By Andrew Hay
TIERRA MONTE, N.M. (Reuters) -When U.S. President Joe Biden visits New Mexico on Saturday to meet victims of the state’s largest ever wildfire, Daniel Encinias hopes to ask him for a new house.
Encinias’ home and hundreds more in northern New Mexico were torched in April after controlled burns by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), meant to reduce wildfire risk, ran out of control.
The resulting Hermits Peak Calf Canyon Fire has torched around 320,000 acres (129,500 hectares), an area the size of Los Angeles, in mountains northeast of Santa Fe.
It is burning simultaneously with the second-largest blaze in state history which has blackened over 300,000 acres in the Gila National Forest in southwest New Mexico.
Encinias and his family are among locals invited to Biden’s visit to Santa Fe where he is expected to address USFS mistakes, federal compensation and the West’s climate-driven wildfires.
“I don’t need an apology, I need a home,” said Encinias, 55, standing in the ashes of his house next to burned forest and the recreational vehicle his family of five now calls home.
The rancher and retired electrician has so far received $37,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), probably not enough for a new house foundation.
Like many residents in this low-income area of the second-poorest U.S. state, he built his house paycheck to paycheck and has no homeowners insurance.
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham visited the area on Tuesday and told locals she was trying to gain full federal compensation for recovery efforts, Encinias said.
Some people who lost homes are leaving the area’s Indo-Hispano communities, which have their own dialect of Spanish, raising concerns that centuries-old traditions will disappear.
Some 50 residents of hard-hit Mora County on Wednesday sued the USFS for failing to give them information on its role in starting the wildfire, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported. The agency declined to comment on pending litigation.
(Reporting by Andrew Hay in Tierra Monte, New Mexico; Editing by Donna Bryson, Frances Kerry and Cynthia Osterman)
