Inferno by Committee

"Tom Ribe's clear, scrupulous and thorough
account of the Los Alamos/Bandelier fire of 2000 is a
white-knuckle narrative, yet meticulously
accurate."
-Roger G. Kennedy, Former Director,
U.S. National Park Service; Director Emeritus, National
Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution and
author of Wildfire and Americans

Inferno by
Committee tells the story of America's worst prescribed fire
disaster, the Cerro Grande Fire of 2000 which burned 250
homes in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The fire started with a
National Park Service prescribed fire that went out of
control and ended up burning 42,000 acres of the Santa Fe
National Forest. A thorough review of the investigations of
the fire and the policy changes that resulted from this
seminal event in American fire history are also an integral
part of this examination. Prescribing fire on the landscape
involves risk. Sometimes, as with the Cerro Grande Fire, the
risk taken results in disaster. For land managers, there
really is no option but to prescribe fire and take risk-to
restore fire to a landscape where fire is native and
necessary for the survival of biological systems. Cerro
Grande showed us both the consequences of taking a risk with
fire and more dramatically, the consequences of avoiding
that risk.