From the by M.D. Fletcher |
March 2011 |
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The sunny southwestern part of the United States has long attracted northern residents who pack up the old fifth-wheel each fall and haul south in order to escape the bitter cold of their frozen hometowns. They are traditionally referred to around here as "snow birds"; though the more politically hypersensitive among us insist we all use the term "winter visitors" so as not to somehow offend these transient folks (or, more importantly, their transient wallets). So about the time the NFL is kicking off, I25 and I10 are bumper to strapped-on bicycle full of high-dollar recreational rolling stock, some travelling gathered in convoys to provide mutual protection against renegade Indian raids and unscrupulous service station operators, and others striking out alone either expressing a strong sense of individuality or the inherent inability to get along with anybody, or maybe both. In any case, sooner or later, lots of them end up right here. Southern New Mexico has always been blessed with a wonderfully mild winter climate with very low humidity, plentiful sunshine and relatively high daytime temperatures. Deming and other towns along I10 offer many amenities catering to folks seeking to pass the winter without having to shovel snow off the roof or clear a path in the back yard for Fluffy to do his business. So here they are, looking for a round of golf in short pants and a tan on body parts otherwise necessarily clad in 3-layered thermal underwear. This year, however, the joke's on them. The last week of January and the first half of February saw temperatures that would be considered nippy at the North Pole. Anything that could freeze froze, and every hardware store in a 200-mile radius sold out of every valve, standpipe and stick of PVC they had and then they sold out of everything they could get trucked in. Just to make things more interesting, El Paso Electric started rolling blackouts in order to avoid over-peaking their transmission systems and then perhaps as a result, Gas Company of New Mexico actually stopped pumping natural gas to thousands of customers north of I40. It seems that ERCOT, which is the electric power pool in Texas, was woefully unprepared for the arctic cold front even though they |
presumably had access to some pretty sophisticated weather prediction models of their own and if not, they probably could have taken a peek at the nightly news weather cast just like the rest of us did. The resultant catastrophic failure of both the investor-owned electric and gas utilities has attracted the extraordinarily unwelcome attention of both state and Federal regulatory authorities as well as that of some very well-connected elected office-holders and at this point in time some highly-compensated gas and electric utility executives are reassessing their career choices while engaging in a well-publicized circular firing squad blaming first the chicken and then the egg and then the chicken again. It will be a while before all of this is sorted out but it appears that some Texas generating facilities paid insufficient attention to their own required and filed weatherization plans and allowed things like boiler and cooling tower feed pumps to freeze and fail, thereby taking themselves out of service and straining the transmission system as it tried unsuccessfully to move power from other generation sources to their established critical loads, like natural gas compressor stations and pipelines. Consequently, end users all over the northern part of New Mexico were without natural gas service for the better part of six days in sub-zero temperatures and southern New Mexico customers of El Paso Electric endured frequent rolling outages putting people out of work and businesses out of business. Columbus Electric members fared considerably better because both Columbus Electric and our power supplier Tri-State understand that we are all about service, not profit, and we take great care to insure we are there when you need us. This is not luck; in the coldest three weeks we had two outages and both were repaired and service restored within a combined total of 3 hours and 45 minutes. Our meters kept turning, no matter how many of those little kWh-sucking electric heaters you plugged in all over the house. Bless your heart. Remember that when you finish reading this and take a peek at your enclosed bill. As for our snow birds, we're sorry for the reminder of life back home. But the sun's out now, the course awaits and it's time to brown up. Bien Venidos! |
