October 4 – Prescribed burns as part of a wildfire suppression project at Glorieta Adventure Camps are canceled after Santa Fe National Forest conducted a “further risk assessment.”
The prescribed burn was canceled due to concerns that the fire could spread from thinned areas near Glorieta Camps to adjacent Forest Service lands that had not been treated similarly, Santa Fe National Forest spokesperson Claudia Brookshire said.
“Although the SFNF Fire Department was operationally confident that we could safely burn the diluted fuels in the project units at Glorieta Camps, the likelihood of a high-risk event occurring was still low,” Brookshire wrote in an email email The New Mexican.
Several agencies and organizations, including the Forest Stewards Guild, the New Mexico State Forestry Division, the Nature Conservancy and Santa Fe National Forest, visited the site of the planned fire in July.
The planned “broadcast fires” — controlled burns in limited areas under specific conditions — would “reintroduce the natural process of fire” in areas that had previously been decimated, the groups said in a news release.
The burns were intended to reduce lower branches and debris from the forest floor, as well as oak and juniper, to create a gap in wildfire fuel. The idea was to create conditions that would slow down forest fires to increase the response time of fire crews.
Public meetings were held in July and August to discuss the prescribed fire plan.
Despite the cancellation, the team will continue to work with the Glorieta Adventure Camps on wildfire mitigation projects, and Forest Service fire managers are planning treatments and thinning on Forest Service lands, Brookshire wrote in a release Friday.
