This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Desk collaboration.
First came the drought. After three years without significant rain, northern New Mexico’s dense forests of spruce, fir and ponderosa pines were baked to a crisp. Then came the spark—a prescribed burn lit by the US Forest Service in April 2022. It was supposed to reduce wildfire risk but instead got out of control, eventually becoming the largest wildfire in state history.
After the prescribed burn escaped its perimeter, it was dubbed the Hermit’s Peak Fire. Then it merged with the Calf Canyon Fire, a “sleeper” fire from January pile burns, in the hills above Las Vegas, New Mexico. (This is rare: Prescribed burns evade control and turn into wildfires only about 1 percent of the time, according to the Forest Service.)
“It feels like I’m running a restaurant through the apocalypse”
In June, rain finally fell—not enough to douse the flames, but enough to send rivers of soot, ash, and mud racing into downstream communities and homes. That put drinking water sources at risk, including private wells and a water treatment plant that was unable to turn the sludgy, contaminated water into anything safe to drink.
Firefighters contained the 340,000-acre fire in August. Now, three years later, people living in the burn scar and the roughly 13,000 residents of Las Vegas, less than 10 miles from the edge of the burn, still intermittently have trouble accessing clean drinking water. The ongoing problems expose how local, state and federal systems aren’t set up to deal with the long recovery times for increasingly large and destructive wildfires.
Las Vegas will remain vulnerable to flooding and drinking water will be at risk for at least the next five to 10 years, until shrubs regrow enough to help stabilize sloppy hillsides and scorched soil can hold moisture again. Now everyone holds their breath when summer monsoon season rolls around.
That June 2022 flood wasn’t the only disastrous deluge the community experienced even as the fire was still burning. In July, at least 2-4 inches of rain fell on ashy, water-repellant soil in just a few hours. A torrent of water raced downstream, surging into steep canyons and filling the Gallinas River with a chocolaty sludge of burned trees, dirt, and pine needles.
Flash flooding killed three people, washed out roads, and overpowered the city’s water treatment plant, which was not designed to handle post-wildfire conditions. Whenever floods pour dirt and ash into the river that feeds the city’s three reservoirs, the plant automatically shuts off to prevent permanent damage.
Then, last summer, it happened again: Heavy monsoonal rainstorms triggered more flooding, causing debris flows that left the water treatment plant unusable for roughly two weeks. It was intermittently shut down for months afterward, forcing city officials to close all nonessential businesses before the busiest weekend of the year, the annual Fourth of July Fiesta, which was cancelled.
The turbidity in some water samples—a measure of their clarity—was 200 times higher than federal drinking water standards. Locals were asked to limit their water use; businesses faced penalties if they didn’t comply. “It feels like I’m running a restaurant through the apocalypse,” said Isaac Sandoval, a Las Vegas local and owner of The Skillet restaurant. “It’s just one thing after another.”
“People are asking, ‘Is it safe to live here?’ ”
The solution is a new facility that can handle muddy, debris-filled water, and will cost over $100 million. But disaster recovery moves slowly. Despite $4 billion in congressionally approved fire relief and additional FEMA funding, design delays mean a new plant won’t open for at least four to six more years, according to Mayor David Romero.
In the meantime, maintaining the existing plant has cost Las Vegas $1 million over the last six months. And the city’s water still isn’t always clean. The New Mexico Environment Department’s Drinking Water Bureau has cited the city for violating state drinking water standards almost 60 times since 2023.
The effects of all this ripple throughout the community. Water shortages stress city firefighters. Closed businesses require more police patrols. Paper plates—dishwashing isn’t possible without clean water—and an estimated 1.2 million plastic water bottles burden the city’s garbage disposal system.
Other communities could face similar problems. More than 60 million people in the United States get their drinking water from streams that flow from the nation’s 193 million acres of national forests. Proactive thinning is underway in high-risk watersheds, including the one supplying Butte, Montana, as HCN reported last year.
And some rural areas, like Lake Madrone, California, have already paid the price. The 2020 North Complex Fire contaminated water pipes with toxic VOCs and trihalomethanes. More than four years later, residents of the 60 or so houses that didn’t burn down are still drinking from water tanks in their yards, dependent on truck deliveries for refills. FEMA denied the Lake Madrone Water District’s $8 million request to rebuild its water system, and the community can’t afford to replace the piping on its own.
Chaos at FEMA—in June, President Donald Trump said he wanted to phase out the agency and “give out less money” for disaster relief—will hurt the next community ravaged by a similar catastrophe. (So far, the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fire recovery funds have not been cut.) “It is unacceptable that the Trump administration is attempting to gut FEMA—making us less prepared for the next crisis,” New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján said in an emailed statement.
Cyn Palmer and I stepped over the sandbags that still line the front door of her small townhome in Rociada, New Mexico, in April. Rociada is in the foothills about 30 minutes northwest of Las Vegas, due north of Hermit’s Peak and flanked by a horseshoe-shaped ridgeline. Snow blanketed the ground and the thousands of burnt trees that ring the valley resembled charred toothpicks. Many of her neighbors and friends lost their houses, and the community center and bar where Palmer, a retired wildlife manager, once picked up shifts burned down as well.
