On Wednesday morning, the Southwest Area Incident Management Team 5 took over command operations of the ongoing wildfires burning near Ruidoso and surrounding communities. Working out of a large building on the Alamogordo fairgrounds, the team is made up of individuals from a myriad of federal, state, and local agencies who specialize in management of large-scale disasters.
Lynn McAloon, public information officer for the incident management team, said that her crew is keeping an eye on incoming thunderstorms in the area, and is doing their best to keep affected communities up to date as they settle into the command post.
“Thunder, lightning, that can create some safety concerns for the crew. We also are concerned about gusty winds and winds changing direction. So we are very tuned in to making sure that folks on the ground know what is happening during these incidents,” McAloon said. “We have fire behavior analysts, we have incident meteorologists, and they are watching all the time to see what is going on and trying to provide that information and in a very timely manner to folks on the ground.”
After being briefed by the team, U.S. Representative Gabe Vasquez said he was confident in the team’s ability to lead an effective response against the ongoing blazes.
“The most important thing right now is that we're setting up the proper fire lines to protect as much of the village of Ruidoso as we can and to make sure that we are working with our sovereign partners, and the village of Mescalero to make sure that they have the resources they need in some of these very rural and remote areas, to protect properties and lives and work together, both with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, local elected officials, and the governor's team, who has been great in providing them responses here in New Mexico,” Vasquez said. “I can tell you that we've mobilized as many resources, both on the federal, local and state level and right now everybody's doing their job to contain this fire.”
According to officials, both the South Fork and Salt Fires are at 0% containment, but the crews on the ground are using all available resources to build fire lines in an effort to bring the blazes under control.
