All 29 people who had been unaccounted for following a pair of wildfires that have killed two people are accounted for, the mayor of the Village of Ruidoso said Wednesday.
“All the folks that we had on the missing list is now at zero,” Mayor Lynn Crawford said at a community meeting about the South Fork and Salt fires.
Earlier this week, Crawford said more than two dozen people were unaccounted for after the two fires, which broke out last week and prompted the evacuation of Ruidoso, a town of around 7,500.
Two deaths have been linked to the fires, which together have burned more than 25,000 acres in and around Ruidoso, New Mexico State Police have said.
The fires broke out on the Mescalero Apache Reservation on June 17 and then burned east, fueled by high temperatures and wind. The cause of the fires is under investigation.
An estimated 1,400 structures have been affected, with about 500 homes believed to have been lost, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has said.
Urban search and rescue teams, including 20 dogs trained to detect human remains, have done secondary searches of damaged structures.
“I’m happy to report we did not find any human remains,” said Ernie Rhodes, the urban search and rescue operation chief on the fires for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Progress has been made in containing the fires, helped in part by better weather, which cooled fire activity.
By Thursday, the South Fork Fire was 69% contained and the Salt Fire was 66% contained, the New Mexico Forestry Division said in a daily update.
