Wildfire — April 10, 2025 – John Agliata

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THE DAILY UPDATE

On Monday afternoon, I received a text from someone with whom I collaborate for my side business, Johnny Boy Marketing. He asked me if I wanted to write a story for someone who had contacted him because he had another major project he was working on and didn’t have the bandwidth at the moment.

I very, very rarely say no to anything that involves writing, and despite this seeming like a very dry topic on the surface — it was for something called the Western Landowners Alliance, after all — the fact that anyone is willing to actually pay me to write still sometimes boggles my mind, so I said yes.

There was just one hitch: The 600-word article was due by Friday afternoon.

Now, I am blessed with the ability to write 600 words about anything very, very quickly. The fact that I had no clue what the topic of the article really was at the time didn’t bother me. After writing about blockchain, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, complicated orthopedic procedures, and how electricity is generated and gets from power plant to your home over the course of my no three-decade career, I’m not intimidated by the unknown.

I am so glad I said yes.

Turns out that the issue is a 2022 wildfire in a rural area of New Mexico northeast of Albuquerque that ultimately burned for 137 days and scorched 341,000-plus acres, as well as the homes, livestock, and livelihoods of a whole lot of people. And guess who started the fire?

The federal gubment.

It seems as if on the day the fire started, a day residents say came during a long dry spell and a day during which winds topped out at 85 mph, the U.S. Forest Service went ahead with plans for what was supposed to be a limited prescribed burn. They did a small test fire, declared it a success … and then started receiving phone calls about spot fires outside of what they had established as a containment area.

Oopsie.

That was in early April. In late August, the last of the flames were extinguished.

Then came the rains. Without the erosion protection provided by the now-incinerated trees and underbrush, the heavy precipitation turned into flooding that washed away the remnants of residents’ burned out belongings and lives.

Now, if the federal gubment could have denied its roll, it surely would have, I have no doubt. That’s how our federal gubment works, especially when there’s lots of money at stake. But an 80-page report issued while the flames were still burning detailed a series of missteps that made plausible deniability, well, pretty damn implausible. And so Congress passed legislation signed by Grandpa Joe to allocate $4 billion to compensate these wildfire victims at 100% of their losses.

Were it that simple, I would not be getting paid to write a story about this in 2025.

Here was are, three years after the fire, and numerous residents haven’t been compensated for diddly squat. Some who have received some money say the Claims Office, a subsidiary of FEMA appointed to manage the disbursement of the $4 billion, have, well, been big pains in the asses, requiring insane amounts of paperwork and impossible-to-get proof of ownership of things that are now nothing more than ashes.

And so people in this rural New Mexico area are rather unhappy, to say the least.

My job is to tell this story. I have incorporated heartbreaking resident interviews, obviously, and that’s where the strength of this story lies. There is strong emotional appeal to the tales of woe they have and the anger they (rightly) direct at the gubment for starting the fire in the first place and then being the large, inefficient, and often ineffective body most people think of it as today.

Let me ask you this: If someone came over to your house, torched it, burned up all your stuff and your way of making money, would you be OK if three years later that person hasn’t been punished and/or compensated you? Would you be OK if you were asked to submit paperwork that got burned up in the fire? Would you be OK if someone agreed to a 180-day deadline to give you your money and then didn’t give you your money at 180 days?

Of course you wouldn’t be OK with that. And neither are these residents.

But.

Reporting on this story couldn’t stop at the residents whose lives were torched. As much as the gubment is an easy target for anger, the people who work inside that massive machine have a job to do and, in many cases, really do want to help people as the public servants that they are. So I’ve talked with the FEMA claims office phone-answerer, a kind woman who is my newfound buddy in this story. She gave me a lot of great info on background (Read: not on the record) that helped paint a more full picture of what’s going on out there, and much of the holdup is because of lawyers, of course. They have swooped in with great eagerness to sue the snot out of the federal gubment, which, because of its ability to, ya know, print money, makes for an attractive target.

And when lawyers get in the ear of largely poor, rural New Mexicans, many of whom are not native English speakers, what do you think is going to happen? So many gubment people, on background of course, are saying all sorts of things very carefully, because what they are essentially saying is, “If you wouldn’t have lawyered up, this would all be solved by now. Oh, and if you would have let us do prescribed burns over the past 20 years like we wanted to, this whole thing wouldn’t have been this bad.” In other words, “Um, don’t you share some of the blame in this whole mess?”

