Ruidoso officials say lack of forest thinning and logging contributed to fire

Still reeling from fires and floods that caused two deaths, the destruction of hundreds of homes and a puny summer tourism season, local leaders in the Ruidoso area are asking: How much could have been avoided?

Local and tribal officials told a group of state lawmakers gathered Wednesday in Las Cruces they believe insufficient forest thinning and maintenance played a role in scope of the South Fork and Salt fires this summer, as well as the subsequent burn scar flooding that caused heavy damage at the Ruidoso Downs Race Track & Casino, a tourism driver in the cluster of mountain communities.

Several said they blame overgrowth in the forests in part on the slowdown of the logging industry in the area.

“This disaster, which affects even the Hondo Valley and the acequias down there ... was all man-made,” said Mark Fischer, a Lincoln County commissioner, during a meeting of the Legislature’s Economic and Rural Development and Policy Committee.

Authorities have said a lightning strike started the South Fork Fire in mid-June near Ruidoso, and they believe the Salt Fire was set intentionally around the same time. The fires exploded in size and prompted the full evacuation of the village of Ruidoso as well as some others, ultimately destroying more than 900 homes. Several hundred more were damaged or destroyed by floods that followed as monsoon rains skidded down the burn scar area.

Fischer and Lincoln County Manager Randall Camp both told lawmakers Wednesday there hasn’t been enough forest thinning in the area, but in areas where thinning projects have been undertaken, the payoff was visible — sometimes even decades after the fact.

“With the Salt Fire, where the tribe had thinned, that actually saved a major transmission power line to the entire county,” Camp said. “We lost total communications across the county for days; losing power would have really killed us in the middle of the disaster.”

Fischer said when the fire hit another area where the tribe did forest thinning years ago, that work allowed crews to get a foothold they didn’t have in other areas where the trees were closer together.

“Some of the treatments that the Mescalero tribe did over 20 years ago where they did thinning ... that fire was able to be contained,” Fischer said.

While the U.S. Forest Service does periodically conduct timber sales by competitive bid, Fischer and several others said they’d like to see both a larger return of the logging industry and state support for the reopening of the Mescalero sawmill to encourage local processing.

Mescalero Apache President Thora Walsh Padilla, who herself worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ forestry division as a timber sale forester starting in the 1980s, said logging declined greatly following the listing of the Mexican spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

“There was a considerable downturn in the amount that’s logged off of Lincoln National Forest,” she said.

Fischer said he’s supportive of “not clear-cut logging ... but a thinning process around municipal areas” that’s more oriented toward forest health and creating what firefighters call “defensible space.”

Walsh Padilla said the Mescalero sawmill even years ago faced serious economic headwinds, including a narrow profit margin, limited infrastructure and a lack of local demand, all of which would need to be addressed to bring back a successful enterprise. She said from what she knows of the limited logging activity in the area, the demand issue is still a problem.

“We do have a logger doing small logging units right now, a couple of hundred acres here and there,” she said. “Even he is having a hard time finding markets in this area to take the wood.”

Ruidoso Mayor Lynn Crawford, meanwhile, asked lawmakers to find some way to offer “lost revenue replacement” for the village of Ruidoso, where many small businesses missed out on most of their high-season business and are now heading into the leaner winter months with anemic profits. The village itself, which Crawford said is already understaffed, is considering a hiring freeze based on its low anticipated tax revenues, Crawford said.

“We have to maintain strength for our community,” he said.