Firefighters worked into Wednesday night battling a large blaze in the Rio Grande bosque on both sides of the river near Coors and Montaño.
The fire had grown to 30 acres and was burning on both sides of the river at one point, south of the bridge, said Tom Ruiz, an Albuquerque Fire Rescue spokesman.
He said no structures were threatened and nobody was injured in the blaze. Ruiz did not give a cause of the fire.
Confusion ensued Wednesday night when an apparent miscommunication led the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office to order evacuations for all residents between Montaño and Candelaria.
The agency lifted the evacuation order soon after, but not before local television stations sent out alerts announcing them.
Ruiz said an Albuquerque police officer initially called in the fire around 5:45 p.m. after seeing smoke on the west side of the river. The wind-driven fire quickly grew and jumped to the east side, he said.
Ruiz said Bernalillo County firefighters had contained the smaller fire on the east side by 7:30 p.m. and AFR had stopped the forward momentum on the larger blaze on the west side.
Wednesday’s blaze came a little more than a week after police said a woman with mental illness lit 12 fires across 5 acres in the bosque south of the National Hispanic Cultural Center. Those fires, set on May 18, were quickly snuffed out by fire crews from several different agencies.
At the time, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller said the city wouldn’t be closing the bosque — a roughly 20-mile-long riparian forest — because it’s safer to have people around who can call in suspicious activity.
“What we want is more people using it, coming down here and calling right away if they see anything,” he told reporters after that incident.
