'I hope they can rebuild.' McBride Fire caused millions in damages as fire raged in Ruidoso
Ruidoso family mourns loss of historic home while looks to be rebuild after being torched by wildfire
Adrian Hedden
- Among the wreckage was home built by renowned architect
- 207 structures were burned by wildfire, causing up to $20 million in damages
- McBride Fire 90 percent contained after a week of destruction
Mark French watched from thousands of miles away as his childhood home burned to the ground.
It was the first built on McBride Drive in Ruidoso in 1977 designed by French’s father, renowned local architect Stanley “Jim” French.
The home sported an 8-foot waterfall in the entryway and provided a picturesque upbringing for French and his six brothers and sisters in the mountain village, until it was sold by the family in 1990s and subsequently used as a high-end vacation rental.
That all came to end last week when the former French home was counted among more than 200 structures destroyed in the devastating McBride Fire – a wildfire that burned more 6,000 acres in the scenic, rural locale.
It extended across Gavilan Canyon, coming perilously close to Ruidoso Middle School which was also evacuated.
The fire killed two residents, and led to multiple evacuations as fire crews, volunteers and fearful residents struggled to fight the blaze amid dire drought conditions, high desert winds and thousands of trees-worth of fuel.
At his home in Palm Springs, California, where French retired to last year, he said he was terrified to read the morning news.
Every day the fire burned, French combed local media reports for news he didn’t want to read.
And when he saw his beloved former home, now reduced to ashes, emblazoned on the front page of the Ruidoso News, French said it was the destruction of his own heritage.
All that remained, ironically, was a large fireplace still standing along with a fireproof safe French’s dad built for just such a possibility.
“The devastation is beyond the pale in how it affects families,” he said. “I’m far removed from Ruidoso now, but when I saw McBride Drive and the fire, I was scared to open the newspaper. It was so sad to see the legacy our family completely destroyed.”
“We’re not all by ourselves, it’s also the 200 families. I hope those people can rebuild.”
200 homes. $20 million in damages
In total, fire officials reported as of Wednesday there were 207 primary structures – mostly homes –decimated in the blaze.
About $20.8 million in property damages were assessed throughout the county due to the McBride Fire, according to preliminary reports from the Lincoln County assessor’s office.
That meant an estimated $140,000 in tax losses throughout the county.
In the Village of Ruidoso alone, the fire caused $5.5 million in damages, per the report, and about $55,000 in loss to the village’s tax base.
Lincoln County Assessor Walter Hill during a Tuesday meeting said his office was granted clearance and began conducting onsite inspections Wednesday of all properties burned in the fire for a more accurate report expected in the coming weeks.
He did not yet have an estimate for the damage caused by the nearby Nogal Fire which grew to more than 400 acres, and was 77 percent contained as of Wednesday after destroying an estimated six structures.
Hill said the tax loss would likely increase as land values could decline to compensate for fire damage.
“We will provide a thorough inspection of all the properties that have burned in the two fires,” he said. “I’d like to personally say thank you to all the firefighters, first responders, police officers, volunteers, anyone who responded to the fire. It was a job well done.”
County Treasurer Beverly Calaway said the county was planning a sale of tax-delinquent properties in May, many of which were likely burned in the fire.
That could mean the county taking another financial hit as value of the properties for sale was likely to drop. Calaway said there could be up to 65 properties planned for the sale impacted by the blaze.
“This McBride Fire has affected some of the properties in the tax sale,” she said. “We’ll have to get with the Property Tax Division in Santa Fe to see how they’re going to handle that.”
The fire also devastated the housing market in Ruidoso, said Damon Maddox, president of the New Mexico Association Realtors.
He said there were 182 homes on the market in Lincoln County at the end of March, meaning if just half of the 207 structures torched by the McBride Fire were homes it would have destroyed more than half of those available for displaced owners.
Maddox said it could take years to rebuild.
"It's going to ruin the local economy for a few years," he said "It could take two to three years to back to normal."
Maddox said New Mexico's housing market was already struggling with shortages, a problem worsened by destructive events like wildfires.
"We're seeing home prices go up because we're short on available houses," he said. "Those families that were displaced will have to rent, so rental prices will go up as well."
Wildfires are one of several extreme weather events believed to be brought on by climate change, but Maddox said many homeowners continue to risk it and move to places of elevated threat.
"We see people all over the country living in places that face natural disasters. It doesn't deter everyone," he said. "Ruidoso is a beautiful part of the state. The hope is it doesn't deter people.
"That's our natural disaster. The fires. When we get these dry winters, our springs can be flammable."
