Tuesday, June 28, 2011

My hometown burns...again

So, for those who don't know, I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Yes, that's where the Manhattan Project was based, and yes, everyone in my family, including me, worked at LANL at one point or another (hey, I had an email address when I was 13, in 1989!)

So one of the nice things about Los Alamos is the awesome trail system - big portions of which burned and then had to be restored (with some success) after the Cerro Grande fire in 2000. My good friend McCalla's house burned down, along with 400 others, and he lost basically everything he owned.

Now it looks like Los Alamos is burning again. The town has been evacuated, the restored trails will probably be destroyed again, and we can only hope that nobody dies this time around (amazingly, nobody died in the Cerro Grande fire).

Anyway, sad news. Best of luck to all my old friends in LA. McCalla, sorry about the race you were going to put on this fall...looks like Pipeline is on fire.

Anyway, back to the shop for me, I guess. I find it hard to motivate when I get bad news, and this makes me very sad.

3 comments:

LeeAB said...

That blows, it looks like NM and AZ are going to burn to the ground this year. Wonder what started it with all the fire restrictions and forest closures in effect already?

steveo said...

Most of the fires have been human caused, the Los Alamos fire began on private land. It seems very little is being done to track down the perpetrators, regardless of whether there was intent or just carelessness.

Unknown said...

The fires are wreaking havoc on this year's Tour Divide. The front runners got through before it got bad, but others are having to scramble to figure out a detour.