By State › New Mexico

New Mexico: Overview

Download all of New Mexico as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in New Mexico exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under New Mexico go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire: a government-started disaster

In April 2022, a U.S. Forest Service controlled burn escaped its boundaries in high winds and merged with a second fire to become the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history, burning 341,471 acres across San Miguel, Mora, and Taos counties before it was fully contained in August. Like Ohio’s East Palestine train derailment covered on this site, this is a disaster with an identifiable human and institutional cause, not a purely natural event, and Congress ultimately allocated nearly $4 billion to compensate victims because the government itself was responsible for the ignition. See the Risks page for the full data.

The Rio Grande Compact: a 13-year interstate water fight, just settled

New Mexico shares the Rio Grande with Texas and Colorado under a 1938 interstate compact, and Texas sued New Mexico in 2013 alleging that New Mexico’s groundwater pumping was siphoning off water the compact promised to Texas. That lawsuit ran for 13 years before the U.S. Supreme Court approved a settlement in May 2026, splitting irrigation water 57-43 in New Mexico’s favor while requiring New Mexico to cut its annual groundwater use by 18,200 acre-feet over the next decade. This is a live example of exactly the kind of interstate water conflict Georgia’s page covers for the ACF/ACT river basins, resolved just months before this page was written. See the Risks page for the full data.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in New Mexico: wildfire risk here isn’t limited to naturally ignited fires, so the same defensible-space and evacuation planning this manual recommends for California and Oregon applies just as much to a fire that starts from a government-managed burn; and if your household relies on groundwater in the Rio Grande basin, the newly mandated pumping cuts are worth tracking directly rather than assuming water availability stays as it has been.

Sources