New Mexico rivers rage, fields dry after slow federal fire aid

By Andrew Hay

ACEQUIA DE LA SIERRA, New Mexico (Reuters) - Rivers are roaring in northern New Mexico after a big snowpack. But sacred pastures Jimmy Sanchez's family has irrigated for seven generations are dry.

Sanchez has labored in snow, mud and ice to clear centuries-old irrigation ditches of fallen trees and debris left in the wake of the state’s worst-ever wildfire, which was started by the federal government in what was supposed to have been a controlled burn.

The problem is blocking water flowing from a 12,000-foot (3,660-meter) Sangre de Cristo mountain peak into the Mora Valley through earthen channels known as acequias.

Sanchez, a mayordomo or water caretaker, had hoped to have Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding to clear the ditches after the agency was given $3.95 billion to compensate communities for the 40-mile-long blaze.

Over a year after two botched U.S. Forest Service prescribed burns started the largest fire of 2022 in the contiguous United States, help has yet to arrive.

“Our waters come down to give what we can give back to our Mother Earth, our ecosystem, and right now we can’t get that because there’s so much bureaucracy, so much red tape,” said Sanchez, 61, as he watched a trickle of water in a ditch.

FEMA and other federal support has reached only a handful of the dozens of acequias that requested aid in November, said local irrigation leader Paula Garcia.

At stake is the survival of an Indo-Hispano farming, logging and ranching culture rooted in a water system that evolved in the Middle East and North Africa before Spanish colonists brought acequias to the Southwest in the 1600s.

FEMA's critics say the agency is equipped to deal with coastal flooding, not the West's climate-driven wildfires.

Hay fields and pastures will go unirrigated a second year in one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest U.S. states, already suffering from decades of drought blamed on climate change.

With acequias and streams blocked, flash flooding off burn scars is feared in this mountain valley where villagers have a spiritual love of the land known as "querencia."

Garcia, executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association, said it has taken time for FEMA to understand the ditches, overseen by a form of democratic governance older than the United States that are political subdivisions of the state and eligible for aid.

“It's going slow but it's happening, FEMA has finally dedicated staff to acequias," she said, sitting on sandbags outside her Mora home, which is at risk to flooding.

UP TO THE JOB?

FEMA has only once before managed a disaster of this type, said Angela Gladwell, who is running the agency's compensation program for the Hermit's Peak Calf Canyon fire.

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Given 45 days to put regulations in place, the agency based rules on the Cerro Grande fire, another government-started blaze that burned residential areas near Los Alamos in 2000, she said.

As a result, forests were treated like residential gardens and given a 25 percent compensation rate. FEMA personnel thought acequias were storm drains, according to Sanchez.

After angry protests, the agency is redrawing rules and will soon begin partial compensation payments, Gladwell said at the opening of a FEMA claims office in Mora.

“We’re going to address all of their losses as it relates to trees,” she said.

Antonia Roybal-Mack, an attorney representing acequias and residents who lost homes, said an independent claims administrator from New Mexico should have been appointed instead of Gladwell.

"I don't think they're up to the job," said Roybal-Mack, a Mora Valley native.

But FEMA won praise from Las Vegas, New Mexico, Mayor Louie Trujillo, whose city came within 20 days of running out of water after ash choked its supply from the Rio Gallinas, now one of America's most endangered rivers.