And they’re right. They do.

No one likes people setting fires near their livelihoods and homes for any reason. So the residents have been rather resistant to prescribed burns over the past few decades. The fact that when they did get out of the way of a prescribed burn it torched 340,000-plus acres is the ultimate, “See? What did I tell you?” But of course, had these prescribed burns been done earlier, these gubment I-told-you-so-ers are right in saying there wouldn’t have been so much tinder to ignite into such a massive, impossible-to-control inferno.

And it’s also similarly true that the lawyers who have descended upon this community don’t give a rip about it or its residents. They see dollar signs. And to be fair, there are dollar signs to be seen. The gubment has accepted responsibility for the wildfire — not because it is magnanimous but because it literally set the dang fires that started it. That’s a hard thing to deny when it is written down in so many places and witnessed by so many people. Lawyers have a tendency to do slimy things to make their opponents look bad that they then can point out to the media and say “See? The gubment is screwing people over!” Of course, perhaps the gubment could meet the 180-day deadline if the lawyers didn’t drop the required paperwork for a hundred lawsuits on the gubment on day 179. It’s hard to respond accurately to that kind of volume in 24 days, let alone 24 hours.

And that, of course, precipitated a court battle, one the lawyers ultimately lost that forced them to have the paperwork turned in by day 60.

The gubment also rightly points out that it has, indeed, paid a lot of money to people afflicted by the fire. More than $2.1 billion has gone to roughly 15,000 claimants. That, on the surface, sounds very impressive. Until, of course, you see the scope of the damage and then do the math, which comes out to an average of $140,000 per claimant. If you owned a home, a whole bunch of timber trees, crops, farm machinery, animals, etc … is $140,000 really enough to cover it at that 100% level the gubment promised to pay?

There is a lot to this story, far more than can be told in 600 words. Word counts suck for someone like me who tends to be verbose through his keyboard. The part I have the room to tell? I want it to be balanced.

I feel for the residents. I also understand the gubment peeps are in a no-win situation. FEMA has a bad reputation as it is, and it’s hard to comment and not seem like an insensitive ass when the other “side” is standing outside the burned-out remnants of what once was their home, something that has been reduced to a foundation because of the gubment’s admitted irresponsibility with matches. On the flip side, saying “No comment” is the worst thing you can do here. I was supposed to talk with a Claim Office spokesperson in a half hour. She just cancelled, saying I’d get written responses to my inquiry by the end of the day. I’ll believe that when I see it.

Here’s what I know. I was born for this kind of stuff. This stuff thrills me. Telling stories and getting facts? Cutting through gubment red tape and spokesperson bullshit? I love this stuff.

I’ll share the article once it’s published, but beyond that, I sincerely hope the people in New Mexico are able to get their lives back together sooner rather than later. That our gubment is so unwieldy and inefficient is a crime in and of itself just as bad as the irresponsibility that lead to this mess.

Something I’m grateful for today: Cappuccino

Something I’ve (ghost)written: Not Quite Human: The danger of creeping out customers in an AI age

Song In My Head When I Woke Up: Hard-Workin’ Man, by Brooks & Dunn, which is interesting because I don’t know that I’ve ever purposefully listened to this song … like ever.

Meaningful Lyric From SIMHWIWU:

Come Friday night
I like to party hard
I carry on with the Cadillac cuties
Spend my whole week’s pay on some weekend beauty
Monday mornin’ I’m the first to arrive
I ain’t nothin’ but business from nine to five

Song of the Day: I Got Id, by Pearl Jam

Meaningful lyric from the S.O.T.D.:

So I’ll just lie alone and wait for a dream
Where I’m not ugly and you’re lookin’ at me

Something good from today/yesterday: Getting Wifey Poo’s car to the shop without it breaking down on the journey

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: A good trip to outer space this afternoon.

Fat-Ass Update:

Starting weight: 230.6 on 2/12/25
Goal weight (for now): 199.9
Today’s weight 221.7 (-8.9)
Fat-ass burn-off remaining: 21.8 fat-ass pounds

Help a brutha out: Subscribe to my twice-weekly eNewsletter free! It’s called News-B-Nuts and it’s a quick hitter on interesting news stories I find. Sign up here, please!

Wildfire — April 10, 2025

THE DAILY UPDATE

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