Los Alamos evacuation order lifted; 12,000 go home (AP)

By P. SOLOMON BANDA, Associated Press P. Solomon Banda, Associated Press – 14?mins?ago

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. – A smattering of summer rain gave a boost to firefighters battling a huge forest fire near Los Alamos, giving authorities enough confidence to allow about 12,000 people to return home for the first time in nearly a week.

Residents rolled into town Sunday morning, honking their horns and waving to firefighters as the word got out that the roadblocks were lifted and the narrow two lane highway cut into the side of a mesa leading to Los Alamos was open. They had fled en masse on Monday as the fast-moving fire approached the city and its nuclear laboratory.

"Thank, you! Thank, You! Thank, you!," yelled Amy Riehl, an assistant manager at the Smith's grocery store as she arrived in Los Alamos to help keep the store open for returning residents.

"It's scary, but all of the resources here this time, they were ready. They did a magnificent job," said Michael Shields, eyes tearing up as he returned home to his apartment in the heart of the town.

The town was last evacuated because of the 2000 Cerro Grande fire. That time, residents returned to a town that had lost 200 homes, several businesses and had to cope with damaged utilities and other county enterprises. This time around, residents were returning to a town that is completely intact, although the fire destroyed 63 homes west of town.

Although the threat to Los Alamos and the nation's premier nuclear research lab had passed, the mammoth wildfire raging in northern New Mexico was still threatening sacred sites of American Indian tribes.

Hundreds of firefighters were working Sunday to contain the 189-square-mile fire as it burned through a canyon on the Santa Clara Pueblo reservation and threatened other pueblos on the Pajarito Plateau.

The area, a stretch of mesas that run more than 15 miles west of Santa Fe, N.M., includes Los Alamos and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Authorities said the fire, burning for eight days Sunday, has been fueled by an exceptionally dry season in the Southwest and erratic winds.

Crews have managed to keep the fire in Los Alamos Canyon several miles upslope from the federal laboratory, boosting confidence that it no longer posed an immediate threat to the facility or the nearby town. Crews were helped by rain on Saturday afternoon that slowed the fire.

"Hopefully we'll get two to three more days like this and we'll be fine," operations chief Jayson Coil said.

The blaze, the largest ever in New Mexico, reached the Santa Clara Pueblo's watershed in the canyon this week, damaging the area that the tribe considers its birthplace and scorching 20 square miles of tribal forest. Fire operations chief Jerome Macdonald said it was within miles of the centuries-old Puye Cliff Dwellings, a national historic landmark.

Tribes were worried that cabins, pueblos and watersheds could be destroyed.

"We were also praying on our knees, we were asking the Creator in our cultural way to please forgive us, `What have we done?'" Santa Clara Pueblo Gov. Walter Dasheno said. "Bring moisture so that the Mother Fire can be stopped. But that was not meant to be."

About 2,800 tribe members live in a dusty village nestled in New Mexico's high desert, near the mouth of Santa Clara Canyon where aspen and blue spruce forests provide relief from the dry desert and ponds provide water for irrigation. The canyon is north of the town of Los Alamos.

Pueblo Fire Chief Mel Tafoya said it was unclear whether cabins in the canyon or the ponds survived the blaze. Members of the state's congressional delegation have promised federal help for the tribe pending a damage assessment.

The tribe also worried that 1.5 million trees planted after the 2000 fire have been destroyed, as well as work to restore the Rio Grande cuthroat trout to the upper headwaters of the Santa Clara Creek. The tribe called for emergency federal relief.

To Santa Clara's south, Cochiti Pueblo was also worried about damage to ground cover affecting its watershed.

Archaeological sites at the northern end of the blaze at Bandelier National Monument hold great significance to area tribes. About half of the park has burned, Bandelier superintendent Jason Lott said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of lab employees were returning to prepare operations and thousands of experiments for the scientists and technicians who were forced to evacuate days ago. Among the work put on hold were experiments using two supercomputers and studies on extending the life of 1960s-era nuclear bombs.

Employees were checking filters in air handling systems to ensure they weren't affected by smoke and restarting computer systems shut down when the lab closed.

"Once we start operation phases for the laboratory, it will take about two days to bring everyone back and have the laboratory fully operational," Lab Director Charles McMillan said.

