A team that helped manage the fight against Arizona’s largest wildfire in history has now set its sights on battling the Las Conchas blaze.

Team members from the Southwest Area Type 1 Incident Management Team were activated due, in part, to the fire’s scorching rate of growth, said Brad Pitassi, the team’s public information officer. The Las Conchas blaze flared to life on Sunday, growing to more than 43,000 acres in 24 hours.

The team is called in for the most complicated fires when resources are needed “that go kind of go a little further than what the states can provide,” Pitassi said. “We can bring in aerial services from all over the country; firefighters from all over the country.”

Most recently, the team helped manage the fight against the Wallow Fire, which burned 540,000 acres in Arizona. With that fire, the team managed 5,000 firefighters. “Not saying that this incident will demand that much, but if needed we have the ability to bring in those resources,” Pitassi said.

“We should see a big influx in the next couple of days,” Pitassi said. “As resources are needed, we will go out and order those crews as necessary.”

The growth of the Las Conchas fire and its proximity to the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the town caused enough concern that U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, stopped by the lab’s emergency operations center Monday morning.

“The first thing I wanted to do is talk to the director” of the labs to ask if there any federal issues that needed his involvement  “in terms of giving additional federal support,” Udall said.

“The reason we’re all paying attention is it has gone from, in just 24 hours, a started fire to 43,000 acres,” the senator said. “And that shows you it is in an area that has huge potential to burn. The lab could be in danger, Cochiti Lake could be in danger. And many other areas that have housing in them.”

As of midday Monday, the fire was still growing, although it was not on the lab’s property, said county spokesman Kevin Roark. But that’s not to say the possibility doesn’t exist.

The fire “is experiencing some pretty extreme wind behavior and that is known to drive a fire,” Pitassi said, describing one situation that concerns his team members: “spot fires.”

That occurs when the fire reaches the tops of trees , then jumps, throwing up embers into the air. “With this fire behavior, they have had half a mile spotting, which can create some extreme fire behavior,” Pitassi said. In other words, the embers are being thrown half a mile away.  

Team members on the incident management team include a meteorologist and a fire behaviorist.

Like a profiler used in criminal cases to predict a killer’s future actions, a fire behaviorist tries to predict what a fire will do next based on certain factors, Pitassi said.

“A fire is a science,” Pitassi said. “The way a fire behaves and the different fuel sources --- the alpines, the Douglas firs, the mixed conifers, the grasses and brushes – all has relatively predictable behavior.”

The fire behaviorist “will fly over the fire, he will hike out to it, assess what fuels it’s getting into,” Pitassi said. “They will take samples of the trees to see how dry they are.”

“Every fire has its own personality,” Pitassi said.