LANL has more than 20,000 acres and the fire walked across 9,000 acres of it. Praying for rain, anxiously No, nobody expected that the entire area would blow up in a nuclear explosion. But a lot of New Mexicans are concerned about what will wash out of these mountains when the rains fall, if they ever do. So there's your Catch-22. The need for rain is desperate, yet it might produce pollution if it comes.
Forest fires can denude the land of grass and underbrush that anchor soils.
Heavy rain could send tons of topsoil down through the canyons of the Jemez Mountains, and this material would feed into the Rio Grande, source of drinking water for several cities. This is the same Rio Grande that flows down to El Paso, and Del Rio, and Laredo, and the Gulf of Mexico. From what I have read, and can find out, LANL officials are saying the soil that might wash off the lab's land has a level of radioactivity harmless to humans. The part I can see looks better than I thought it would. A great deal of cleanup and erosion control work has been done already, and will surely be going on for years.