Los Alamos evacuated

A wildfire that roared out of nowhere on Sunday in northern New Mexico prompted an evacuation of Los Alamos County on Monday, and by midafternoon had spread to the boundary of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the highly sensitive headquarters for United States military nuclear research.
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A laboratory spokesman, Kevin Roark, said the blaze, at the facility’s southern edge, was still several miles from any essential structures on the 25,600-acre property. Mr. Roark said that nuclear and other hazardous materials had been placed in safe storage as a precaution.

Los Alamos Laboratory was created in World War II as cornerstone of the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb, and it has continued to operate over the decades since as a storied and mystery-shrouded center of military science. Its primary mission still, Mr. Roark said, is the “safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.”

The fire destroyed about 30 homes and outbuildings in the county, mostly on Sunday, but so far had not made it into the town of Los Alamos itself, said the fire chief for Los Alamos County, Doug Tucker. Chief Tucker said in a telephone interview that the encroachment onto laboratory land was also fairly quickly extinguished, and that calmer winds on Monday afternoon had given firefighters a break as well.

Residents were ordered to evacuate Los Alamos, N.M., as an out-of-control wildfire was at the town's edge and buffeted the secretive U.S. military nuclear lab.

A Los Alamos National Laboratory spokesman said the blaze, at the facility's southern boundary, remained a few miles from key structures on the 25,600-acre property.

Nuclear and other hazardous materials were in safe storage deep inside vaults within concrete and steel buildings, Kevin Roark told the Alibi newspaper of Albuquerque.

The lab would not comment on a Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety allegation that the wildfire was about 3 miles from a nuclear dumpsite containing tens of thousands of 55-gallon drums of plutonium-contaminated waste.

The anti-nuclear watchdog group's Web site appeared hacked early Tuesday morning, a United Press International check indicated. Its Facebook page had six messages from people alerting the group of the possible hacking, including a message commenting on the timing of the incident happening "just as the fires started."

The wildfire, which began Sunday and exceeded 50,000 acres, or 78 square miles, early Tuesday, destroyed at least 30 homes and outbuildings south and west of Los Alamos, fire officials said.

Wildfires are common in New Mexico and thus many precautions have been taken at the nuclear facility to protect against them. "The radioactive materials and supercomputers are locked away in vaults deep inside buildings that are constructed of cinder block," Roark said.

To protect the buildings themselves, he said, firefighters are reducing the fuel load on lab property. "That means reducing the number of trees, especially those close to buildings, and cutting back underbrush grasses. We're making less fuel to burn."

"At this time there is no fire on lab property," Roark said at 12:30 p.m. ET. "The latest information is that the northern boundary of the fire was about a mile south of lab property. Right now what we're doing is monitoring the situation very closely and deploying firefighter crews to the field, and working closely with the forest service."