A wisp of smoke on a cloudless early August morning was one of the first indications that a wildfire had started in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico. Lightning struck near the village of Cundiyó, and a blaze quickly erupted in the drought-stricken canyons surrounding the Río Frijoles.
Both this 13-mile stream and the Río en Media descend from the Sangres and flow into Santa Cruz Lake, a reservoir that releases their water into the Santa Cruz River, which is then joined by another tributary, the Río Quemado.
Like the spurs of a railway, some 30 hand-dug channels, or acequias, deliver that water — collectively owned by around 3,000 parciantes or members — to the small family farms of several historic communities. These acequias — established hundreds of years ago and maintained to this day — predate the dam by many generations and are themselves recognized as political subdivisions of New Mexico, overseen by commissions and individual mayordomos who steward their distribution and maintenance.
But with more than half of the Río Frijoles in the direct path of the fire, the health of the watershed — and the future of the area’s irrigation — were at risk.
“Once it started, I was just waiting for a call, a text, a message from somebody to see if they could pump water” from the lake, said Ron Gallegos, chair of the Santa Cruz Irrigation District, which manages the water for local irrigators downstream.
“And sure enough, they did.”
Within days, U.S. Forest Service aircraft began scooping up lake water to douse the fire and spraying slurry to slow its spread. Gallegos received a contract from the agency to pay the Irrigation District one cent for every gallon it used. It wasn’t much — about $8,500 for about 850,000 gallons, a comparatively small amount of water — but trying to save the watershed, which serves the small farms of some 3,000 people, made it seem worthwhile, Gallegos said.
As of early October, almost two months after the Frijoles Fire ignited, it’s about 90% contained. An initial assessment showed that most of the fire burned at a low intensity, potentially minimizing the post-fire impacts. But flooding could still lead to a rise in sediment, creating turbidity in the lake, and local communities are concerned about the effects that this sediment and the fire retardant might have on the quality of the water on which they depend.
EVEN BEFORE THE FRIJOLES FIRE, the rapid shifts in extreme weather between drought and torrential rains in recent years had made irrigation here precarious. This year, with little snow and high temperatures, runoff has been severely curtailed. “It could be the worst on record,” said Steve Finch, a hydrogeologist and geochemist at an Albuquerque-based firm. A nearby U.S. Geological Survey gauge registered about 4 cubic feet per second all summer long. “Normally, it should be 20 or 30,” he said.
The low levels of warmer water spurred an algae bloom earlier this year that turned the lake a murky green and infused it with a strong putrid scent.
Joel Esquibel operates and maintains the dam just as his father did before him. Several times a week, he climbs a concrete buttress to the top of the dam to observe the height of the lake’s water. As the fire burned, his concern increased. “The only time it was lower was when it was dredged” in the late 1980s, he said. By the end of September, however, a moisture plume from Hurricane Polo had brought the lake up 15 feet.
But too much water has its own risks. In 2025, a historic flood destroyed acequia infrastructure, and the damage brought irrigation to a halt as small communities rebuilt headgates and cleared out debris and silt, a process that took months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This September’s historic rains flushed Frijoles Fire debris and silt into the lake, and Finch worries that this will reduce the reservoir’s capacity. He estimates that over the past 100 years, Santa Cruz Lake has already accumulated 1,000 acre-feet of silt, or about one-quarter of its capacity. He doesn’t know yet how much silt the post-fire rains have brought, but he said that reservoir will have to be dredged again one day to “refurbish its storage capacity.”
ON AUG. 4, the day the fire started, New Mexico Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D, requested that the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, “examine the prevalence and potential effects of toxic metals in fire retardants” used by the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior. The letter — which emphasized the “essential, lifesaving support” of aerial firefighting and was signed by eight congresspeople — added that “recent reports have raised questions about the safety of fire retardants commonly used by aerial firefighters.”
“All fire retardants used by the Forest Service fall into the Environmental Protection Agency’s ‘practically non-toxic’ category for mammals, including humans, and aquatic species,” Forest Service spokesperson Claudia Brookshire wrote in an email to High Country News. “The Forest Service prohibits retardant drops within waterways and within mapped avoidance areas for cultural resources, or threatened, endangered, proposed, candidate or sensitive species.”
While fire retardants largely comprise two forms of phosphate widely used in fertilizers, investigations in California revealed arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead in samples collected after the Palisades, Eaton and Franklin fires.
Three years after the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire ripped through 340,000 acres of forest lands in northern New Mexico, independent analysis showed the presence of heavy metals in private well water. A 2026 report attributed it to natural ores as well as burnt structures and fire suppressants.
According to the Forest Service, some 453,000 gallons of retardant were dropped on the Frijoles Fire, more than a quarter of the 1,600,000 gallons used on the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. But the Frijoles Fire is significantly smaller: At 16,000 acres, it’s less than 5% of the size of the Hermit’s Peak blaze.
Asked at a public meeting in early September in the nearby village of Truchas whether there were heavy metals present in the fire retardant used on the Frijoles Fire, Lawrence Lujan, a deputy district ranger for the Santa Fe National Forest, referred High Country News to the manufacturer.
“No heavy metals are added to any PHOS-CHEK fire retardant formulations; any trace amounts of heavy metals present are naturally occurring within the raw materials used to formulate the solution,” wrote Zak Bollenbacher, president of the Americas Retardants business at Perimeter Solutions, the retardant’s manufacturer, in an email. The phosphate in the retardant used in the Frijoles Fire, he added, undergoes multiple processes to remove “heavy metal levels below fertilizer grade.”
PHOS-CHEK IS A BRAND of firefighting foam sprayed from aircraft to prevent wildfires from spreading. It was developed in the late 1960s by industrial giant Monsanto. While most of its ingredients were made public in material safety data sheets, a small percentage remain undisclosed as trade secrets. This prompted a team of researchers from University of Southern California to investigate the presence of heavy metals in retardants using data from fires that occurred between 2009 and 2021.
The team looked at 14 types, three of them in the Phos-Chek line, that are now owned by Perimeter Solutions. The results published in 2024 show that one Phos-Chek product, Phos-Chek LC95-W — once considered the world’s most widely used retardant — contains levels of heavy metals orders of magnitude higher than the EPA’s drinking water standards. The Forest Service phased out the product in 2024, but the agency confirmed that it had used this type as well as the two others on the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon blaze. Another retardant used on Hermit’s Peak and, according to Bollenbacher, used “to help contain the Frijoles Fire” was also used in the recent major California fires. Later analysis by the USC team revealed high levels of heavy metals.
According to lead researcher Daniel McCurry, the USC team did not analyze the second type of retardant used on the Frijoles Fire, a variety called Phos-Chek 259-Fx, because it lacked access to all of the manufacturer’s samples.
On the ground, acequia parciantes are holding their breath. The entire lake has darkened to the color of ash, and concerns about water quality remain. No more water releases are planned for the rest of the year, Finch said, so whatever debris and silt ended up in the lake will have time to settle over the winter months. That means that the debris is unlikely to get distributed into the acequias. At least, not this year.
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