POWER GOES OUT IN NEW MEXICO

By Richard Benke
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, March 19, 2000; 12:34 a.m. EST

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- A grass fire knocked out electricity to nearly 550,000 New Mexico customers for up to three hours 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.

The fire in the Four Corners area burned a transmission line, which caused two power plants to shut down, utility officials said. People lost power from anywhere from 40 minutes to three hours.

From Las Cruces to Gallup to Albuquerque to Santa Fe to Taos, power went out shortly before 5 p.m. It came back on, in phases from south to north, after about 6 p.m. By 8 p.m., the southern part of the state was fully restored and Albuquerque was more than 85 percent restored, utility

officials said. More than half of Santa Fe had its power restored. The outage began with several sharp surges and then darkness. Power came back on in about 15 minutes, then went out again 15 minutes later.

"We had a fire on one of our major transmission lines from the San Juan Generating Station (near Farmington) to Albuquerque," Grey said. "It was caused by a grass fire."

The fire caused the Four Corners Generating Station to "trip off line," Grey said. The cause of the 4:45 p.m. blaze was not determined.

All of Public Service Company of New Mexico's 360,000 customers statewide were affected by the blackout, she said.

The same fire caused another utility, Plains Electric, to lose power from its plant that serves several northern New Mexico communities. About 187,500 of Plains' 250,000 customers were blacked out, said spokeswoman Amy Miller, bringing the total affected to about 547,500.

The outage left traffic lights out, causing major snarls throughout Albuquerque. There was also a brief period of pandemonium at an Albuquerque mall.

"Everybody just started screaming," said Rebecca Lies, an employee at Stacy's Hallmark at the Coronado Center. "So I got the flashlight and I said, 'Just follow the light.'" She led 10 to 15 people outdoors.

Damian Sutton, assistant manager of Software Etc. at the Winrock mall, said all the stores had to close and roll down their security gates.

"We had to kick everybody out of the store," he said, including about 30 customers at an estimated cost in lost business of $2,000 to $3,000.

A bartender at the Radisson Hotel and Suites in Santa Fe was stuck in an elevator for about half an hour, desk clerk Morgan Sweet said.

El Paso, Texas, also had a citywide outage for about 30 minutes Saturday afternoon.

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