Bigger and more-frequent wildfires threaten water supplies across the US
– By Martha Bellisle, Associated Press
Wildfires leave behind charred trees and scorched vegetation that impact the streams and rivers providing drinking water to much of the country, and new studies show that contamination could remain for more than a decade.
These findings about the longevity of contamination in the nation's drinking water supplies are especially concerning as climate change and increasingly strong El Niño weather events, which intensify drought conditions, have led to bigger and more frequent wildfires in the U.S. So far in 2026, there have been 68,179 blazes burning more than 9.5 million acres (3.8 million hectares).
After a wildfire sweeps through hillsides and forests, rains carry ash and organic matter into the streams that feed water treatment plants for towns and cities alike. Communities are working to adapt, but it can take years and require stopgap solutions.
People in the City of Las Vegas, New Mexico, went without water for months after the Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon wildfire contaminated the Gallinas River in 2022. In the four years since, they've had to give residents bottled water and ship tanks in from nearby towns as they collected funds to build a new treatment plant.
Karen Pettine, who has owned the Hillcrest Restaurant for 50 years, said the water crisis forced them to close, sometimes for a week at a time.
"It's hard to run a restaurant without good water," she said. "We used some paper plates at times. They brought in semi-truckloads of bottled water. You could pick up four cases at a time. The water situation is ongoing because when it rains, it floods and it brings dirty water down the stream."
Las Vegas Mayor David Romero said climate change has made the things that used to be reliable less predictable.
"It's a scary situation that we're all going to encounter," he said.
Sediment from burned landscapes a headache for water-treatment plants
Wildfires are a natural part of forest ecosystems, but an increase in their severity has made areas that capture, filter and regulate the flow of water, known as watersheds, vulnerable, said Amanda Hohner, an assistant professor at Montana State University who specializes in wildfires and water quality.
Forested watersheds provide water to nearly two-thirds of municipalities in the U.S., according to Carli Brucker, lead author of a University of Colorado Boulder study that assessed wildfire-affected water quality in hundreds of burned basins and compared them to unburned areas. Their study found that the impacts can last up to eight years.
Garrett McKay, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Texas A&M, said utilities are extremely concerned about the impacts wildfires have on water. They're reaching out to experts like him for help finding different water sources or to learn how to treat the organic matter coming into their plants.
Water treatment facilities that rely on streams and rivers typically treat high quality water, aided by trees and soil that act as a natural filtration system, Brucker said. But wildfires cause spikes in heavy metals or dissolved organic matter, which the plants aren't built to handle, she said.
This can force treatment facilities to shut off the incoming water and resort to other sources, which may not be immediately available, Brucker said. Some have groundwater or reservoir backups, but even those can be impacted.
Reservoirs can serve as a "sedimentation basin" where particles can settle, said Kyle Shimabuku, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Gonzaga University. But sediments from burned vegetation are rich in nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, and as they sit in still water, algal blooms can grow, he said. The algae can make people sick and kill the fish.
Chlorine, routinely used to treat water, also is impacted by wildfires, said McKay at Texas A&M. When facilities add disinfectants, like chlorine, to water, they react with the dissolved organic matter left behind by the fires to form "disinfection byproducts," which are regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because they can cause illnesses, including cancer.
Since plants can't remove the disinfection byproducts, they must get rid of the organic matter before disinfecting the water, which can cause delays in the water supply.
Implementing new options can cost facilities millions
When a 2020 wildfire burned the area around No Name and Grizzly creeks, the primary water sources for the city of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, officials scrambled to protect against sediment expected to wash down the slopes when spring rains arrived. They sought help from the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Within two months, the board authorized an emergency loan of $8 million for improvements to the treatment system.
Fort Collins faced a similar challenge that year when ash and sediment from the Cameron Peak fire forced the city to close its river intake and pull water from the Horsetooth Reservoir, which was safe to use because it's fed by a different watershed.
Las Vegas, New Mexico, was hit harder when the Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon fire damaged the Gallinas River watershed in 2022. A massive rainstorm swept ash and sludge from the burn scar into the river and reservoirs, forcing the town to shut down its water treatment plant while they installed additional filters and looked for additional water sources.
