Driven by drought and wind, the fire has destroyed hundreds of homes in the mountains northeast of Santa Fe since two burns controlled by the US Forest Service got out of control in April.
Tens of thousands of residents have evacuated Indo-Hispanic farming villages where poverty rates are twice the national level, upending fragile economies where residents cut firewood and harvest hay to survive.
“Biden and (Governor Michelle Lujan) Grisham have no plan or resources for our mountains that have been decimated,” said Ella Arellano, whose family lost hundreds of acres of forest around the village of Holman.
With more than 320,000 acres (129,500 hectares) of mountains blackened by the Hermits Peak Calf Canyon fire, communities are preparing for landslides, ash flows and flooding in areas where the extreme fire has given forest soils equivalent to the water absorption of asphalt.
Before he left for New Mexico, Mr Biden said he favored full federal funding to offset the cost of firefighting and recovery, but added that this had to be approved by Congress.
“I can’t initiate this on my own,” Biden said of the need for Congress to support full funding.
So far, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has disbursed more than $3 million to over 900 households. But FEMA’s maximum compensation, which is about $40,000 for destroyed homes, is in some cases not enough to cover the loss of farm equipment that burned down next to homes, and which, in a home, was worth probably hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The blaze is burning alongside another in southwestern New Mexico that is the second largest in state history, underscoring concerns about climate change intensifying fires that overwhelm firefighters and threaten to eventually destroy most forests in the southwestern United States.
Investigators found that a controlled USFS burn jumped out of bounds on April 6 to start the Hermits Peak fire. The Calf Canyon Fire was started by a burning of logs and branches by the USFS on April 19. The two fires merged on April 22.
The US Forest Service has since called for a temporary halt to the practice of controlled burns nationwide.