The last time Santa Feans coughed, hacked and teared up due to smoke was last fall, when the Santa Fe National Forest lit a prescribed burn in the municipal watershed east of the city.

But that was nothing compared to what they have been dealing with in the last week due to an Arizona wildfire.

Smoke from the Sept. 29 planned burn settled heavily in the city, but lasted only a night and part of the next day. Santa Feans made their unhappiness with the smoke known to local media and Forest Service officials.

Smoke from the 389,000 acre — and growing — Wallow Fire near Alpine, Ariz., has filled Santa Fe and surrounding areas with smoke daily since the weekend.

"We could see this smoke through June in the worst-case scenario," said Bill Armstrong, fuels specialist program manager for the Santa Fe National Forest.

Winds pushed the human-caused fire northwest through rugged terrain and parched vegetation ranging from grass to pine trees. "No vegetation has a high moisture content right now," said Terry Wildermuth, a spokeswoman with the incident command team managing the Wallow firefighting efforts. "Some of the biggest factors driving this fire are the dryness of the fuel and the winds."

According to Armstrong, "The only way to prevent this type of fire is with fire. If the American public wants large contiguous blocks of forested land, the choice is not 'fire or no fire,' it is what kind of fire do they want to see."

Some Arizona politicians are blaming environmentalists and poor Forest Service management for the Wallow conflagration burning up the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, the location of Arizona's largest fire to date — the Rodeo-Chediski, which burned 468,000 acres in 2002.

But environmentalists and foresters like Armstrong, who often don't agree on much, agree on this: Decades of fire suppression and logging combined with the drought currently gripping the Southwest are the primary factors setting up catastrophic fires such as Wallow. And the forests around Santa Fe are ripe for a big one.

"Under these historic drought conditions and windy weather, catastrophic fire is to be expected, and all people can do is get out of the way," said Bryan Bird, an ecologist with the nonprofit environmental group WildEarth Guardians, based in Santa Fe. "Thinning only changes fire behavior under certain conditions. We are far outside the range of those circumstances."

Foresters made fire suppression top priority beginning in the early 1900s. Their efforts prevented the natural fires, so long a part of Southwest ecosystems, from doing their job. Scientists have found increasingly that Southwest forests and even wildlife had adapted to fire over centuries. Frequent, low-intensity fires prevented forest overgrowth, cleaned out debris, enriched soil and stimulated seedling growth. "The last 100 years of fire suppression didn't work," Armstrong said.

Logging during much of the last century contributed to the problem, Bird said. Loggers wanted big, wide-trunked trees, the kind that brought top dollar in the market. They left behind wide swaths of clear-cut land or forests with all the same age and type of trees. Those trees grew densely, protected again by fire suppression.

Now millions of acres around the West have thick, overgrown forests of small-trunked trees, just waiting to fuel a big fire.

Armstrong is among foresters who agree with environmentalists such as Bird that what is needed to correct the problem, and prevent more Wallow-size fires, is more prescribed burns.

Even thinning isn't the answer, Armstrong believes. "The cost is prohibitive and there's no place to take the wood," he said.

Santa Fe National Forest has been averaging prescribed burns on 15,000 to 20,000 acres a year. "We need to burn 40,000 to 60,000 acres a year over the next eight to 10 years to make enough of an impact, reduce fuels and create conditions that reduce the risk of these big fires," Armstrong said.

Armstrong spent two months over the winter helping manage prescribed burns at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. "They burn 90,000 acres a year," Armstrong said, noting that the base also hosts a long list of threatened and endangered species that are thriving in the fire-enriched landscapes.

The challenges to prescribed burning are many.

Some people who remember the 2000 Cerro Grande fire near Los Alamos, which started when a National Park Service prescribed burn got out of control, still don't trust federal agencies. But the Forest Service, Park Service and other agencies in New Mexico have conducted dozens of prescribed burns successfully since then.

Smoke concerns many in Santa Fe, especially those with respiratory conditions.

The biggest hurdle is federal funding and support in Congress, Armstrong said. Funding spent on prescribed burns is a fraction of the cost spent fighting massive wildfires such as Wallow, he pointed out.

The Wallow and Horseshoe 2 fires burning in Arizona have so far cost a combined $42 million, according to the Southwest Coordination Center.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., supported funding for a program a couple of years ago that pays federal agencies to conduct prescribed burns on a large, "landscape" level. The Santa Fe National Forest and Valles Caldera National Preserve won one of the competitive grants to begin treating 150,000 acres over the next few years.

Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.