As they worked on solutions, a massive flood in 2024 carried more burn debris into the town's two reservoirs, leaving them with only a few days of safe water. As businesses closed and residents bought bottled water, the town hired trucks to bring 2.2 million gallons (8.3 million liters) of water from nearby towns of Santa Fe and Santa Rosa.
They were hit again in February 2025. Burn scar debris coupled with bad weather and equipment failure caused a pressure drop, which resulted in a monthlong boil-water advisory and more water shipments.
"The February event was probably the scariest," Romero said.
Ultimately, the state and federal governments allocated $148 million to rebuild the town's treatment plant and help support their efforts to find other options, including drilling wells and reusing water. Groundbreaking on the first phase of their new water treatment plant is slated for Nov. 18, the mayor said.
"We've been doing a lot of work for other sources of water and we know with climate change and what we experienced in the past, the Gallinas River is something we can't depend on forever."
Microsoft struggles to restore email and other services in a global outage
– By Chan Ho-Him, AP Business Writer
From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft's outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue.
Microsoft said the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
The extent of the outage wasn't clear but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
The company indicated that its recovery efforts were making progress Friday, saying it was "seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements," and that there was "incremental improvement in several workloads." But problems appeared to persist, according to an outage tracking site, status reports from organizations that depend on the company's services and anecdotal reports on social media.
Microsoft scrambles to recover services
The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using "a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure."
The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident "with urgency and priority until full resolution."
A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.
Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.
An earlier post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution.
"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected," the company wrote.
In a pair of more recent updates on Friday, Microsoft said "we're seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue."
"Recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure and progressing in phases," the company said in a second post. "We're seeing incremental improvement in several workloads, but service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline."
Governments, businesses from Japan to Australia affected
The British government said it is "working closely" with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services but that "robust contingency plans" are in place to minimize disruption.
British police forces said they're unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call emergency responders to make any urgent reports.
The National Pharmacy Association said people could face delays getting their prescriptions because the outage is affecting the email systems of the state-run National Health Service. Hospitals urged patients to attend appointments as usual.
U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had likened the widespread disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which stemmed from a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. That outage grounded flights and disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers.
Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft's top executive in Australia and the government's national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption.
"They (Microsoft) don't believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry," Burke told reporters in Sydney.
Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company could not receive updates from its U.S. customers throughout Outlook. If the situation dragged on further, this could "impact the production timeline," he said. Some banks in Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub, also saw part of their operations disrupted.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption, the company said in a statement.
IndiGo, another Indian airline company, also reported disruptions to its email support services, which affected its ability to receive customer queries. The airline in a statement on X said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected.
Singapore's Government Technology Agency said that government emails were down and that the agency is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue.
The Philippines' Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the ongoing Microsoft 365 service outage has affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage impacted the government's IT infrastructure and that officials were "keeping a close eye on the developments." Japanese authorities had taken steps including securing alternative communication tools such as telephones, the government said.
OpenAI and Anthropic each reported that they were facing problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies' software.
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AP journalists Adam Schreck in Bangkok, Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, Sheikh Saaliq in New Delhi, Mayuko Ono in Tokyo and Pan Pylas in London contributed.
‘Here we go again’: New Mexico conservationists decry US Interior public land selloff plan
– Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
The U.S. Interior Department this week released its four-year strategic plan, which includes offering states, localities and tribes the opportunity to purchase federal lands.
Public lands advocates in New Mexico and across the country immediately criticized the 28-page plan published Tuesday as another effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to initiate mass selloffs of public lands to private interests. Waves of protests in New Mexico and across the country early in Trump’s first term contributed to lawmakers excisinga similar proposal from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” Trump signed last July.
“After Americans across the political spectrum rejected efforts to sell off millions of acres of our shared lands, the Trump administration is once again pushing a dangerous agenda that puts our outdoors at risk,” said Loren Blackford, the executive director of the Sierra Club, in a statement Thursday.
The strategic plan marks the first time the Trump’s administration has formally announced its intention to sell federal lands. And it demonstrates that Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum is still set on shuffling public lands off the federal government’s balance sheet, Garrett Veneklasen, New Mexico Wild’s northern conservation director, told Source NM on Thursday.
“Here we go again, right?” Veneklasen said. “This is their last-ditch effort. It’s like they’ve dusted this thing off and put new dressing on it.”
