LAS VEGAS, N.M. (AP) — Maggie Mulligan said her dogs might feel the panic as she and her husband picked them up, sad to leave their horses behind and flee a rapidly advancing wildfire. to his home in northeastern New Mexico.
“We don’t know what’s next,” he said. “We don’t know if we can go back to horses.”
Mulligan and her husband, Bill Gombas, 67, were among anxious residents who quickly packed up and evacuated their homes Friday ahead of looming wildfires in the West fanned by dry tinder conditions and fierce winds.
More than a dozen sizable fires were burning in Arizona and New Mexico, destroying dozens of homes and as of Saturday burning more than 451 square kilometers (174 square miles).
Winds that howled on Friday remained a concern Saturday in northern New Mexico, where two fires have merged and quadrupled in size to a total of 171 square kilometers (66 square miles) in mountains and grasslands northwest of Las Vegas, New Mexico.
The merged fires burned some structures, but no numbers were available, Fire Information Officer Mike Johnson said.
“They were able to save some structures and we know we lost other structures that we were unable to defend,” he said.
Wind-blown dust clouds and plumes of smoke darkened the skies near the fires, said Jesus Romero, deputy San Miguel County Sheriff.
“All the ugliness that spring brings in New Mexico, that’s what they’re dealing with,” he said.
An estimated 500 households in San Miguel were in rural Mora and San Miguel counties covered by evacuation orders or advisories, Romero added.
Elsewhere in the region, fire danger in the Denver area on Friday was the highest in more than a decade, according to the National Weather Service, due to unusual temperatures in the 1980s combined with high winds and very dry conditions.
In Arizona, a Flagstaff-area fire consumed 30 homes and numerous buildings as flames ripped through rural neighborhoods Tuesday.