There was some hope in a recent, nationwide increase in home construction of about 6 percent, Maddox said, as the U.S. economy recovers from labor shortages and supply-chain disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Hopefully, that will trickle down to Ruidoso, and people can start rebuilding," he said.
‘You could feel the heat.’
Manny Guardiola took it personally when the village he called home throughout all the major landmarks of adolescence went up in flames.
He graduated from Ruidoso High School and moved to Las Cruces in 2016 to work for Sedona Contracting, a commercial construction company.
Guardiola was building a second home on Eagle Creek when the flames arrived.
He already had experience fighting fires with the U.S. Forest Service, registering equipment that could be used as back up in an emergency.
His company, for which he serves as project manager, already had two workers at the village, and Guardiola quickly made the two-hour drive and joined them.
The men, after partnering with another contractor in the area, leapt into action.
They sprayed down homes, hoping to wet the wood and prevent them from burning while also beating down the fire.
They worked until about 3 a.m. on Tuesday, rested, and resumed their efforts at 6:30 a.m. the next day.
Firefighters arrived at Eagle Creek that afternoon and Guardiola’s crew began feeding them water to battle the blaze.
“We grabbed our equipment, our guys, and just started fighting fires,” he said. “It was surreal. It was scary. The house up the street was burning down. There were flames surrounding other homes. There was smoke everywhere.
“Flames were jumping the road. You could feel the heat.”
Such a massive scale of destruction was simply unheard of in Ruidoso when Guardiola was growing up in the 1980s.
He’s watched as winters grew shorter, less snow accumulating in the mountains once renowned for skiing, and drought set in.
Lincoln County was suffering some of the worst drought conditions in New Mexico when the McBride ignited April 12, per the latest data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.
It's a dangerous reality, Guardiola said, for residents of his hometown living near heavy forest vegetation which creates a natural tinderbox susceptible to fire because of dry, arid conditions.
“It’s horribly precarious. We don’t get enough snow,” he said. “When I was a kid, this was unheard of. The snow used to pile up on Sudderth (Drive), and you couldn’t see the traffic. That doesn’t happen today.
“The windstorm was unprecedented,” he continued regarding the day the fire hit. “It was kind of the perfect storm.”
‘A sense of finality.’
A combination of dried plants to fuel the fire, high winds to stoke the flames and a severe lack of moisture in the air and soil was what robbed the French family of the home that exemplified their legacy.
Stanley French first moved the family of nine to Ruidoso in 1975 after he arrived a year earlier.
He was sent to design the Inn of the Mountain Gods, the casino and resort owned by the Mescalero Apache Tribe.
To house his wife, eight kids, Stanley McBride designed a cutting-edge home amid the Sacramento Mountains.
It was solar-power in two ways – a rarity in the 1970s – using solar panels on the roof and a system of rocks to gather heat from the sun that shown through large windows in the ceiling.
That 8-foot waterfall also collected heat and reduced the power load required for the home.
Sustainability was built-in with a greenhouse on the back of the property to grow vegetables for the family.
All the children help build it.
Bob French, today living in Minneapolis as a naval architect, remembered designing and casting tiles, installing them along the edge of an indoor hot tub.
“It was very unique,” Bob French said. “All of us had a hand in building it.”
Like his brother Mark, Bob also found out about his father’s creation when he saw the photos of the destroyed but still-familiar home originating from a newspaper about 1,200 miles away.
“I was so shocked. I felt a real moment of finality,” he said. “It was my worst fear when I did that internet search, and there was our house front-and-center. We built it at a very impressionable age. It was my first job. It was where I learned the basics of home building.
“We had such a personal connection to it.”
Working on the house became a summer job, he said, and its completion culminated his father’s career that spanned two states and included an array of landmarks in both southern California and south-central New Mexico.
Aside from the casino that would serve as a main economic driver and destination for Ruidoso, Stanley French designed the Kokopeli Golf Course in the village, along with its convention center, numerous high-end homes and the village’s official offices.
In San Diego, his work can be seen at seafood restaurant Tom Ham’s Lighthouse and he helped design an extension of Balboa Stadium, where the San Diego Chargers defeated the Boston Patriots for the American League Championship in 1964.
“The Inn of the Mountain Gods was such a big project that he moved to Ruidoso,” Bob French said. “And he fell in with it and quit his job.”
That led to Stanley French starting his own company Stanley J. Architecture in Ruidoso, where we worked for the rest of his career.
Stanley French died in 20, but was remembered by his sons as “the fastest draw in the West” for his ability to outpace computer aided design machines using only a pencil.
Adrian Hedden can be reached at 575-628-5516, achedden@currentargus.com or @AdrianHedden on Twitter.