The department’s strategic plan does not specify which lands it might sell to states or tribes, but it outlines doing so in a section dedicated to reducing bureaucracy and improving collaboration with state, local and tribal governments.
The same section also suggests the department intends to reduce its workforce to “advance operational efficiencies” and strengthen its focus to unspecified public lands of national importance.
“The Department will work to decrease the size of the federal estate by offering to states, localities and Tribes the opportunity to purchase federal lands,” the plan reads. “Through these sales, the Department will be able to focus its resources on primary federal responsibilities and nationally significant federal lands.”
Jesse Deubel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, told Source NM on Thursday that the plan’s language aims to deceive the public from the department’s real intent.
“It doesn’t sound as egregious as it actually is, but transferring land to the state or selling land to the state or some other entity ultimately results in privatization,” he said. “These are lands that belong to the American people.”
Keegan King, founder and executive director of the Native Lands Institute, told Source NM on Thursday that the department’s plan “confirms a lot of our fears” about Trump’s public lands agenda.
“This strategic plan is basically letting people know that the Department of the Interior is open for business. Our children’s inheritance, public lands, are being sold out from under us,” he said. “If this goes through and DOI changes its mission from stewarding our public lands to selling them off to the highest bidder, I’m not sure what we’ll have left.”
U.S. Interior Department officials did not respond to Source NM’s emailed request for further comment Thursday.
The department released the plan a week after midterm elections in which Democrats won sizable majorities in both chambers of Congress.
Veneklasen said new majority Democrats — including all of New Mexico’s congressional delegation, whose five members have consistently opposed public lands sales — will be instrumental in preventing Trump’s administration from implementing its plan over the next four years.
U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) is expected to become the next chair of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and, in a statement his office sent Thursday to Source NM, denounced the U.S. Interior Department’s plan.
“These lands belong to the American people,” Heinrich said. “Public lands belong in public hands.”
In addition to congressional Democrats, Veneklasen predicted members of the recreating public — including hunters, anglers, hikers and others — will rise again in opposition.
“We’ve got to do everything we can to fight it,” he said. “And I think that there will be an even bigger uprising, especially now that the blue wave has happened.”
IJA condemns racist cartoon published by the Albuquerque Journal
- Jeanette DeDios, KUNM News
The Indigenous Journalists Association known as IJA condemns the Albuquerque Journal’s decision to publish an editorial cartoon by John Trever that depicts racist stereotypes of New Mexico Governor-elect Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna.
The cartoon was published on Sundays, November 8th’s print edition.
The drawing references “totem poles” which is often associated with tribes from the Pacific Northwest not Pueblo tribes. Haaland is also drawn in stereotypical features of having a big nose, and big lips.
IJA said in a statement that the cartoon is turning Haaland’s Indigenous identity into a punch line and that the choices made reinforce the false idea that Indigenous peoples and cultures are interchangeable.
IJA says while political cartoonists have every right to scrutinize Haaland’s record and policy proposals, the Journal’s editors also are responsible for what they choose to publish. Readers deserve political commentary that holds public officials accountable without reducing them to racial caricatures.
IJA urges the Journal to publish an apology, explain how the cartoon was approved, provide opportunities to educate staff, and seek and use resources provided by IJA to better train their newsroom.
ICE increases arrests at New Mexico home construction sites, putting workers on edge
– Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
New Mexico homebuilders are reporting a sharp increase of federal immigration raids at home construction sites across Albuquerque and Santa Fe in recent weeks, resulting in arrests and project delays across the industry during a statewide housing shortage.
Miles Dylan Conway, CEO of the New Mexico Home Builders Association, told Source NM that he’s received approximately 20 calls or texts from developers in the last week reporting that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have descended on home construction sites, often in unmarked SUVs, and have arrested multiple workers at a time.
“The level of activity I’ve had on my phone, the calls from members who are sometimes calling on behalf of their subcontractors, are telling me that the pace and intensity of the immigration enforcement is significantly escalated,” he said.
ICE officials did not respond to Source NM’s emailed request for comment Tuesday about whether the agency is stepping up its activity at home construction sites and how many people it has detained.
But Source NM’s interviews with home developers, immigration advocacy groups and homebuilder organizations suggest at least five such operations netting more than a dozen arrests have occurred at construction sites over the last month. Social media video has also shown ICE agents leading handcuffed workers away from partially built homes in Santa Fe and Albuquerque in recent weeks.
