Forestry Division: 276 wildfires reported in New Mexico so far this year

SAN MIGUEL COUNTY, N.M. — Every time fire season arrives, New Mexicans hold their breath and prepare. New Mexico Forestry Division says this year alone, there have been more than 200 wildfires.

Thankfully, the Las Tusas fire is now 90% contained and they are now monitoring containment lines.

“Fighting fire takes the help of everyone – from federal to state resources, to local first responders. Everyone has to pitch in and that is exactly what happened,” said George Ducker, the communications coordinator for the Forestry Division.

KOB 4 wanted to know how this compares to this time last year, and how many acres have burned.

Taking a wider look at the data: this year, to date, 276 wildfires have burned. 118 of these fires were caused by people, but only 18,400 acres across the state have burned.

“A lot of these are small grass fires or fires that were in rural, or not even rural, remote regions so there is still a lot of danger and a lot of fire risk all across the state,” said Ducker.

Around this time last year, we had 290 total wildfires burned. 239 of them were caused by humans and there were 477,924 acres burned across the state.

“This fire season is a vast improvement on last fire season in terms of chronology. We still have had over 200 fires across the state this year and that goes back to January of 2023,” he said.

Even with these improvements, we’re not out of the woods when it comes to fire danger.

“We are still in drought conditions and even though we got a helpful amount of precipitation during the winter and during the spring the fire conditions are still high,” said Ducker.