The national news, which almost never recognizes that New Mexico is a state—after all we have only five Congressional delegates—has been pricked into awareness by our five fires, one of them, the Hermit’s Peak Fire, the biggest in the U.S. and still growing, now threatening a small community called Mora.
But there is another fire in the Jemez Mountains to the West that is also growing, and has now crept to within three miles of the nuclear pit production facility at Los Alamos. People there are now on “Set” as in “Ready, Set, Go” so they can flee at a moment’s notice if the fire reaches the production facility and the enormous aboveground storage barrels of nuclear waste that have been accumulating on the mesa there since World War Two.
But there would they go?
Where would any of us go?
I remember a naive age long ago when I spent some of my honeymoon in Vermont helping my new husband build a bomb shelter in the basement of the old farmhouse there (later it was turned into a wine cellar). We had a list of what we should put into the dark airless space: water—I’ve forgotten how much—canned soups, soap… It didn’t seem like an odd and fruitless thing to do. We didn’t know anything—the bombs that devastated Japan had passed unnoticed—and we had an almost limitless faith in the U.S. government to protect us from anything.
Now, with my next book, Little Brother, about to appear, we know a lot more. We know there is nowhere to hide.
And yet the fires rage on and the Federal Government has already allotted billions, more than was asked for, for the production at Los Alamos of sixty plutonium pits—the triggers for nuclear bombs—rather than the thirty they have been manufacturing for years, and their safety and clean-up efforts have always been abysmal.
I have been a supporter of local and national Democrats running for re-election for many years, but I am suspending my contributions until one of the five rears up and speaks out against the intolerable threat of combining prescribed burns and nuclear expansion.
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