The blaze remained in Los Alamos Canyon, which runs past the old Manhattan Project site and a 1940s-era dump site of low-level radioactive waste, as well as the site of a nuclear reactor that was demolished in 2003.

Firefighters had planned to burn out areas near homes west of the town to remove combustible material and ensure the fire doesn't creep through an area burned in a 2000 blaze, but the rain kept the fire away, Coil said.

For returning Los Alamos residents Leo and Lorene Beckstead, their first stop was the grocery store to buy fruits, vegetables and milk as they prepared to heed officials' request that returning residents remain home because of the firefighters battling the blaze the continues to burn north, south, and west of the town.

"They did a great job," Leo Beckstead said of the firefighters. "I think because of the Cerro Grande fire, they learned a lot."

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Some worry about nuclear plant evacuation plans (AP)

Retiree Bret Gross of San Clemente loves Southern California weather and the seashore. Yet he's ready for a quick getaway, leaving his car's tank at least half full of gasoline.

Is he worried about earthquakes? Yes. Wildfires? Sure. Floods? Yep.

And then there are those two San Onofre nuclear power reactors five miles down the road. Gross worries that the area cannot be quickly evacuated in a severe nuclear accident.

"Forget the amount of training and plans," he said. "It'll be ugly."

Residents near 12 of 65 U.S. commercial nuclear power sites were interviewed following an Associated Press investigative series that reported population increases of up to 4 1/2 times since 1980 within 10 miles of plant locations.

Those interviewed voiced a mixture of anxiety, confidence and resignation about the safety of reactors. Many doubted they can safely and quickly evacuate in a major accident. Despite the existence of formal evacuation plans, many said they didn't even know where to go. They predicted confusion and panic on crowded roadways.

Some vowed to ignore instructions to take initial shelter at home — a strategy increasingly favored by disaster planners in the face of population expansions. Some residents said they have devised their own emergency plans, intending to ignore official directives.

By law, evacuations must be prepared for areas within about 10 miles of every nuclear plant, but many plans haven't kept up with changing populations, according to the AP investigation.

Also, federal regulators don't set standards for how quickly people must be capable of evacuating. Meanwhile, aging reactors have been operating at higher power, risking larger radioactive releases.

Planning for evacuations falls to local communities and states, all under supervision of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Even the best planning, however, is challenged by the extraordinary growth around many plants. Population more than doubled in evacuation zones of a dozen nuclear sites over three decades, according to AP's analysis. The population within 10 miles of San Onofre ballooned by 283 percent to 98,631 since 1980.

Despite population growth, many residents insisted they are relatively comfortable living near nuclear plants. Many work at a plant or live with someone who does.

Yet even some strong nuclear advocates assumed evacuations would bog down.

South of Miami, the population around the Turkey Point plant quadrupled to 155,118 over the past 30 years. Two miles away in Homestead, retired industrial engineer Clara Waterman Powell said nuclear power is "the way of the future." She said she trusts plant workers, yet she can't imagine an orderly evacuation. "If everybody got in the car and started driving, where would we go?" she asked.

In Fort Calhoun, Neb., about five miles from the nuclear plant with the same name, 86-year-old Feris Stevenson said he doesn't worry much about its safety. To him, it's "just another power plant."

Regarding a possible accident, he added, "Why worry about something you can't do anything about?" He thinks it would be hard to evacuate, especially with the Missouri River flooding areas around the plant. "We've got one major road getting out of here," he said, referring to U.S. Highway 75.

Larry Jones and his wife, Jean, have lived in Blair about three miles from the Fort Calhoun plant for 30 years. "It's always in the back of your mind," she said.

The couple said they are unsettled by the memory of hearing long ago that the plant, which opened in 1973, was not designed to last until now. The AP investigation found that federal regulators have been relaxing safety standards to keep aging reactors within the rules and therefore extend their lives.

Serious weaknesses also were found in evacuation plans, including the failure to test different scenarios involving the weather or the time of day. And evacuation zones have remained frozen at 10 miles since they were established in 1978, before the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima Dai-ichi in Japan.

Some watchdogs say evacuation standards also are kept lax to keep plants running, as nearby populations swell.

At the two-unit Calvert Cliffs site, population within 10 miles has ballooned by 224 percent since 1980, to 48,843.

