By Andrew Hay
MORA, New Mexico (Reuters) -Three muddy torrents rage through Victoria Lovato’s northern New Mexico ranch when it rains hard, born of the state’s biggest ever wildfire that burned through mountains above her land over three years ago.
It is this kind of deadly, post-wildfire flooding making homes unlivable and knocking out infrastructure such as roads and water treatment plants across the Western United States as climate change makes blazes burn larger areas of land at higher temperatures.
Ranch dogs run alongside Lovato’s red GMC truck, as she, her husband Ismael and their 11-year-old daughter Mia drive north over a high mountain valley ringed by torched trees after the 2022 Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Fire.
Lovato, 41, points to the “nuked” mountains above her 52-acre ranch in Mora, about 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Santa Fe. The drought-fueled blaze, started by two botched U.S. Forest Service prescribed fires, burned hot enough to melt rocks and bake the earth to the consistency of asphalt.
The soil no longer absorbs water and the fire left no trees or scrub to slow it. Rain runs off the burn scar like water off a parking lot, carrying away soil and boulders in flash floods and debris flows.
The number of Americans living in areas exposed to wildfires doubled to nearly 22 million in the past two decades, according to a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. At the same time, the annual area of Western forests burned at the kind of high severity that creates the post-apocalyptic scene Lovato can inspect from her home increased eight-fold in the last three decades, according to a 2020 study.
U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Jason Kean maps wildfire burn areas for risks of flash floods and debris flows. Last year alone he worked on over 105 fires covering 6 million acres, an area nearly twice the size of Connecticut. Given flood risks can last for up to a decade, the area of severely burned land liable to flash flooding keeps growing each year, he said.
“You start kind of accumulating a lot of vulnerable terrain,” said Kean.
Some areas like Coconino County in northern Arizona have slowed or diverted floods by building features such as alluvial fans, conical sediment fields that soak up water like a giant sponge. Lucinda Andreani, flood control administrator for Coconino, visited Mora to share lessons learned from $118 million in federal, state and local funds spent on post-wildfire watershed restoration in the county around Flagstaff.
That type of funding and cooperation among authorities is still missing in Mora County, according to around a dozen local residents, private contractors and community activists Reuters spoke to.
FLOODS CLAIM MORE LIVES THAN FIRES
Lovato’s home survived the fire that torched hundreds of houses but caused no deaths. Her valley has been flooded over two dozen times since then, the water knocking down fences causing cattle to escape, flooding her outbuildings and neighbors’ homes, and coming to her front steps this year. A 2022 flood drowned a motorist. In July of that year, another flood washed away a stretch of highway, leading to a fatal traffic accident.
In terms of lives lost, post-wildfire flooding has killed seven people in New Mexico in the last five years, while fires have killed five, according to state and local data.
National data on post-wildfire deaths and flooding has yet to be developed, with Washington, Utah and Colorado only launching post-wildfire disaster mitigation programs in the last six years, according to emergency management officials from those states.
“This really does feel like the 21st century’s Dust Bowl,” said Collin Haffey, head of Washington state’s post-fire recovery program, referring to severe soil erosion in the Great Plains in the 1930s that forced migration.
CONTAMINATED WELLS
Across Mora County, among the poorest counties in one of the poorest U.S. states, dozens of houses have been abandoned or demolished due to mold infestation following flooding, according to County Commissioner Veronica Serna. Flash flooding has washed toxic heavy metals from airborne fire retardant into wells, according to an October study by Zeigler Geologic Consulting, a company which analyzes groundwater quality for communities in Mora County.
Lovato was among residents who said it has become even harder to get help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency since President Donald Trump began dismantling the agency and cutting jobs and grants at other federal offices. Officials for FEMA did not respond to requests for comment.
The misery of repetitive flooding has driven dozens of families and businesses out of Mora and San Miguel Counties with a combined population around 30,000, according to county officials and local business people.
The New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management said it was working with the U.S. Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service to identify funding for watershed restoration. The state agency said it had opened a public survey to identify high-hazard areas and was working to develop potential projects to address those areas.
The NRCS and USFS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mora County Commission Chair George Trujillo said the county was focused on a $41 million plan to repair roads. He said the USFS, which manages burned land around Mora, and private landowners had to restore mountain watersheds to stop valley flooding.
“It doesn’t make no sense for us to fix it in the bottom if they don’t fix it up top,” said Trujillo of the many private land parcels flood water runs through before entering the Lovato ranch.
Standing by a culvert that becomes a kind of giant open fire hydrant when there is a downpour, Lovato despairs that county officials this summer paved her dirt road rather than worked on restoring her watershed.
“We want a true solution,” she said.
(Reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico; Editing by Donna Bryson and Aurora Ellis)
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