Third World New Mexico

Paranoia flourishes where government and institutions fail.

We are living through the coldest period anyone remembers, and our heat supply was cut off on Thursday morning, soon after temperatures reached -12 here. We won’t be up until after the Super Bowl in Dallas.

The gas company has done a particularly poor job of communicating, at least through its emergency website. It blames the lowered power supply in Texas which has lowered pressure in the gas lines. The websites of the local TV stations are no better; they simply redirect you the utility company site.

There’s some news somewhere. One hears particular areas like Taos are down because of equipment or line failures. We suspect the priorities of Texas suppliers eager to leave a good impression on the wealthy visitors and provide extra power to the media crews converging in Dallas Sunday.

We look at the pattern and see outages in remote areas around Albuquerque, nothing in Santa Fe County, and then here. The pueblos, whose lines come from here, went down three hours later than we did. The utility website indicated they had separate, probably more demanding, agreements with the company.

When I walked into the post office I was asked why did I think we were singled out.

Of course I had a ready answer. We won’t squawk like the wealthy in Santa Fe. I didn’t say the obvious, because this area is poor, Hispanic, and has a long tradition of crony politics where regulations are non-existent or not respected because they were written to help family and friends.

I know some lines are good and gas exists. Every time they do a test my furnace turns on, sometimes in the middle of the night. I’m at the end of a line, several miles from the city.

A couple years ago, the local utility spun off the natural gas business to New Mexico Gas, and both suddenly used Denver addresses for their bill payments. When companies are no longer local, they don’t respond to local interests. When companies are owned by investors, they tend to out source maintenance, rather than maintain their own crews.

The thing that makes us all angry is the utility company has decided it needs to bring in crews of relighters to go house to house to turn on our appliances for us. They’ve recruited people from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Colorado. We wonder about the quality of tradesmen who aren’t employed in those states fixing local problems caused by the cold.

As the postman said, give me my gas and I’ll handle the relighting.

The utility and the governor actually have responded to that particular distrust. They now list the utilities who are providing the technicians. Elsewhere, the police are accompanying the crews who have to test everything for safety before they put meters back in service.

In this area, they’re using the National Guard. I don’t know if that’s because there aren’t enough police, or if they’re no different than the rest of us, staying home keeping an eye on the water pipes, or if they’re so distrusted someone else needs to be used. The costs of a dysfunctional police force are hidden and high.

No one’s saying yet why we lost our gas service, or why we’re the last ones to have it restored. All we know is we will endure four days without heat when morning temperatures are between 4 and 10 degrees, and the areas that vote Republican are getting service before those that traditionally vote for Democrats.

Some, of course, don’t have problems. They live in areas where they still use propane. We only got gas here about 10 years ago. At least some of my neighbors still have wood stoves, although I’ve seen little smoke coming from their chimneys. Perhaps they exhausted their wood supplies in January.

I’m lucky. I have some decent space heaters and can keep the bedroom at about 68. The rest of the house is drafty and in the low 40's at night. I keep water tricking through the hot and cold water pipes in the farthest bathroom and don’t flush the toilet in the night. Even so, it got down to 39 inside last night and the fittings on the toilet are leaking.

The biggest problem is the lack of hot water. I’ve abandoned dishes for paper plates, and now dip my cooking utensils in the large pot I keep boiling when I’m in the kitchen. I can’t go to work again until I can take a shower.

A man I work with lives in a trailer with four children. He can’t afford a space heater, if any are still available after the cold at New Year’s. Friday his wife took two kids to the emergency room because they were already sick.

There won’t be any questions asked in the state capital. The governor not only supports the Tea Party philosophy, but is widely seen to be a daughter of the Texas gas and oil interests. There’s more likely to be investigations of poor construction techniques: many multi-million dollar homes in Las Campanas have broken water pipes despite having heat. Bottled water was sold out in my Santa Fe grocery Friday afternoon.