Two years and holding on: Victims of Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire dealing daily with changes caused by 2022 blaze

May 5—MORA COUNTY — John Bartley walked through the scarred and charred high mountain forest on his 4,000-acre property at Gascon, just northwest of Rociada, envisioning what it had been like before the fire.

It was Friday, May 13, 2022, that the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire came spilling out the Sangre de Cristos to the west, tumbling like an avalanche from hell toward the house Bartley shares with his wife, Tamera, and his mother's house just beyond.

"It came roaring down like five freight trains, with flames 200 to 300 feet in the air," Bartley, 64, said. "I thought I was going to have a heart attack that day. That was the worst day. We had four sleepless nights and eight days of unrelenting smoke."

Firetruck crews, Bartley and two friends with hoses fought the fire back from the houses, the barns and the outbuildings. A hotshot crew from Arizona cut it off before it swallowed his sawmill up the road.

But the fire destroyed 3,000 acres of timber that Bartley, who has been in the wood products business for more than 40 years, depends on for his livelihood.

Gone now are much of the ponderosa pine and the Douglas fir, most of the white fir that produced the 700 to 1,000 Christmas trees he harvested annually.

"For 35 years, I supplied about 155 Christmas trees each year to make up the one large Christmas tree in Albuquerque's Old Town," Bartley said.

Trees, scorched black, still stand here in the forest above Bartley's house, but he has clear cut most of this section, something he would never do under normal circumstances. He hopes, however, to salvage firewood and maybe some lumber from the dead trees before the wood decays.

Burned skeletons of white firs that would have been Christmas trees haunt this place.

"I can see 25 (dead) Christmas trees right here in an eighth of an acre," he said. "I am out of the Christmas tree business. I had two full-time employees in the heyday. I would take specialty orders for specialty beams and lumber garages, cabins and sheds. Now, I'm living on firewood and savings."

Bartley has been planting seedlings from the John T. Harrington Forestry Research Center in Mora to replace to some degree the thousands of trees he lost, but as he looked around, he noticed a couple of seedlings sprouting naturally, tiny, green harbingers of hope, something positive in the helter-skelter world the fire left in its wake.

"I believe I will get my business back," Bartley said. "But it will not be as lucrative."

Not normalU.S. Forest Service prescribed burns, fed by arid conditions and spurred by high winds, ran wild and evolved into the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire that burned more than 341,000 acres in San Miguel, Mora and Taos counties between April 6 and late June 2022. It was New Mexico's largest wildfire ever and was not fully contained until Aug. 21 of that year.

In recognition of a federal agency's responsibility for the fire, Congress appropriated almost $4 billion in November and December 2022 to compensate New Mexican residents and businesses for losses suffered in the inferno and in the flooding that followed when summer monsoon rains cascaded unfettered over burn scars.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was tasked with reviewing claims.

Now, more than two years after the fire started, the northern New Mexico communities affected by the fire are not back to normal.

Some people are still without homes, most acequias (irrigation ditches) are still in poor condition, jeopardizing agriculture, and people such as Bartley who make their living from the forest are challenged to find product, which was previously plentiful.

David Old is owner of Old Wood, a wood flooring- and firewood-production business with manufacturing facilities in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and a showroom in Santa Fe.

He said the 2022 fire resulted in profound changes in the affected area, ranging from the environment itself, to access to materials and labor and relations with government agencies.

"We got tree mortality going on, thousands and thousands of trees dying, becoming fodder for the next fire," he said. "The ranch we got our firewood from was backburned. People have timber they could sell us, but their lawyers are advising them not to sell because they can get more (money) in a settlement with FEMA.

"I've been driving into strangers' driveways, knocking on doors, looking for wood, risking getting shot or bitten. I bring Slim Jims with me to fend off the dogs."

He said wood he does get comes from New Mexico State Forestry forest-thinning projects, so it's small timber.

"It's 100 percent firewood," he said. "Our sawmill is barely running because we don't have logs to saw. We lost access to product. We lost a major client. But we are busy. We are working hard."

Wood said it has become difficult to find employees and other workers in Las Vegas and the vicinity.

