Snow and a county-wide power outage shut down Española School District schools less than an hour into the school day Tuesday, to the excitement of students and the annoyance of teachers and parents.
Despite heavy snowfall early Tuesday morning, administrators opted against calling off classes for the day. Instead, bus drivers and parents dropped off students at school, only to find the power outage meant no lights, no bathrooms and, in some cases, no heat.
By 8:45 a.m., parents who had slogged through snow, slush and out-of-order stoplights to take their children to school were called back to retrieve them.
For Orlando Miera, it wasn’t a big deal returning to pick up his two sons from Española Elementary because he lives close by and Tuesday was his day off from work.
“To tell you the truth, I was kind of expecting it,” Miera said. “But I was surprised they didn’t announce a two-hour delay, I kept checking for it on the news.”
Behind the school, parent and Tewa teacher Faye Viarrial watched as a dozen students lobbed snowballs at each other while waiting for their school bus to come take them home.
Viarrial said the power was out and class had been cancelled at Fairview Elementary and Española middle school by the time school buses started arriving at Española Elementary, yet students were still unloaded from the buses to wait inside the dark school until the District announced class was cancelled.
“We’ve been here over an hour,” Viarrial said. “They should’ve been more alert.”
At Española Valley High School, students milled around in the hallways and in front of the school, waiting to be picked up. Principal Bruce Hopmeier said the power outage caused more trouble than the bad weather.
“We didn’t have anywhere to put our students. Some of our classes don’t have windows,” Hopmeier said. “We just had to kind of let them hang out and wait.”
And teachers were just plain annoyed they had to get out of bed for just one hour of work, high school math teacher Brian Every said.
Who’s in charge?
Superintendent David Cockerham said he or Assistant Superintendent Dorothy Sanchez decide when school will be cancelled due to bad weather, usually based on a recommendation from Transportation Director Sennie Quintana. Cockerham was at a teacher recruitment fair in Portales Tuesday morning and Sanchez, who was left in charge, did not return calls for comment.
Quintana chalked up the situation to bad timing. She said bus drivers usually call her around 4:30 a.m. each morning to report on weather and driving conditions, allowing her to decide by 5 a.m. whether to delay or cancel school for the day.
“It wasn’t really snowing hard at that time, it didn’t seem like there was a need to cancel,” Quintana said. “It was around six that it came down hard and it came down fast.”
By that time, many school buses had started picking up students already.
“At that point, we didn’t know if there’s going to be parents still at home, so we had to take them to school until we made sure we announced what was happening,” Quintana said.
Quintana said it was not until Jemez Mountains Electrical Cooperative announced a main power line was damaged and could not predict when the city grid would be back online that administrators decided to send students back home.
Power Outage Shuts Down Other Schools
The Jemez Mountain School District faced a similar situation, Superintendent Adan Delgado said. That District’s schools lost power after most students got to school and they were sent home around 10 a.m.
“It was not a very good situation,” Delgado said. “We were trying to make phone calls to parents, but a lot of homes have cordless phones and we couldn’t get through. We had to improvise and send some people out.”
The Chama School District cancelled school after a two-hour delay, and though Dulce didn’t get more than an inch or two of snow, power outages forced that District to dismiss students at 9:30 a.m.
Only the Mesa Vista School District held class Tuesday, though after two-hour delay, administrative assistant Audra Chacon said.
A storm Tuesday blanketed Rio Arriba County with snow and resulted in power outages from Pojoaque to Chama.
Jemez Mountains Electric Cooperative operations spokeswoman Judy Pippin said a Tri-State Generation and Transmission transformer at the Hernandez substation went down following a tree falling on a transmission line near the Chimayó substation.
“A tree came in contact with a power line,” Tri-State spokesman Jim Van Someren said. “The transformers automatically shut down.”
Van Someren said the outage occurred before 8 a.m., and by 9:40 a.m. workers began to restore the load.
Tri-State also serves the Northern Rio Arriba Electric Cooperative. Northern Executive Vice President Ben Leyba said power was out to about 4,000 meters between 7:30 a.m. and 10:15 a.m.
“Our whole system was out,” he said.
Leyba said three circuits went out initially — to Jemez, Northern and Kit Carson, though a Kit Carson spokeswoman said customers in Taos did not lose power.
Pippin said the Co-op had restored power to about 85 percent of the system by 12:55 p.m. when it went out once more.
“We lost everything again,” she said.
Jemez Finance Director Ernesto Gonzales said more than 25,000 meters were out during the peak of the outage between Pojoaque and Abiquiú and east in Chimayó, Velarde and Dixon, but by late Tuesday afternoon about 90 percent were up again. He said Truchas was the largest single area that was still out at that point.
Gonzales said the afternoon outage involved a similar equipment failure as the one in the morning, and workers had to “step up” the power to Co-op customers.
“We had to start from square one,” he said. “You can’t energize everyone at the same time.”
He said a combination of things, including the tree, bad weather and equipment failure, is to blame for the long outage. He said the Co-op should know more about the causes and complications later in the week.
Snow Fall
National Weather Service forecaster Mark Fettig said high winds in part caused variability in snow depth throughout Rio Arriba County.
He said a monitoring station about a mile south of Española measured five inches of snow, while a station about two miles southeast of the city only recorded two inches.
Fettig said Chama received nine inches, Tierra Amarilla got eight inches, and Truchas got between six and seven inches of snow. He said Abiquiú only got an inch-and-a-half, most of which melted by early Tuesday afternoon.
Chama Mayor Archie Vigil said the roads from Chama to Canjilon were a little rough, and the Village lost power Tuesday morning, but otherwise things were going smoothly.
Numerous government buildings shut down all or part of Tuesday, including the Chama Village Hall; the County offices in Tierra Amarilla; and the magistrate court, County Annex, city hall and municipal court in Española.
Fettig also said the County should prepare for more snowfall, possibly beginning Dec. 14.