Page 45 - The Silver Fire

THE BLACK RANGE RAG - WWW.BLACKRANGE.ORG
Fire Update: 6/29 - 4:30 PM - Notice of Flood Planning Meeting (Con’t)
lower temperatures an increase in relative humidity and winds. There is also a slight chance of isolated thunderstorms on the Black Range that may bring dry lightning.
Silver City, Hillsboro and Winston remain open. Businesses along NM State Highways 15 and 35 remain open all the way to the Gila Cliff Dwellings. The majority of the Gila National Forest is open for recreational opportunities with Stage 1 fire restrictions in effect. NM
Highway 152 is closed from Kingston to San Lorenzo. For more information go to www.nmroads.com.
E-mail to the Hillsboro and Kingston Communities
From Russ Bowen, Asst. Fire Chief of Hillsboro Fire/Rescue
June 28, 2013
To the residents of Hillsboro and Kingston: would like to advise you to the best of my ability of the current and future flooding concerns for our
communities. For those of you who were present at the Planning Meeting of June 25th, you may have left confused and frustrated by the things that you heard. Please understand that what we are dealing with is a large number of unknowns and that many entities are at work trying to assess the possible effects of these unknowns before they become knowns!
Before you judge this to be a lot of gibberish, let me get to some specifics. We have a burn scar on the mountains above us unlike anything that we have experienced before, even for the old timers. A burn scar, as the professionals informed us, is unable to slow down and soak up precipitation in the way that a healthy forest and soil would do. Therefore, increased runoff will result. Increased runoff has the capacity of gathering and transporting larger volumes of debris, in addition to the volume of water that is flowing. Of course, the runoff is dependent upon the rate at which the precipitation falls and the duration of the precipitation event.
Normally, over half of our annual precipitation falls in the months of July, August, and September – the monsoon season. The precipitation falls primarily in the form of convective showers which usually are localized, but produce a
iN MEMORY OF THE GRANITE MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS
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