The raids have occurred at large, multi-family developments as well as at least one small project site in a low-income Albuquerque neighborhood.
On Tuesday morning, ICE agents arrived in Albuquerque’s San Jose neighborhood as workers were pouring concrete for driveways on two nearly complete, single-family Habitat for Humanity homes, Bill Bidal, CEO of the Greater Albuquerque Habitat for Humanity, told Source NM on Wednesday.
“Out of the blue, the federal authorities showed up,” Bidal, who said he arrived at the site shortly after workers fled, relayed. “We’ve heard rumors all over town for the last couple weeks about activity, but to have it hit home like this was very, very sudden.”
ICE didn’t detain any Habitat for Humanity contractors, Bidal said, and the two low-income families the homes are built for will likely be able to move in after Thanksgiving. But he said he remains “in total shock.”
Sales employees from Twilight Homes, which is developing several large subdivisions in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, told Source NM on Wednesday that ICE targeted their subcontractors in recent weeks and those of other developers at adjacent sites.
Pauline Hansen, a sales counselor for Twilight Homes in Mesa Del Sol, said ICE agents have been out “several times” in the last few weeks to hers and other companies’ sites in the subdivision south of Albuquerque. ICE detained four subcontractors doing concrete work for Twilight Homes several weeks ago, she said, and she witnessed an additional raid last week for another company during which ICE arrested an additional four workers on a different development.
“They’re going everywhere, apparently,” she said. “It’s quite disturbing.”
Fear of ICE arrests has prompted workers not to show up to job sites, even in locations that ICE hasn’t targeted, Conway said.
“A lot of projects this week are not operating,” he said. “It’s oftentimes even folks with documentation — visas and work permits — are not coming to work because the potential for them to get swept up in one of these actions is very real.”
Johanna Gilligan, the CEO of nonprofit developer Homewise, told Source NM on Wednesday that workers on Homewise projects, particularly those contracted for stucco work, have shown up at low rates over the last month or so. She said her organization is anticipating at least weeks of delays in projects being completed.
“It has the potential to have a knock-on effect, just out of people taking an abundance of precaution,” she said about workers afraid to show up to job sites. “So we are definitely concerned about how this could be exacerbating what’s already a hard process of building homes.”
The National Association of Home Builders estimates that the industry relies on a workforce that is approximately 30% foreign-born. In a state that lacks approximately 58,000 affordable housing units, Conway said he is hoping homebuilders will prevail upon President Donald Trump’s administration to stop the crackdown.
The administration has revoked millions of immigrants’ work permits in the last two years, including in the construction industries. But Trump also said he was open to making a deal on work permits in certain industries in an interview shortly after the midterm elections last week in which Democrats reclaimed control over both chambers of Congress.
Conway said he hopes New Mexico homebuilders will speak up more in the coming days to pressure Trump to make a deal.
“When I get that many calls and texts, there just seems to be an overwhelming energy to try and find a strategy forward,” he said. “We just really need a strategy forward that’s different than what’s happening now.”
Democratic presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel touts problem-solving prowess in New Mexico visit
– Dan Boyd, Albuquerque Journal
With the 2028 election looming on the horizon, New Mexico is quickly becoming a go-to state for potential presidential candidates.
Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel spent two days in the state this week, visiting with veterans in Albuquerque, meeting with Gov.-elect Deb Haaland and touring the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon burn scar in northern New Mexico.
During a Thursday visit to the Santa Fe Indian School, Emanuel spoke with students about his background and was frank about his interest in running for president.
“I think I have something to offer,” he said in response to one student’s question about his plans.
For more information on this story, visit the Albuquerque Journal website.
DOGE cuts cost tribes $470M, gutting funding for climate projects
- Joseph Lee, GRIST & AP
Every year, Kotzebue, a small city in northwest Alaska, has a three-month window to receive all the diesel fuel it will use throughout the following year. It sits on a gravel spit that juts into Kotzebue Sound just north of the Arctic Circle, and is accessible only by air and sea. Ice keeps freight barges from reaching it for most of the year.
The community relies on diesel for 75 percent of its power, and residents put about 20 percent of their income toward buying it. That’s more than three times the average energy burden for low-income households nationwide.
