Food piled for evacuees from the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire at the disaster recovery center in Glorieta, N.M. on May 20, 2022. (Photo by Bright Quashie for Source NM)
When thousands of northern New Mexicans fled the biggest wildfire in state history beginning in April 2022, some of them returned home to a nasty smell emanating from their fridges or freezers: food that went bad amid weekslong power outages.
Food storage is harder in the rural, mountainous areas affected by the fire, where many put deer or elk they harvested in freezers in the garage and store months’ worth of food to last through the winter. Grocery stores are few and far between.
Food lost in the wildfire, which was caused by two botched prescribed burns on federal forest land, is one category of losses that the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire Claims Office is seeking to compensate victims for using a $3.95 billion fund approved by Congress.
To do that, the office is using a standardized calculator, which allows office employees to quickly figure out losses owed to a household by punching numbers into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet then applies a formula and spits out an amount for categories like firewood, evacuation costs, mileage, do-it-yourself repairs and more.
A copy of the spreadsheet obtained by Source New Mexico reveals the calculations and formulas the office devised as it seeks to fully compensate victims of the Forest Service’s mistake, choices it has often not explained to the public. As of Sept. 24, the office has paid $1.35 billion of the fund.
One such decision the spreadsheet reveals: Men are paid more than women for food losses, according to Source NM’s review.
A man aged 19 to 50 receives $104.70 for a week’s worth of lost food. A woman in the same age range gets $93, according to the calculator Source NM reviewed. Children get less than adults, as well: A girl between 12 and 13 gets $86.40; a boy between 12 and 13 gets $99.90.
Several wildfire survivors and advocates said they were unaware until recently that the office was paying men more than women for food lost in the fridge, and they thought the process was unfair or unnecessarily complicated.
Amy McFall lost all her food and her brand new fridge due to power outages at her home in Cañoncito de Manuelitas. She remembers several pounds of chicken and beef, a few pounds of frozen green chile and half a lime being among the culinary casualties. She said the claims office should not pay out based on assumptions about how much men and women eat.
“You can’t make a generalization like that. Sometimes, you know, you’ve got a woman who’s pregnant. They can eat like a horse,” she said. “My appetite is bigger than my husband.”
Janna Lopez, who leads a volunteer group for wildfire victims, said the office should just pay everyone a flat fee. It would be easier and fairer, she said.
“I think they should just have a standard rate,” she said. “I think it’s more fair if you have just one number.”
According to the claims office, the difference in payments is based on food plans prepared by the United States Department of Agriculture in February 2023. Those plans incorporate the expected “food needs per individual per week,” said spokesperson Danielle Stomberg.
The USDA has completed food plans since 1894 to “illustrate how a healthy diet can be achieved at various costs,” and they’ve been used by different state and federal agencies and the courts system, according to the USDA’s website. The plans base costs on a selection of foods that make up a healthy diet and the current market prices for those foods.
They also break food plans into three tiers based on a household’s ability to afford groceries, with the most expensive plans placed into the “liberal plan” tier. The claims office pays households based on the “liberal plan,” Stomberg noted. The “liberal plan” payment for a month’s worth of food for a man aged 19-50 has increased $8.60 between February 2023 and August 2024, according to the plans.
The office pays households for four weeks’ worth of food based on the age and gender of each recipient, and then pays a little extra for smaller households. A household with one man aged 19 to 50 gets $502.56. A household with one woman between ages 19 and 50 gets $446.40; a household with a man and woman between ages of 19 and 50 and two children between ages 6 and 8 gets $1,410.
The same formula applies to those who hosted evacuees: A host who put up a man aged 19 to 50 for 20 days will be paid $40.11 more than if they’d put up a woman in the same age range for the same amount of time.
Antonia Roybal-Mack, a lawyer representing hundreds of victims, said she thought the food payment system was “insane” when she first learned about it. She said most of her clients accept offers for food losses without much question, because they’re concerned about their other, more expensive losses, like lost trees, flood damage or the destruction of their homes.
Still, she said, the government has a Constitutional responsibility to treat people equally.
“The United States Constitution says that everybody’s equal under the law and needs to be treated equal by the government. And that’s really not what’s happening here,” she said. “The fact that they have a different rate for a man versus a woman– all those sorts of things are problematic.”
It’s not clear how much money has been paid via the standard calculator for food losses, and how much more has been paid to men than women. The office does not track those figures, Stomberg said.
Internal FEMA smoke map shows large area where northern NM residents need little to prove losses
Still, Stomberg defended the use of the calculators as one tool to simplify the claims process for thousands of victims with their own particular experiences of disaster and loss.
“Each claim is different, and the Standard Rate Calculators are one tool used to ease the burden on claimants,” she said.
The office has repeatedly pointed to the use of standard calculators as a reason they’ve been able to spend money quickly and efficiently.
Jay Mitchell, the new director of the claims office, said in a June letter to the Las Vegas Optic that more staff, better processes and the calculators “have increased the Claims Office’s output: Payments have nearly tripled since January, we’re issuing more Letters of Determination than ever before, and we’re processing payments faster than ever.”
Stomberg also encouraged claimants with questions about how much they’d be compensated to contact the office or their attorneys.
The calculator reveals other choices the office is making about how to compensate people. For example, payments for smoke damage range from $5.71 per square foot for a detached structure to $43.23 for places of worship. The per-square-foot payment for homes and apartments is $35.35. The office has paid nearly $400 million for smoke and ash damage payments, which is about 35% of the total paid out so far.
Also, residents who are seeking reimbursement for repairs they completed on their property can get paid by the hour, including for livestock handling, equipment repair, moving and storage, and debris removal. But the hourly pay they receive depends on which county they’re in: $18.97 an hour in Mora County, for example, versus $29.49 an hour in Santa Fe County.
The hourly wages are based on Census data, based on income data and median hourly wages, according to the calculator Source NM reviewed.
Yolanda Cruz, a community advocate who moderates a Facebook page for fellow survivors, provided the calculator to Source NM after getting it earlier this month from an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees the claims office. The official did not respond to a request for comment.
Stomberg said the calculator Source NM reviewed is “unofficial,” and that the office was “unable to validate those posted or hosted externally.” Only the calculators that FEMA maintains are “official,” she said, though she confirmed in response to a list of questions several particulars about how the calculator works.
Singleton Schreiber, a law firm representing more than 1,000 clients also provided earlier versions of the calculator, with minor differences, to Source New Mexico after getting them from the claims office.