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LOS ALAMOS, N.M. —A smattering of summer rain gave a boost to firefighters battling a huge forest fire near Los Alamos, the desert birthplace of the atomic bomb, giving authorities enough confidence to allow about 12,000 people to return home for the first time in nearly a week.
Residents rolled into town, honking their horns and waving to firefighters as the word got out that the roadblocks were lifted and the narrow two-lane highway cut into the side of a mesa leading to Los Alamos was open.
They had fled en masse last Monday as the fast-moving fire approached the city and its nuclear laboratory.
“It’s scary, but all of the resources here this time, they were ready. They did a magnificent job,” said Michael Shields, eyes swelling with tears as he returned home to his apartment in the heart of the town.
The town was last evacuated because of the 2000 Cerro Grande fire. That time, residents returned to a town that had lost 200 homes, several businesses and had to cope with damaged utilities and other county enterprises.
This time around, residents were returning to a town that is completely intact, although the fire destroyed 63 homes west of town.
Meanwhile, hundreds of employees of the Los Alamos National Laboratory were returning to prepare operations and thousands of experiments for the scientists and technicians who were forced to evacuate days ago.
Among the work put on hold were experiments using two supercomputers and studies on extending the life of 1960s-era nuclear bombs.
Employees were checking filters in air handling systems to ensure they were not affected by smoke and restarting computer systems shut down when the lab closed.
“Once we start operation phases for the laboratory, it will take about two days to bring everyone back and have the laboratory fully operational,” lab director Charles McMillan said.
An aircraft monitoring the area near Los Alamos has picked up no sign of unusual radiation levels, New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez announced. She said flights by a US Environmental Protection Agency plane in the past week showed radiation levels are the same as they were before the fire.
Although the threat to Los Alamos and the nation’s premier nuclear research lab had passed, the mammoth wildfire raging in northern New Mexico was still threatening sacred sites of American Indian tribes.
Hundreds of firefighters were working to contain the 189-square-mile fire as it burned through a canyon on the Santa Clara Pueblo reservation and threatened other pueblos on the Pajarito Plateau.