Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory Update: TA 16 on Fire

Just in the last hour or so the Concha fire has entered the LANL laboratory grounds: it looks like TA 16 and TA 28 are on fire as we speak, whereas TA 47, TA 11, TA 13, TA 08 and TA 09 are threatened with what looks like a very hot and wild fire. Because this area is kind of remote, it has been used for high explosive experiments and there are lots of potentially contaminated buildings and areas there. If I remember correctly some of the long term burning bunkers with unknown toxic legacy contents in 2000 were also in this general area and there may be more. Explosives storage, tritium facilities, x-ray equipment, experimental explosives, they are all located in this area and it is going up in flames as we speak. From here the fire has an open road towards the plutonium and administration facilities which presumably will be protected one way or another --but who knows? The laboratory is totally unwieldy and many people have become depressed by the lack of meaningful work and hence there are screw-ups abound. This is really terrible news: code purple I would say --very close to code black. I will let you know.