"I'm struggling to find plumbers, electricians and drivers," he said. "Labor prices have gone up because everybody and his dog is working in fire-related construction. FEMA is handing out money, people are building houses, building barns, working on roads. It is hard to hire when all around us is a bubble of prosperity at the labor level."

There are folks, however, who think FEMA is not giving out money fast enough. Brian Rodgers, 70, who lives in Las Tusas, is one of those.

'Gone in a flash'Rodgers, originally from New Jersey, is retired from the electronics industry and has been living on a 241-acre land trust since 1971.

"I'm a trustee for the land trust," he said. "This was a highly maintained property, 100 some odd campsites, a stage, a covered outdoor kitchen. For many years, starting in 1972, there was a Memorial Day party here.

"My entire life's work was taking care of this property, and the Forest Service took it all away. Everything I worked for was gone in a flash."

The fire destroyed 209 acres of ponderosa pine on the property as well as the 1,600-square-foot wooden house in which Rodgers and his wife lived.

He said FEMA gave him and his wife $47,000 when the agency saw the house was gone, and they used part of that money to buy an RV and go to Santa Rosa. Rodgers said he returned to Las Tusas from Santa Rosa in February 2023, and he and his wife are now living in a trailer FEMA sold to them at what he said was an inexpensive price.

But he said FEMA has not acted on his claim for the house and his and his wife's other belongings, or on a claim filed for the land trust's property damage.

"They did not do anything with the claim for eight months," Rodgers said. "They still have not paid us. Our house had a wood-burning stove and solar panels. The trailer is all electric, and I'm paying $450 a month for electricity. I've had to borrow money from family.

"Half of the pain and suffering is that FEMA is just a disorganized and slow-moving organization. It's just so frustrating."

FEMA spokesperson Deborah Martinez has a different perspective. She said FEMA had nothing when the compensation money was made available.

"We were six months building and staffing our offices (in Mora, Las Vegas and Santa Fe)," she said. "By federal standards, that's pretty fast. In April 2023, we were up and running and paying our first claim."

She said the agency understands that it looks to many like the response to needs is moving at a slow pace.

"We have sped up the process," she said. "We have hired more people and are still hiring people to deal with the increase in claims.

"In the first four months of this year, FEMA has paid out more than we did in all 2023. FEMA has paid out $553 million, over half a billion, on 2,890 claims approved for property, business and financial losses."

When told there is a perception among some people that FEMA acts last on claims for homes lost in the fire, she said the numbers do not support that view.

"The latest number of claims we have for lost homes is 149, and of those, 116 claims, totaling $31.8 million, have been paid.

"We are only allowed to pay claims for financial, property and business losses not covered by insurance. We can pay the difference if the insurance is short, but we cannot pay what has already been paid by insurance companies."

Trying to say yesKayt Peck, 70, poet, author of novels and former assistant fire chief of the Sapello-Rociada-San Ignacio Volunteer Fire Department, lost her 1,800-square-foot log cabin in Rociada to the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire.

She bought a travel trailer in May 2022 and lived in a trailer park in Andrews, Texas, for a while. Then she bought a single-wide home and is now living in Las Vegas until she sees how her FEMA claims pan out.

"I was lucky to have enough insurance money to live and do some stuff," she said. "But it was not enough to build the same house I had."

Peck said she felt pressured by FEMA not to use a lawyer, but the agency did recently agree to speak with her and her attorney and has made what she deems to be a decent offer for a claims settlement, although some issues still need to be addressed.

Martinez said FEMA will tell everyone they are entitled to an attorney.

Even so, she said the agency has hired 168 local people, some from Santa Fe, but most from Mora, Las Vegas and nearby communities, people who have experienced the fire themselves, to help people navigate FEMA's challenging claims process.

"It can be a difficult system, especially for those who do not have computers," said Martinez, who is a local herself, born in Española and reared in Chimayó and Los Alamos. She said the agency will meet people at their homes and work with them there.

"This is public money, and we have to account for all of it," Martinez said. "Sometimes, when a house has been in a family for generations, there is no documentation. But we can take declarations that people are telling the truth. We try to say yes. We want to compensate people to the full extent of the law."

Larry Bradshaw, 79, a retired insurance rep, and his wife, Barbara, 77, a retired registered nurse, live on 83 acres in Cañoncito. Larry is from Iowa and Barbara from New Jersey, but they had been living and working in Colorado for 32 years when they moved to Cañoncito 12 years ago to live full time.

They received FEMA restitution for a double-wide manufactured home that burned in the fire, for loss of business on a cabin they rented out as an Airbnb, smoke damage and destruction of a hay field, forest property and fences, along with partial reimbursement of money spent for lodging in Taos while they were displaced from their home.

Barbara handled the application on her computer.

"I had enough time, just enough computer skills to be scary, and a lot of help from the (New Mexico) Acequia Association and some from FEMA," she said. "I think a lot of people don't have the documentation we have, and I had the ability to scan documents and send them in."

The couple has no problem with the way FEMA settles claims, but they think the agency may have difficulty with cost containment.

"I don't know how many times pickup trucks went up and down here just to look at that double wide," Barbara said.

Acequia bluesGilbert Quintana lives on 12 acres of irrigated farmland in the small community of Tramperos, near Cleveland. The farm has been in his family for generations. He said portions of a house on the property date back 400 years.

"You can go down four or five feet here and the soil is still dark," he said. "It's rich. We are blessed."

But going on three years now, farming has been compromised because acequias are strangled by silt, ash and debris pushed into the ditches by flood waters pouring over decimated watersheds. Silt clogs the ditches. Debris damages or rips away headgates and diversion dams.

During regular irrigation years, Quintana would take organic produce to the growers market in Taos. But since the fire and the floods, he has been limiting his produce primarily to the three sisters: corn, beans and squash.

"After a year and a half, we cleaned out some of the acequias," Quintana, 76, said. "One ditch we got cleaned out completely, and the very next day we got a flood that damaged a long stretch of it."

He said he and others have been trying to get FEMA to fund the clearing of acequias in Tramperos, but he doesn't think the agency knows much about the ditches.

"There are 160 pages of FEMA rules and regulations and less than half a page on acequias," he said.

Paula Garcia, executive director of the nonprofit New Mexico Acequia Association, said that of 80 acequias damaged by the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire, only one has been completely repaired.

"We still have a lot of work to do," she said. "There's enough work for years and years. We can use FEMA money to do debris removal. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture) will do structural repair.

"But before you can touch an acequia with federal money, you have to follow all kinds of historic preservation and environmental regulations. You have to count all the birds. That makes it really difficult."

Parts of acequias are running with water and other acequias are running with water part of the time.

"Some acequias are decently operating," Garcia said. "But there are probably dozens that have not got a drop of water in three years. My acequia (in Mora) is running now as we speak, but in about three days it is going to fill up with silt at the head, so we are going to have to get a backhoe to clean it out. It costs about $1,500 every time we use a backhoe."

Forever changedElla Arellano lives in Holman, six miles northwest of Mora, on a 700-acre farm that has been in her family for 100 years.

"My property was burning on Mother's Day (May 8, 2022)," she said. "It burned all my willow trees along the acequia. All the wood products we harvested for vigas, latillas, Christmas trees are gone. The erosions on my properties are severe and continue.

"Most of the mountain roads on my properties have been wiped out. This is the third irrigation and hay season since the fire and flooding. The last two years, we had no hay.

"The maintenance on the acequias is ongoing. Culverts are missing, damaged, plugged or too small to handle the water flow."

She has made a claim for damages, but has received no money to this point.

"Contractors are getting a lot of money, farmers are just starting to see some," she said. "But money does not bring back the landscape as we knew it. Everything is forever changed throughout the valley and nearby communities. The fire and flooding has impacted everyone in one way or another."

Arellano made a career as an educator — teacher, principal, superintendent. But like her ancestors, she is of the land and wants to remain so.

"I am very fortunate and grateful that I have three adult children and their young families who are wanting to invest their time and efforts in the rebuilding of our properties. Whatever it takes," she said.

"We have always been resourceful, and this disaster has tested our resilience for sure. This has been tough, but I remain optimistic for the future."