The number of residents still unaccounted for has been shrinking significantly after thousands of people fled their homes as two fast-moving wildfires approached their village in southern New Mexico, Ruidoso Mayor Lynn Crawford said Tuesday.
Search and rescue crews have cleared more properties in the areas of Ruidoso, the mountain community hardest hit by the flames, and village officials and volunteers from the American Red Cross have been working through social media to list all those found to be ''safe.''
Just a few people remained on the list Tuesday as unaccounted for. They include those authorities have yet to make contact with and who have not been heard from by family and friends.
Crawford said during his regular radio address that he hoped to get the list down to zero.
''We feel good that we're getting that number down ... but we have to be sure,'' he said.
About 1,000 firefighters were assigned to the fires in Ruidoso, as other crews were busy responding to reports of new fires around the region. In all, more than 100 new fires — most of them small — were reported in New Mexico and Arizona over the last seven days, according to the multiagency Southwest Coordination Center based in Albuquerque.
Federal officials have been working to streamline their response to major wildfires, starting with the deployment of complex incident management teams when there are significant threats to homes and infrastructure. That was the case with the fires in Ruidoso, which has a permanent population of about 8,000 and can triple during the summer months when tourists flood in.
Nationwide, more than a dozen large uncontained fires are currently burning, according to the National Interagecy Fire Center. Aside from the South Fork and Salt fires in Ruidoso, complex incident management teams are assigned to blazes in Washington and Colorado.
