Forest-fire suppression can lead to superfires like the one that scorched Los Alamos a decade ago, says Tom Ribe of Santa Fe in his new book. Inferno by Committee calls the Cerro Grande Fire the "worst prescribed fire disaster" in U.S. history.

It got started on the evening of May 4, 2000, with a controlled burn in the backcountry of Bandelier National Monument. Blown into the Santa Fe National Forest, it quickly went out of control and began burning residences a week later. By the time it was out, nearly a month later, it had burned 42,000 acres of forest and 250 homes.

According to Ribe, the underlying cause was that timber, brush and other potential fuels were allowed to build up around the security-obsessed research laboratory: "Never, apparently, did (J. Robert) Oppenheimer and his army assistants consider the wildfire-prone nature of the Pajarito Plateau and the danger forest fire could pose to the laboratory and its support community as they built the facilities in a place the Spanish called Quemazon or 'big burn.' "

In a cover blurb, Roger Kennedy, a former director of the U.S. National Park Service, called Inferno by Committee "a white-knuckle narrative." Casual readers might find that a bit of an exaggeration. Not a single fatality resulted from the Cerro Grande Fire — a far cry from the Great Miramichi Fire of 1825 that burned 4 million acres of New Brunswick forests and killed 160 people, or the Mann Gulch Fire of 1949 in the Helena National Forest of Montana that took the lives of 13 firefighters, including 12 who parachuted into the area.

But Ribe, a biologist, ecologist and journalist who has worked as a wild-land firefighter for more than 20 years, hammers home the message that government bureaucrats for years ignored warnings about the dangerous buildups of flammable fuels around Los Alamos. Realizations that followed, he says, have stirred federal agencies to communicate better on wildfire issues and to assign more people to controlled burns.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.