the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department said at a news conference.
Single filers will get $500, while married couples filing jointly will get $1,000.
Stephanie Schardin Clarke, the department's Cabinet secretary, said rebates will be deposited around June 21 into the bank accounts of taxpayers who received a refund by direct deposit on their 2021 return. Everyone else will get a check in the mail, which will be printed and sent out between June 20 and June 29, she said.
New Mexico residents have until May 31, 2024, to file a 2021 return and still qualify for the rebates.
Those who aren't required to file a state tax return because of their income can apply for relief payments on a first-come, first-served basis through the state's Human Services Department. Applications opened Monday and will be accepted through close of business on June 23.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the tax rebates in April, as a result of a multibillion-dollar surplus in oil income.
At the time, Lujan Grisham noted that prices remain high in a state with elevated poverty rates and low workforce participation, but said New Mexico "is in a fantastic financial position."
Amid red flag warning, new fire sparks in Sandia Mountains - KUNM News
Amid warmer than normal temperatures and a red flag warning Monday, a new fire popped up in the Sandia Ranger District.
Estimated to be around 0.25 acres as of 2 p.m., the 10K Fire is 0% contained and is located West of the 10K Trail, North of New Mexico Highway 536 and East of the Ellis Trailhead.
Firefighters from the Cibola National Forest, Bernalillo County and Albuquerque Fire department have all been dispatched and are responding to the flames.
No evacuations have been ordered, though the communication towers on the Sandia Crest have been labeled as “at risk.”
Fire officials are warning the public to avoid the area and other trailheads could be affected if the blaze grows.
CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to reflect the fire was around 0.25 acres in size around 2 p.m. Monday.