7/1/2011 Wildfire distance to toxic (nuclear and otherwise) waste dumps on Los Alamos National Lab grounds

Date: 7/1/2011

Below is the MDA (Materials Disposal Areas) map from the Los Alamos Study Group website. For a detailed description of each MDA click on the map:

To visit this map page directly click here

The USDA Forest Service provides wildfire detection data which can be downloaded and viewed in Google Maps. In order to see the distance between the Las Conchas wildfire to the nuclear (or chemical/explosive) waste dump sites on the grounds of the Los Alamos National Lab I overlaid the inverted image of the above map on top of the Google Map with the fire detections data from the USDA Forest Service. Since the overlaid image is inverted (for better clarity) the original MDA map colors are transformed from red=>blue, green=>red, black=>white etc.

Here is the composite map, showing only detections 0-6 hours old (darker red) or 6-12 hours old (lighter red):

The data set I used was for GOES and obtained by clicking the "Current" link next to "Fire Detections:".

There is a light red square (6-12 hour old detection) just about touching the biggest blue blob (biggest red blob from the original Los Alamos Study Group Map).

Following is the Technical Area map from Los Alamos Study Group:

To visit this map page directly click here

I did a similar overlay of the technical areas on top of the 0-6 hour and 0-12 hour fire detections:

The light red square (6-12 hour old detection) is right on the North edge of TA-82, TA-03 and TA-43.

Finally here is the composite that combines the MDA (Material Disposal Areas) map with the Technical Areas map: