These New Mexico fire victims are starting to give up on FEMA

LAS VEGAS, N.M. — After prescribed fires intentionally set by the U.S. Forest Service accidentally turned into New Mexico’s largest wildfire ever in 2022, the last thing the town of Las Vegas needed was another disaster.

And yet the dreaded came anyway this June, when monsoon season arrived early and taps in the northern New Mexico community paradoxically nearly went dry. That’s because flash flooding off the 2-year-old burn scar sent toxic debris into the Gallinas River, compromising Las Vegas’ water treatment plant.

“It’s hard to figure out how you move forward,” says Yolanda Cruz, a community activist whose property was damaged both by the flooding and wildfire.

For weeks now, Las Vegas, population 13,000, has been struggling through a drinking water crisis. At one point the city had just over a day’s supply of water left. Strict conservation measures and plans to install a temporary filtration system have lately eased some of the short-term worries and allowed non-essential businesses to reopen.

But the need for aid is high. And this latest disaster comes as many people like Cruz are still waiting for promised federal aid to recover the from the last one.

“One row of sandbags, 20 sandbags, isn’t gonna help,” Cruz says, driving the rural roads north of town that lead into the charred forests with standing, dead trees still black from the 2022 fire. “That whole place was flooded again.”

Cruz’s septic system and well burned in the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. Today, she’s still paying out of pocket to fill $5,000 cisterns her family also had to buy for drinking water and cooking.

The recent floods tested the nerves of her and her neighbors.

“When the disaster first hit and President Biden flew over the area and he had a press conference and he said, ‘Don’t worry, this was caused by the federal government and we are going to make this whole,’ everybody cheered,” Cruz says, recalling that people were happy because FEMA was coming to make it right.

After all, the federal government had started the wildfire when embers from two prescribed burns — a key, long-standing wildfire mitigation strategy — ignited into an accidental fire. Soon after, Congress passed a law requiring that aid be distributed to victims by FEMA within 180 days of people filing claims. Lawmakers set aside nearly $4 billion for survivors, communities and tribes.

Today, Yolanda Cruz’s Facebook profile is a logo she made that says her claim is past 250 days. She’s not alone. An estimated three-quarters of total survivors haven’t been made whole, according to federal figures.

“I am trying to be patient,” she says. “I can’t move forward. I just need FEMA to listen to people and to start paying out the claims instead of making excuses.”

To hear survivors tell it, these last two years have been marked by confusion, disorganization and a misunderstanding of rural New Mexico by FEMA. San Miguel and Mora counties are some of the poorest pockets of the West. Some people don’t speak English and some land ownership here dates back to Spanish colonial times.

Jack Rowe’s home, along with his best friend’s, burned in April 2022.

“It’s a poor county. It’s a Hispanic county. I think they’ve got a mindset that poor people want something for nothing and they’re just digging in their heels and not doing anything,” Rowe says.

FEMA officials acknowledge there were stumbles early on in the weeks after the law passed guaranteeing payouts to fire victims.

“This was a new program that we stood up from scratch, writing the regulations in the government take some time,” says Tony Robinson, administrator for FEMA Region Six, which includes New Mexico.

Robinson says the agency is now hiring more native New Mexicans who understand the local culture. They’ve also staffed up, opened more offices and are holding more workshops on filing claims. But FEMA is also inundated with disasters currently, from new wildfires in southern New Mexico to flooding in Texas.

“We’ve made some changes to look at how we estimate damages so that we can make payments more quickly,” Robinson says. “We’ve made tremendous progress since the first of the year.”

According to the latest statistics provided by FEMA, more than $900 million has now been paid out to more than 5,000 applicants, or roughly a quarter of the total estimated number of eligible victims.

But this also means some $3 billion is still sitting unspent as Las Vegas is now dealing with the aftermath of flooding, water shortages and the economic fallout from prolonged business closures around the Fourth of July holiday and tourist season.

“This is a cascading effect of the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, this isn’t a new disaster,” says Mayor David Romero. “It was a fire started by the federal government and we’re dealing with the results and the aftermath of that.”

Romero thinks one problem is that FEMA is not set up to do long-term disaster recovery. The agency’s traditional model is to respond to a community and get people back on their feet within about 18 months. Local officials themselves are still waiting for promised federal funds from the wildfire relief law to build a new, more resilient water treatment plant.

Meanwhile, the mayor says residents now affected by flooding are getting turned away at the local FEMA office that’s designed to help wildfire victims and their claims.

And some of these people appear to be giving up on FEMA and the federal government.

Jack Rowe ended up moving two hours away to a small house in the foothills east of Albuquerque with his best friend, Vicki Garland. Her son helped them buy it after more than a year of moving between shelters and friends’ places. The couple hired a lawyer to negotiate with FEMA after they say the agency lost their claims and repeatedly asked them to resubmit the same paperwork.

“Psychologically we’re just kind of in limbo and physically we’re just kind of ... here,” Garland says.

Garland says they recently came to the realization that they won’t ever go home.

“Are they trying to wear us down so we settle for less?” she asks. “It’s a travesty. It’s just bad. It’s making a lot of people who already suffered suffer a lot more.”