VallesCaldera.com – The independent news source about the Valles Caldera

As containment of the 156,590-acre Las Conchas Fire grew to 75% today, officials released a map depicting the intensity of burn throughout the 244-square-mile fire zone. The map can be seen below.

The blaze is still “creeping within the interior,” of the burn zone on its 25th day, according to fire managers, who said that the “potential exists for active fire behavior in some unburned, isolated islands well within the interior of the fire,” but “the majority of the fire continues to burn at low intensity within the fire perimeter.”

Here’s what the AP had to say about the map of the conflagration’s intensity of burn:

The map shows a mosaic of color, with blotches of red on the western side and in pockets on the northern end indicating where the fire burned the hottest.

On the southeastern and northern flanks, yellow and light blue patches indicate low to moderate severity.

There are some areas of green within the fire perimeter that indicate unburned sections of forest.

Burn Area Emergency Response teams have been busy for the past week assessing the damage. They have scheduled a series of public meetings this week to share their findings and suggestions for recovery with residents in surrounding communities.

The immediate recovery effort includes preparing for flooding as summer rains hit the burn scar and wash down ash, sediment and other debris.
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Meanwhile, the National Weather Service in Albuquerque issued another round of flash flood warnings and flood advisories for the fire area Wednesday afternoon. Scattered showers were predicted to hit before midnight, and more thunderstorms were expected through Sunday.

The community meetings mentioned above that will be conducted by representatives of the BAER Team will take place at:

Wednesday, July 20th 6 p.m. in Los Alamos at Mountain Elementary School, 2280 North Road, Los Alamos, NM

Thursday, July 21st-6 p.m. in Cochiti Lake at the Cochiti Lake Community Center, 255 Cochiti Street, Pueblo de Cochiti

Friday, July 22nd-6 p.m. in Jemez Springs, at the Madonna Center, off Hwy 4 between mile marker 15 and 16, Jemez Springs, NM

Representatives from USDA Forest Service, Valles Caldera National Preserve, Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), NM Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Sandoval County, Los Alamos County, Corps of Engineers, and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) will be present and available to answer questions attendees may have.

Legislation that would transfer management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve to the National Park Service will be considered on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, May 11, at 12:30 PM MDT, in Senate hearing room SD-366. The bill, dubbed the “Valles Caldera National Preserve Management Act,” which was reintroduced by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) in March after first being introduced last May, will be one of 21 bills about which the Senate’s National Parks Subcommittee of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hear testimony during the hearing.

Among the four individuals scheduled to testify before the subcommittee is Raymond Loretto, the chairman of the Valles Caldera National Preserve Board of Trustees.

Though Bingaman chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the National Parks Subcommittee is chaired by Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), who is a first cousin of the senator who co-sponsored the Caldera bill along with Bingaman, Tom Udall (D-NM).

The hearing will be webcast live on the committee’s website, and an archive video will be available shortly after the hearing is complete. Witness testimony will be available on the website at the start of the hearing.

The following individuals are slated to testify at the hearing:

Panel 1:
U.S. Thomas Carper (D-DE)

Panel 2:
Stephen E. Whitesell, Associate Director of Park Planning, Facilities, and Lands National Park Service, Department of the Interior
Joel Holtrop, Deputy Chief, National Forest System, Department of Agriculture
Dr. Raymond Loretto, Chairman, Valles Caldera Trust

The first of this year’s three legally-mandated meetings of the Valles Caldera National Preserve Board of Trustees will be held on Tuesday, April 19, 2011, at 9:00 AM, at the Valles Caldera National Preserve offices in Jemez Springs. An agenda for this meeting has not yet been posted on the official government-run Preserve web site.

Unfortunately, once again, the board of the VCNP, a taxpayer-owned national preserve, has chosen to schedule another public trustee meeting during business hours, when most members of the community who have day jobs (including the author of this web site) are unable to attend. This is not new; only once in the last five years has the management of the Preserve decided to make it easy for working people to attend its meetings by scheduling them during evenings or on weekends. This last occurred when the VCNP scheduled an evening board meeting in 2009 in Los Alamos that drew a “standing room only” crowd.

VallesCaldera.com has repeatedly criticized this long-standing and arrogant habit of the Preserve — a practice that is clearly designed to minimize public participation in these meetings and reduce the amount of dissent and opposing viewpoints that might be expressed to the presidentially-appointed members of the Board of Trustees when officials from New Mexico’s congressional delegation are in attendance (as is usually the case).

We will continue to question this ill-conceived and elitist strategy until VCNP management decides to operate in a manner that reflects more respect for the working people of Northern New Mexico, or until the Valles Caldera Trust is dissolved, which would occur if legislation currently in the U.S. Senate passes.

