By Charles D. Brunt
Albuquerque Journal (New Mexico)
Copyright 2007 Albuquerque Journal
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Those in the business of predicting New Mexico’s wildfire season say we’re looking at a fairly typical year. But those in the business of aerial firefighting, as always, are gearing for the worst.
This week, C-130H3 military cargo planes have been using water in the skies of central New Mexico to practice bombarding forest fires with fire-retardant slurry.
Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard wings from Colorado, Wyoming, California and North Carolina are training here, working out of the U.S. Forest Service’s Air Tanker Base at Kirtland Air Force Base.
The planes, equipped with the Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System, are called in when Forest Service-contracted slurry planes can’t handle the workload, said mission commander Maj. Dave Condit with the 302nd Airlift Wing, based at Peterson Air Force Base, in Colorado Springs.
If the C-130s are needed in New Mexico this year, they’re likely to be headed south, according to the Albuquerque-based Southwest Coordination Center, an interagency center that coordinates wildland firefighting resources throughout New Mexico, Arizona and western Oklahoma and Texas.
The potential for wildfires this year is above normal in the southern half of the state, and normal or below normal in northern New Mexico, said meteorologist Chuck Maxwell, group leader for the interagency center’s Predictive Services Group.
Rainfall, it turns out, is a mixed blessing for southern New Mexico.
“Because of all the recent rains, they have a vast abundance of fine fuels - grasses and so forth - both in the desert on the southwest side of the state, and especially in the southeast part of the state around Roswell,” Maxwell said Wednesday.
Because of anticipated dry winds and warm weather from mid-May through mid-June, “our expectation is that that stuff will dry out quickly” and increase the danger of wildfires, Maxwell said,
Meanwhile, rainfall and snowpack levels in the northern half of the state are likely to lessen the potential for fires this season.