Santa Fe National Forest officials say that the Laguna Fire, about four miles north of Gallina, has spread to more than 15,400 acres.
In a morning update, the forestry service announced that containment of the fire’s perimeter is at 40 percent.
The update came the day after officials announced that they had transferred command of the wildfire to the Southwest Area Incident Management July 14.
Members of that team explained the change in firefighting strategy at a community meeting last night in Gallina.
They acknowledged how daily reports about the data around fire completion or containment can be confusing.
At first the strategy was confine and contain, which included in this case, some burns implemented by crews themselves, as part of an overarching fire management strategy.
On July 11 the blaze was 87 percent completed.
The strategy changed a couple of days after the report on July 12, when firefighting crews, engines, and helitankers had to suppress a spot fire that was discovered that day outside containment lines near Laguna Peak.
Now, under the current full containment approach, the percentage was at 40 percent.
Jason Coyle, one of three operations section chiefs, explained the distinction between completion and containment percentages at last night’s meeting.
"There is a way that you measure progress when a fire is not a full suppression fire and they call that percent completion. Like the list that my wife creates for me every Saturday, if I look through that list and there's 10 items, and I get nine of them done. I'm 90% complete," Coyle said.
"That's kind of how that looks whenever you're doing it as a percent completed. Now, when it switches to a full suppression strategy, it is based on containment. So containment is the perimeter of the fire, the complete perimeter of the fire. Of that perimeter, what percentage do we have contained?"
A lightning strike ignited the fire on June 25.
The forest service has added 100 fire management crew members over the past few days to bring the number above 250.
Dozens of head of cattle are reported missing or injured, so another task at hand is getting antibiotics out to ranchers as quickly as possible.
One of the incident managers on the fire last night confirmed that two firefighters were at one point trapped in a potentially life-threatening situation.
Caleb Finch said the pair of crewmembers are fine and have rejoined the team.
Fire managers just deployed an unmanned aircraft system to assist firefighters in locating hot spots.
Smoky conditions were expected today in Gallina, Los Alamos, and Abiquiu , and less so in Santa Fe and Taos.