“We’re pretty much at the mercy of world markets,” Chad Nordlum, who is the energy project manager for the Native Village of Kotzebue, told Grist. “Right now, with the Iran war going on, the diesel prices are very high and we’re locked in to much higher prices than we’ve had in the past. There’s really nothing the community can do about diesel prices, but what we can do is produce our own energy.”
That’s why Nordlum was so excited about a $20 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to support a wind energy project. The funding, announced in 2024, was part of a larger $150 million allocation for tribal infrastructure in Alaska. Nordlum says it would have lowered the community’s reliance on diesel to about 40 percent to 50 percent and given the tribe more control over energy and economic decisions.
But the Trump administration canceled the grant in May 2025. More than a year later, the project remains paused.
That cut was among hundreds of millions of dollars the Department of Government Efficiency pulled from Indian Country, and part of a broader pattern of funding rollbacks and underinvestment in Indigenous communities. Two new reports from the Brookings Institution show that the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act killed many of the funding streams established by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, while DOGE eliminated another $468 million, about half of which was allocated for environmental and natural resources. Another 11 percent targeted agriculture. Those projects include climate resiliency plans, renewable energy projects, and jobs programs.
According to Brookings, despite historic investments flowing into Indian Country after the pandemic, a massive underinvestment in Indigenous communities continues. Not only is that a violation of the federal government’s trust and treaty obligations to tribes, it is hindering Indigenous efforts to protect the environment and address climate change. The report authors are calling for policy changes that would ensure tribes receive funding, regardless of political winds.
Rob Maxim, who is Mashpee Wampanoag and a fellow at Brookings Metro, said climate and environmental funding is especially crucial for Indigenous communities because they are often the most severely impacted by climate change, especially after years of underinvestment.
“The actions that the Trump administration is taking are particularly significant, but it’s not totally out of trend with previous administrations,” he said. “And what we wanted to show was that actually this underinvestment is kind of the default for the U.S. rather than a blip.”
The true aberration was the unprecedented levels of funding after the pandemic. That funding, which came under the Biden administration, included over $700 million in climate, energy, and infrastructure funding for tribes. It covered projects like development of climate action plans, food systems analysis, and more. For example, the Hopi Tribe was to receive a $25 million grant to install solar panels for 600 homes. That grant, and the entire $7 billion Solar for All program, were cut.
Maxim says that funding for Indigenous communities is a federal obligation based on treaties and other agreements with tribes and should be standard and irrevocable. “The funding that was flowing to Indian Country was not being done on the basis of race or DEI, and it was absolutely not illegal,” he said. “It was aimed at the promotion of tribal sovereignty and the well-being of tribal citizens and tribal communities, and so that is, you know, an obligation that the U.S. government maintains.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The EPA provided a comment several days after this story originally published Nov. 2.
“The Trump EPA is committed to ensuring taxpayer dollars are being used appropriately and has reviewed all funding activities with that lens. Through the agency’s General Assistance Program (GAP) and other granting programs, EPA has awarded more than $351 million in Tribal grants funding since the beginning of the second Trump administration,” the agency said in an email to Grist.
Glencora Haskins, a senior research associate and applied research manager at Brookings Metro, said that the administration had targeted funding to tribes, with “tribal” being the most frequently flagged term. “I think that there was a very surface-level view of what a lot of these programs were doing, rather than any deep interrogation of the types of systemic infrastructure deficits that programs were trying to fix,” Haskins said.
In Native communities throughout Alaska, and around the country, energy and infrastructure needs are especially acute because of increasingly frequent and destructive storms, wildfires, and other climate-driven disasters.
Haskins and Maxim recommend that Congress pass legislation that bars the cancellation of grants and contracts for tribes, and stipulates that all funding for Indigenous nations and communities is in service of trust and treaty obligations even if it is from a program with a different stated purpose. They also call for a statutory requirement that money should flow directly to tribes rather than having them seek reimbursement from the U.S. Treasury.
In Kotzebue, Chad Nordlum hopes the political tide will turn enough to get the funding for the wind project moving. In the meantime, he is working on a smaller solar project that he hopes will help alleviate the community’s energy challenges.
“Our main goals are energy security and economic development for the tribe, which is ultimately being able to invest in our own community, help make the lives of people here a little more sustainable,” Nordlum said. “We want our community to continue on into the future. We have to get a handle on our energy prices and availability.”
