"It was a poor plan, and then when they implemented it, it was even worse. And it doesn't make them bad people… I just think they got complacent."
What happened with Cerro Grande, with me personally, as a matter of fact, before it started I was here in Flagstaff, because I was on my way back to Albuquerque from dealing with the Coon Creek Fire on the Tonto. And I got called from the deputy (unclear) supervisor on the Santa Fe, and we were discussing a meeting that we were both going to in Montana, which was supposed to take place the next week. And he said that the Park Service was getting ready to have a prescribed fire adjacent to the Santa Fe, and that they were really concerned whether they were going to be able to hold it. And the reason he said that was they had been taking fuel moisture measurements on the Santa Fe, especially on the west side of the Santa Fe, all winter and into the spring. And they had recorded some of the lowest fuel moisture measurements anybody had ever heard of. So it was quite obvious that they were really dry on that side of the forest. And they had stopped all prescribed fires and those sorts of things on the Santa Fe already.
Well anyway, to make a long story short, they went ahead and lit that thing, and it got away two, three times. The Santa Fe sent a hotshot crew—the Santa Fe Hotshots—there. They called me. I was talking with Paul Roscoe [phonetic], the FMO there, a couple of times a day, because I was still here. He said on Saturday—I think it was Saturday—they were all going to meet up there, all the people involved, the people from the city of Los Alamos, the Department of Energy, the Los Alamos Lab people in Santa Fe, Bandelier National Park—they were all going to meet. I talked to him on Saturday after that Saturday evening. He said it looked like everything was going to be all right. They lost it a couple of times and all that. (phone rings, tape paused) Well anyway, when they were in the process, when it was still fairly small and they'd lost it a couple of times, I happened to know (aside about phone message) that the Mormon Lake Hotshots from here on the Coconino were on their way back from a fire, I think on the Lincoln. And I called the coordination center in Albuquerque and said, "Hey, call Mormon Lake on the radio and stop them. They're going to need them on that fire. Either hold them in Albuquerque or send them up there, whatever they do." I think they had already gone through Albuquerque and they were at Grants already, and (unclear) got them turned around and sent right up there. And they spent the next two days, those two hotshot crews, and I think a Type II crew, trying to stop that thing.
Everybody knows what happened next. The wind caught hold of it and blew it all over the place. It was a really tough situation. On Sunday night, before the national fire team got there, the Mormon Lake Hotshot crew—the fire was headed toward town, and the Mormon Lake Hotshot crew, and it just so happened that the overhead that had been called in, the individual overhead, the division group supervisors, they were all from here on the Coconino, that were trying to stop that thing. In fact, the air attack person was also a Coconino person, although at that time he was working out of Albuquerque. They made a call that they needed to burn out the road going to the ski area, and the road that split the Los Alamos Lab from the Santa Fe National Forest. And they spent that late afternoon and evening burning that out. If they wouldn't have done that, that fire would have been into the center of Los Alamos that night. The call that they made there, and the work that they saved—I mean, no telling. It would have been an ugly situation. As it worked out, the fire went into town three days later and actually just caught the edge of it, and lost 200-and-some houses.
There's going to be debates over that for a while. As you know, there were three or four different investigations looking at that from different viewpoints and all that. And of course I have my own viewpoint over that. And all the people that were there on the fire, you talk to the two hotshot crews, they have a different opinion of what went on and what didn't go on during the first two, three days of that thing, whether the decisions were wise or not. In my own opinion, I looked at the plan and I looked at the situation, all that other stuff—in my opinion, it was a poor plan, they didn't think far enough ahead if something would have went wrong. The odds of them, with the people that they had, even if the weather would have been right, they just didn't think it out, in my opinion. It was a poor plan, and then when they implemented it, it was even worse. And it doesn't make them bad people. I know a lot of those people that were there—it doesn't make them bad, I just think they got complacent. They'd been doing Bandelier, doing a lot of prescribed fire for a lot of years, and I think they got complacent. It happens a lot—people confuse good luck with good planning. And when you get by with some things, instead of recognizing that maybe we got away with something this time—they looked at that as, "Hey, this is a good way of doing business." That happens a lot. But anyway, that's my personal opinion, having been involved in all that.