Palmer’s house has been through the wringer: Soot damage is still visible on its white walls despite cleaning, and repeated flooding has left mold in its wake. But one of her primary concerns is water. The rural communities scattered north of Las Vegas lack municipal water treatment plants; instead, residents rely on wells, either individual wells or community wells that serve a cluster of homes.
Floods can loosen well hardware and erode pump components. They can also ferry toxic runoff from burned areas into well water, contaminating it with chemicals, bacteria or microorganisms that require disinfection and flushing. “People are asking, ‘Is it safe to live here?’” Palmer said. “A lot of people don’t fully trust this water. I don’t trust the water.”
Palmer’s tap water comes from a community well owned and operated by the Pendaries Village Mutual Domestic Water Consumers Association. The association assured Palmer that, after repairs, its wells were safe and uncontaminated by flooding, but it refused to share immediate test results with her.
“I’m so concerned about the water,” Pacheco said. “How toxic is it?”
When Palmer tried to take advantage of free water quality testing from the New Mexico Environment Department, she recalls being told that her sample had been tossed out because the community well had already been tested by the association. (Department spokesperson Muna Habib said some testing events only focus on private or public, not always community, wells.)
Palmer also worries that the pipes that carry water from the well across the valley floor to her house were superheated during the fire. Radiant heat can cause plastic pipes to leach benzene and other toxic volatile organic compounds into water.
To this day, the water she drinks and brushes her teeth with comes from a ceramic dispenser on her kitchen counter or bottles of water. She refills 3-to-5-gallon jugs in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, where she also receives medical care for an anemia autoimmune disorder that developed after the fire. “There’s no point in taking a chance on this water, when you think about all the toxins that went into the watershed,” Palmer said. She’s tripped over sandbags repeatedly, once hurting herself and another time breaking a water jug.
The scope of the private well problem is not fully known, but the roughly 75-100 households who live in and around Rociada get their water from wells. “I worry about people that haven’t gotten sick yet,” Palmer said.
A few miles up the road from Palmer, Laura and Luis Silva live with six family members and run a small herd of cattle. Both sides of their families have lived here for five-plus generations. Manuelitas Creek, which runs through the Silvas’ property, is usually only a few feet wide. Since July 2022, however, it occasionally swells up to 75 feet wide and 12 feet deep, washing out driveways, damaging septic tanks, stock ponds and culverts, and pinning logs and other debris on fences.
The Silvas believe that chemicals from burned homes and fire retardant, which contain toxic heavy metals, ended up in the floodwaters that their cattle drank. It’s difficult to know how much fire retardant was released overall during the months-long fire, but 28,000 gallons were dropped on one day in May 2022. That year, several calves were born prematurely, small and without any fur. “We’ve never seen that before,” Laura Silva said. The calves didn’t survive.
It cost the family $575 to have their well tested for a variety of contaminants in March 2023, which they said FEMA didn’t reimburse. “People haven’t had their wells tested because they can’t afford it,” Laura Silva said. (In a statement attributed to Jay Mitchell, director of operations, FEMA disputed this and said private well testing was eligible for reimbursement before the fire claims reimbursement deadline of March 14.)
They’re concerned a septic tank damaged by flooding may be contaminating their water, an even more expensive problem to fix without FEMA’s help. So for now, they drink their water and hope there’s nothing wrong.
Some 40 miles south, in the mountains south of Hermit’s Peak, Michael Pacheco lives on 100 acres that were once covered with piñon pines, cedars and juniper trees. Most of them burned, and now, when it rains, water runs right off the soil, rather than soaking in. Pacheco, who is a minimalist, has never had running water at his trailer. But he used to draw as much water as he wanted from a nearby well. Now, it runs out after 30 gallons.
When we met for an afternoon lemonade in Las Vegas, Pacheco pulled up in an old turquoise truck. There was a 300-gallon plastic tank strapped in the back, and he planned to fill it with potable water before heading back to the hills. “I’m so concerned about the water,” Pacheco said. “How toxic is it?” The 2024 summer flooding kept Pacheco, who’s cut off from town by Tecolote Creek, from turning in water quality samples to the New Mexico Environment Department for free testing on time.
Though Pacheco lives dozens of miles away from Palmer and the Silvas, they share similar concerns: lingering chemical contamination from fire retardant and the lack of testing of private wells and surrounding waterways. Pacheco has fought environmental battles in the past, protesting and organizing against fracking and mining efforts in the region. “I’ve been an activist since I was a little boy,” he said. Now, safe drinking water is his next fight. He’s started pestering the city, the state, and the federal government to help fund testing and any cleanup necessary to ensure clean water. “It’s time to heal,” he said. “I’m going to help turn this all around.”
Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.
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