Single Publication

INCIWEB UPDATE

SOUTH FORK AND SALT BAER ASSESSMENTS

JUNE 28, 2024

The Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) team continues its rapid assessment of the South Fork and Salt burned areas--assessing for potential risk of future damage from increased water runoff and debris flows. The BAER assessment is an essential step for determining and prioritizing immediate actions to mitigate post-fire impacts to critical values at the greatest risk. Products produced from the assessment will be available to partners in the community and local governments to assess risk to places downstream where people live, work, commute, or gather. Recent good weather has allowed the BAER team members to spend the bulk of their time taking observations and measurements of soil burn severity (SBS) across both the South Fork and Salt Fire burned areas. Specialists are focusing on areas where cloud cover has created gaps in the satellite imagery, necessitating additional data collection. The Southwest Incident Management Team 5 air operations group will assist BAER with an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS, a.k.a. drone) to collect additional imagery in the most remote canyons to fill in gaps and support a completion of SBS maps for each fire. 

In collaboration with local partners, the BAER team also continues to identify and map the locations of potential critical values at risk. This information will allow partners to focus on protecting lives where people reside, commute, work, or recreate downstream from the burned areas. In addition to assessing buildings, roads, culverts, dams, parking lots, trails, and campgrounds, BAER specialists are assessing important natural and cultural resources that may be at risk, like endangered species habitat and historic Native American sites. As specialists survey which critical values are at risk, they also document other post-fire dangers like hazard trees in locations where people are likely to congregate which may need to be felled. In areas where field surveying is complete, team members are beginning preliminary assessments of the level of risk for each value. These risk assessments will be informed by the BAER’s Watershed Response and USGS Debris Flow models. The Watershed Response and the USGS Debris Flow maps will highlight catchments that are likely to see significant increases in water flow and the potential for debris flows for a modeled rainstorm event.

BAER SAFETY MESSAGE: Everyone near and downstream from the burned areas should remain alert and stay updated on weather conditions that may result in heavy rains and increased water runoff. Flash flooding may occur quickly during heavy rain events--be prepared to act. Current weather and emergency notifications can be found at the National Weather Service website: www.weather.gov/abq/.

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