An often-overlooked part of recovery from a wildfire, which lasts for generations, is the series of emotions that come with witnessing the destruction, says Juan Sanchez, president of La Merced del Pueblo de Chililí, a land grant in the Manzano Mountains in central New Mexico.
After the Dog Head Fire in June 2016, when Sanchez drove up the mountain and saw the wreckage, the sadness was overwhelming, even tear-inducing, he said, “because your mountain is gone.”
Then comes the anger, which leads to asking why a fire happened, he said. Third and finally is the grief for that part of nature that is lost.
“That motherland of yours, your mountain, it’s something that your grandkids will never get to see,” he said. “What I have seen, what my ancestors have seen, how we use the mountain and how we lived in it before the fire.”
Other people representing land grant communities, local water systems and the state’s emergency management agency told lawmakers on Tuesday that more recent disasters have had similar lasting impacts.
At the interim legislative Land Grant Committee meeting in Las Vegas, they asked for reforms they say would help them prepare for and recover from disasters like wildfires and flooding.
Jeremy Klass, who leads the recovery and mitigation program at the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency management, asked the committee to build capacity and increase funding for his agency, which leads disaster response in the state.
Klass said disasters are becoming more common — as are cascading events like flooding — federal programs are not structured to address those after-effects in a post-fire landscape.
The department is “sorely understaffed and underfunded,” Klass said. While he has 84 people on staff who are managing $2 billion in disaster funding, he said, he has hired an additional 144 private contractors, whose expertise will not stay in New Mexico once their contracts end.
“When these disasters go away, that capacity is gone,” he said, adding that the department needs that expertise on staff for future disasters. “I can’t do that without an increased budget and staffing,” he said.
The committee on Tuesday also heard from the New Mexico Acequia Association, whose members told lawmakers earlier this month about the volunteer-run acequia organizations face trying to rebuild after wildfires and floods.
Eddie Quintana, president of the Los Vigiles Land Grant-Merced, asked the committee for legislation to make it easier for land grants to gain easement rights to travel through private property. Quintana said private buyers often buy properties surrounding them, resulting in a “landlock” that blocks their access.
The land grants use easements to care for their common lands, said New Mexico Acequia Association Executive Director Paula Garcia.
For example, Sanchez said in 2014, two years before the Dog Head Fire, his land grant had used access roads to thin out parts of the forest, which protected those areas from the blaze, while areas they had not thinned were devastated. He shared photos showing the difference.
“We know that thinning responsibility can actually decrease the likelihood of a catastrophic fire,” Gerald Romero, manager of the Tierra y Montes Soil and Water Conservation District, told the committee.