One wonders why the Board of Trustees is truly so afraid of scheduling its public meetings at night or on the weekends. The most likely result of such a scheduling decision could be a robust and productive face-to-face dialogue with members of the community who might have a different vision for how to manage the scenic crown jewel of Northern New Mexico from those who have been presidentially appointed to manage this land.

Or do the members of the Trust really expect members of the community who want to attend these meetings to take the day off of work for the honor of expressing their opinions to them in person?

VallesCaldera.com again calls on the Valles Caldera National Preserve to show some respect for the working people of Northern New Mexico who might want to participate in its thrice-yearly legally-mandated public meetings by scheduling them when people with day jobs can attend — in the evening or on the weekend.

The Valles Caldera Trust will conduct three public meetings next month in Jemez Springs and Santa Fe to share information about “current and future planning and implementation of the Southwest Jemez Mountains (SWJM) Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR) program.”

Details:

March 1, 2011, 5:30-8:00 pm: Santa Fe National Forest Supervisor’s Office, 11 Forest Lane, Santa Fe, NM.

March 3, 2011, 5:30-8:00 PM and March 5, 2011, 9:00 AM-12:00 PM: VCNP Science & Education Center, 9 Villa Louis Martin, Jemez Springs, NM.

The Albuquerque Journal released a video on YouTube Thursday chronicling the Jemez Mountains Elk Festival, an event which is currently being held at the Valles Caldera National Preserve. To watch this video, which consists of some spectacular shots of elk herds on the Valle Grande, click below:

On Thursday, October 14 at 7:00 PM the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque will host the Valles Caldera National Preserve’s Director of Science and Education, Bob Parmenter, for an event entitled “Natural Resources Management in a Warming Climate: A Landscape Approach in the Valles Caldera National Preserve, Jemez Mountains.” Tickets for the event will cost $5 for the general public, $4 for members of the museum, and $3 for students. You can buy a ticket for this event by clicking here. From the museum:

Many of New Mexico’s watersheds have supported intensive human use for centuries, but are now being transformed by climate warming, catastrophic forest fire, soil erosion, housing developments in the wildland-urban interface, and invasive species. These changes have threatened watershed function and the “ecosystem services” they provide (clean water, forest products, carbon sequestration, sustainable fish and wildlife, biodiversity, erosion control), negatively affecting New Mexico’s quality of life, socio-economic activities, and future development. While these issues occur to varying degrees throughout New Mexico, the impact is particularly acute in the Jemez Mountains.

The Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Project of the Jemez Mountains will assess positive and negative changes in forest and meadow ecosystems, water quantity and quality, plant production and diversity, wildlife species, livestock grazing and production, soil erosion, and economic impacts on local and regional communities. The entire program also will provide educational opportunities for students and the general public, supported through the Valles Caldera’s Science and Education Center in Jemez Springs.

The museum is located at 1801 Mountain Road NW in Albuquerque.

The Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve will conduct the last of its three required annual public meetings for 2010 on Wednesday, Sept 29, at the Preserve’s Science and Education Center in Jemez Springs, from 9:00 AM to noon.

With this event, the Board of Trustees will have conducted all of its public meetings in 2010 in the vicinity of the Caldera and its neighboring communities. This is a welcome departure from its plans of earlier this year, when the Board intended to have its 2010 public meetings hours away from the Preserve in far corners of New Mexico, in places like Roswell and Farmington. The Trust should be applauded for changing the locations of its meetings to better accommodate its neighbors.

However, as VallesCaldera.com has urged in the past, in order to fully accommodate working people in the local community who might wish to participate in these public meetings but cannot because they have jobs, common sense dictates that the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera should conduct its legally-required public meetings in the evenings or on the weekends.

This strategy, which maximizes participation and community involvement, was employed by the U.S. Forest Service in its recent series of eight meetings throughout Northern New Mexico to receive comment about its proposed alternatives for closing roads in the Santa Fe National Forest. All of these meetings were held in the evenings, except for one meeting which was conducted on a Saturday afternoon.

Unfortunately, only once in the last four years has the Board of Trustees decided to make it easy for people with day jobs to attend its meetings, when they scheduled an evening meeting two summers ago in Los Alamos that was “standing room only.”

The Forest Service clearly demonstrated through the manner in which it scheduled its aforementioned meetings that it was truly interested in having as much community participation and involvement as possible in these events. In contrast, by nearly always scheduling its meetings when most folks are at work, the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve exhibits a lack of concern in maximizing the number of people who participate in these meetings, and suggests an insufficient level of interest in having a face-to-face dialogue with community members who are impacted by the management decisions that they decree.