As wildfire season ramps up in New Mexico, the state’s biggest electrical utility has rolled out a new system to alert residents before the utility shuts off power during periods of dangerous fire weather.
Last February, the Public Service Company of New Mexico announced it was considering “public safety power shutoffs” for the first time in areas of the state prone to wildfires. On days with particularly high winds or dry conditions, PNM said it would pre-emptively turn off electricity to prevent a live power line from igniting a wildfire.
Despite multiple warnings, PNM officials only initiated one such shutoff last year: On April 17, the utility briefly cut power to about 2,300 residents in the Las Vegas area.
This year, utility officials determined that they needed to improve how they communicate with the public about the possibility of pre-emptive power shutoffs in their area, PNM spokesperson Eric Chavez told Source NM.
The utility will now place six fire-prone areas in the state under different tiers of alert levels. Residents will be in a shutoff “advisory” two days before severe weather is forecasted and then a “watch” one day before the weather is expected to occur.
The utility asks residents in areas under those categories to prepare for extended outages.
The highest risk level — a “warning” — will turn red on a map the utility announced Wednesday. That will mean that the utility officials will quickly make a decision about shutting off power.
The six areas the utility has designated as high-fire-risk areas subject to shutoffs are in and around Ruidoso, Santa Fe, Silver City, Clayton, Las Vegas and the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque.
Chavez said PNM modeled the new system after National Weather Service weather alerts and is designed to provide residents ample and timely notification.
“We had a lot of opportunity to communicate with customers about public safety power shutoffs last year, and we learned a lot,” he said. “We learned when was too early and when was too late.”
Pre-emptive shutoffs are increasingly necessary, he said, amid increasingly dry and windy conditions to prevent catastrophic wildfires. Recent outlooks from the National Interagency Fire Center say most of Central and Eastern New Mexico will experience above-normal fire risks through March.
Also, the lack of snow this winter across the West raises the risk of early-season wildfire, according to scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Most of the West experienced record temperatures between November and January, and snow cover across the region is far below historic medians.
