Fire Cuts Power to Much of New Mexico

A fire in a transmission line knocked out electricity across much of New Mexico for more than an hour Saturday, snarling traffic in Albuquerque, shutting down radio and television stations and forcing the state high school basketball tournament to halt play.

Candy Hurst, an adoption supervisor with the state Department of Children, Youth and Families, was in her downtown Albuquerque office building during the blackout.

“I had to use my video camera light to get down seven flights of stairs,” she said.

From Las Cruces to Gallup to Albuquerque to Santa Fe to Taos, power went out shortly before 5 p.m. It started coming back online after about 6 p.m. By 8 p.m., the southern part of the state was fully restored and Albuquerque was more than 85% restored, utility officials said. More than half of Santa Fe was also back online.

Power to hospitals was fully restored, Public Service Co. of New Mexico spokeswoman Julie Grey said.

“We had a fire on one of our major transmission lines,” Grey said.

The fire caused the Four Corners Generating Station to “trip offline,” she said. That power plant is operated by Arizona Public Service. The cause of the 4:45 p.m. blaze was not immediately determined.

All of PNM’s 360,000 customers statewide were affected by the blackout, Grey said.

Traffic lights went out, causing major snarls all over Albuquerque.

Another utility, Plains Electric, reported that one of its stations also tripped off, which affected the Cimarron-Springer corridor as well as Taos and several other northern New Mexico communities.

Radio and television stations and newspaper newsrooms in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, Los Alamos and Socorro were affected by the blackout.

One exception was radio station KTAO in Taos.

“We’re on the air at the moment because we’re solar-powered,” said Sara Allen, KTAO’s chief engineer.

The Associated Press bureau in Albuquerque was in the dark, off and on, for nearly two hours.

People with battery-powered television sets were able to watch the NCAA basketball tournament. The state high school tournament, however, had to be halted when the lights went out in the Pan American Center in Las Cruces in southern New Mexico. The game was completed after about an hour’s delay.

Raymond Ko, owner of the Ko Palace restaurant in Albuquerque, stayed open--by candlelight.