Winds whip east-central New Mexico

Powerful winds sweeping through east-central New Mexico on Thursday led officials to close some schools and businesses, consider precautionary power shutoffs and even cancel an annual basketball game between lawmakers.

The culprit: consistent wind between 30-40 mph and gusts up to 65 mph, which almost triggered a temporary public safety power shutoff in the East Mountains by the Public Service Company of New Mexico.

Michael Mertz, senior vice president of New Mexico operations for PNM, said earlier in the day that the company would prepare to implement public safety power shutoffs as a precautionary measure to prevent potential wildfires from downed power lines, but wind intensity was lower than forecasted and PNM did not implement the safety measure.

This would have been the first time PNM has issued a public safety power shutoff, according to Mertz.

“We believe that the safety of our community is at risk, and we must do our part to avoid the type of devastation that we’ve seen from wildfires firsthand in our state and other parts of the country,” Mertz said. “Our number one priority is, and always will be, to return every customer to service with safe and reliable power as quickly as possible.”

PNM warned that although they do not plan to implement any power shutdowns, residents may experience scattered outages throughout the state due to high winds.

The power company also announced it preemptively disabled the grid system’s automatic setting, which means if an outage occurs, power will not turn back on in affected areas until the situation has been deemed safe.

Weather woes won’t stop with wind, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Carter Greulich.

“We switch over very quickly to the potential for impactful winter weather for actually a decent portion of the state,” Greulich said. “We have anywhere from around 6 to 12 inches of snow forecast for the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and up to 6 inches on those immediately adjacent east slopes, and then also in some of the mountains... Snowfall totals above 6 inches in those areas.”

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service advised residents if they are driving and experience high winds to pull over on the side of the road.

The city of Albuquerque issued an air quality shutdown notice on Thursday, alerting contractors and businesses that generate dust to shut down immediately due to wind speeds, along with a health alert due to blowing dust. The Solid Waste Management Department also warned residents that the department would not pick up trash bins knocked over by the wind and all bins must be upright.

What has been affected?

East Mountain schools — A. Montoya Elementary, San Antonito Elementary and Roosevelt Middle School — are on a two-hour delay Friday due to the windy weather.

The Legislature canceled, for now, its annual House vs. Senate basketball game, Hoops4Hope — a fundraiser to support cancer patients — when Santa Fe Indian School, where the game was set to be held, closed early.

The cancellation of the game prompted good-natured ribbing on the Senate floor.

“You forfeited, because you were afraid of a little bit of wind in a closed facility,” said Sen. George Muñoz, D-Gallup, directing his comments toward the state House.