Lessons learned in aftermath of natural-gas crisis

From the Santa Fe New Mexican.com - The snowstorm that blew through New Mexico with an arctic blast in the first week of February, leaving an estimated 32,000 homes and businesses without natural gas for several days, tested the ability of an interstate utility system — and found it wanting. Frozen gas well heads, ruptured waterlines and freezing homes stretched 2,000 miles across at least 16 states from New Mexico and Texas northeast to Connecticut and Illinois. The storm took down power utility companies in Texas and disrupted production, ultimately affecting the ability of natural-gas processing plants to pack enough of the hydrocarbon into interstate pipelines for the thousands of people who needed it. The temperatures stayed below freezing for 80 to 90 hours straight from Feb. 1 to Feb. 4 in Northern New Mexico, according to the National Weather Service. New Mexicans finally have heat and hot water again. But they still have a lot of questions about what happened and, more importantly, why it took so long to fix. Why, in one of the largest natural-gas-producing states in the nation, where customers use less than a 10th of the gas produced, were so many people cut off from the resource for so long? Read more

Lessons learned in aftermath of natural-gas crisis