Today's News

While the weather may not be playing ball right now, the Los Alamos Hilltoppers are.
The season has begun for the Hilltopper baseball program. The team opened up its season this weekend with a doubleheader at Piedra Vista, its usual season-opening jaunt.
And this will hardly be the only road trip Los Alamos has in its immediate future.
“We’re definitely going to be road warriors, that’s for sure,” said Hilltopper manager Mike Gill.
Los Alamos has just one home game set for the month of March, that will be March 12 against Hope Christian.
Expectations are fairly high right now for the Hilltoppers, who have several returning veterans, lots of arms in the bullpen, and good power at the plate.
The Hilltoppers sport one of the dominant players in Class 4A, junior Jared Mang, who has been hitting No. 3 in the batting order since his eighth grade season.
Mang, who plays shortstop when he’s not pitching, had a big season in 2013. Mang hits for power, he hits for average and is a solid No. 1 in the Hilltoppers’ pitching rotation.
Gill, heading into this weekend’s doubleheader with the mighty Piedra Vista Panthers, said he wasn’t sure exactly who was going to throw this weekend, but was planning to get as many pitchers in as the games would allow him to.

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Slippery slope” is an all-purpose image. People use it to damn the havoc that others might set in motion.
Or it might depict the kind of “slippery slope” that lets the Earth’s tectonic plates slip along fault lines to start earthquakes.
Either image fits a public rift that is in the news out of Oklahoma. A current snarl in the quest for oil involves earthquake risk.
For many years, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) has helped produce more oil and gas in Oklahoma. More and more fracking produces more and more oil and gas.
In recent years, more small earthquakes also have occurred in Oklahoma.
Does the fracking trigger the small earthquakes? Statistically speaking, the answer appears to be yes.
Oklahoma always had Earth tremors, averaging about 50 per year, almost all of them minor. In the past three years, the state has had thousands of quakes, with more than 2,600 in 2013.
Most of the quakes were too slight to be felt, but a few damaged a few houses and one injured two people.
Actually, the data say that wells for disposing of wastewater from fracking may relate to quakes more than fracking itself. Lands around disposal wells have had jiggles following strong, distant earthquakes.

Kudos to community for supporting waffle breakfast

Boy Scout Troop 222 would like to thank the Pajarito Masonic Lodge No. 66 and the community for supporting their waffle breakfast on Feb. 1. The 17 boy scouts who participated in the event sold 325 tickets and worked a total of 73 hours cooking and serving breakfast. An additional 73 hours were also put in from other volunteers, parents, siblings and the Masonic Lodge members to make this fundraiser for summer camp and Philimont a huge success.
 

Don’t let this weekend’s weather fool you; there’s a high probability that there will be wildfires this year, and they may be coming early. Fire season in New Mexico usually starts in late March and ends in June, with the coming of the monsoons.
According to the National Weather Service’s New Mexico office in Albuquerque, this year’s snow season has been the worst on record for the past five years. According to meteorologist Brian Guyer, precipitation levels in the Jemez Basin have only been only at 20 percent the normal level of snow water. To put that perspective, snow water levels during the Las Conchas fire in 2011 were at 52 percent.
“Generally what we look for to slow the fire season is a good snowpack,” Guyer said. “Since we have not had hardly any snow in that region, that opens up the opportunity for the fire season to start earlier.”
While Guyer was glad to see this weekend’s weather system, he said that will not change the wildfire forecast much.
“There will be periodic weather systems that can delay the wildfire activity for a few days or perhaps a week, but if you don’t have regular, more timely weather systems moving across the area then you’re just going to continue to have deteriorating conditions.”