Darlene Cocco-Adams, an attorney who lives in Lusby, Md., nine miles from the site, predicted havoc in a nuclear emergency. She said there's just one main road leading out of town, and it sometimes backs up "like New York traffic."

"You couldn't get out of here fast enough," she said.

Many residents living near plants said they regularly receive emergency instructions, usually from the plant operator. Some post them on refrigerators or carefully file them. Others simply toss the document, or stuff it into a drawer and forget about it.

"I just throw it away because we're goners anyway" in a severe accident, said Debra Dominski, 52, who has lived in London, Ark., two miles from the twin reactors of Arkansas One in Russellville, for the past 20 years.

Steven Kerekes, a spokesman for the industry's Nuclear Energy Institute, said "evacuations can work well," with traffic rerouted in a single direction during an emergency.

He said a June survey conducted for NEI found that 81 percent of 1,152 adults living within 10 miles of a nuclear facility said they know what to do in an emergency, with 45 percent "very well informed."

Glenn Cannon, director of emergency management for Pennsylvania, said evacuation is possible. "How quick it is depends on the population you're trying to move and what those road resources are," he said. The state is home to nine operating reactors on five sites, including one unit at the Three Mile Island facility, where the nation's worst nuclear accident occurred in 1979.

Gwen Keenan, bureau chief for preparedness at Florida's emergency agency, acknowledged that evacuations could be complicated by people who flee even though they are told to stay put.

"The roads have the capacity. We have the capacity to get out the word," she said of Florida. "I think the biggest wild card is the behavioral aspect: Will people listen?"

The U.S. nuclear industry's most explosive growth has occurred on the Florida's east coast, around the two-reactor Saint Lucie complex near Fort Pierce, where the 10-mile population of 43,332 in 1980 grew 366 percent to 202,010 in 2010.

Retired clock maker Phil Hollis, of Jensen Beach, Fla., lives six miles from St. Lucie and says he feels little worry.

He thinks he received — but didn't read — emergency instructions mailed by the plant operator.

He's uncertain what route to take in an emergency. "I'd just head west" away from the ocean, he guessed.

Many residents were at a loss to explain why they pay so little attention to planning for a nuclear emergency, including some who should perhaps know better.

Barb Tummel, 48, of Monticello, Minn., drives a school bus and lives within two miles of the Monticello plant, where the 10-mile population rose 314 percent to 58,538 over the past three decades.

Her parents both retired from the plant, and she trusts in its safety. As a driver, she said she knows the city plan for evacuating children from schools in a nuclear accident.

But she wasn't sure how she'd handle an accident when school isn't in session. "I think in the calendar they give out every year, I'm sure there's a page on evacuations. I don't necessarily read all those pages."

And she admitted she has no family plan: "I don't. I should, though."

At Crystal River on Florida's west coast, the population has more than doubled since 1980. Nancy Little Lewis, 53, a real estate broker and advocate of nuclear power, has lived 12 miles away for 17 years and believes it is quite safe.

However, she says there should be some standard for how long evacuation can take and can't imagine following official instructions to stay at home in a major nuclear accident. "I wouldn't do that. We're not talking about a hurricane. We're talking about something much worse," she said.

Others asked, what would be the point of a standard for evacuation times?

"It wouldn't work anyway," said Judith Freed, a psychotherapist in Guilford, Vt., who has lived seven miles from the Vermont Yankee plant for 40 years. She said country roads in that area could not handle an evacuation.

Many residents said they had come up with their own evacuation strategies. Lynn Baldwin, 42, of Soddy-Daisy, Tenn., and her husband live within three miles of the two-unit Sequoyah plant.

She said their family plan is based on typical wind patterns. If it's blowing one way, they meet in Dayton; the other way, at her husband's job in town. "He said, `Go this way if it's blowing that way'" she explained, laughing.

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Donn reported from Boston. Associated Press writers Raquel Maria Dillon in Los Angeles; Matt Sedensky in Miami; Josh Funk in Fort Calhoun, Neb.; Jeannie Nuss in London, Ark.; Amy Forliti in Monticello, Minn.; Bill Kaczor in Tallahassee, Fla.; Eric Tucker in Washington; and Bill Poovey in Soddy-Daisy, Tenn., contributed to this report.

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The AP National Investigative Team can be reached at investigate(at)ap.org

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