A community meeting was held Thursday evening in Alamogordo with members from the Southwest Area Incident Management Team #5 providing updates on the South Fork and Salt Fires near the village of Ruidoso.
During the community meeting, which was also streamed live on their Facebook page, members of the Southwest Area Incident Management Team #5 gave updates on the fire situations. At the bottom of the screen, the latest numbers showed that the South Fork fire has affected 16,394 acres and the Salt Fire has affected 7,652 acres. Brandon Glenn, operations section chief, was optimistic about the progress of controlling the Salt Fire in particular.
“This fire is actually looking really good in this section of the fire,” he said. “Crews are mopping that up. This part that’s west of Highway 70 here, that’s been good for a couple of days: really secure. They’re continuing to mop up and get depth there with hand crews.”
Tom Bird, Team Five’s meteorologist, discussed the extremely hot weather that was a factor in how the fires started.
“As you can see in the couple of days right before (the fire), we had exceptionally hot, exceptionally dry, and very windy days, including the day that these two fires started,” Bird said. “In fact, it was the worst that we’ve seen over the last month.”
While the rains that moved in Wednesday were welcome, meteorologist Bird said that they brought in some unwelcome elements.
“We wanted that moisture, but we didn’t want the large hail; we didn’t want the heavy rain that was almost two inches; and we certainly didn’t want the debris flows and the flash flooding that we got out of the canyons on the fire. But that’s the threat that we morph to once we go from hot, dry windy conditions with the fire really wanting to run, to now more moist conditions and we’re seeing thunderstorms and heavy rain on top of burn scars, which are very susceptible to flash flooding.”
During a question and answer period, Arthur Gonzales from Team Five was asked where they expected the fires to spread.
“With the weather conditions that we see over the next three to four days, we expect very little growth,” he said.
Operations Section Chief Brandon Glenn was also asked if the current evacuations would be lifted in phases.
“Yes they will be,” he answered. “When we deem that an area is safe to do so, we’ll start lifting those (evacuations). And it’ll be lifted just based on the areas. So it’ll be not all at once. It’ll be localized areas as we go through this.”
Road and trail closures remain in effect throughout the fire area. A temporary flight restriction is also in place over the area, including drone flights.
