Kit Carson Electric exemplified good communication during windstorm

Every organization gets criticized, but it’s the rare one that responds with institutional change to the criticism it receives. A little over a year ago, on Dec. 15, 2021, Kit Carson Electric Cooperative was faced with an extraordinary high wind event, dubbed a “snow squall,” which even longtime residents of our region had never even heard of. Tree branches broke under heavy snow, pulling down power lines on the electric grid. In the most extreme cases, winds that gusted as high as 100 miles per hour snapped power poles in half. Over the course of a few hours, the storm knocked out power for roughly 4,000 homes in Taos County, which declared a state of emergency. Another snowstorm on New Year’s cut power to another 3,000 to 3,500 homes. More outages followed in the first week of January. In terms of outages, it was one of the worst years in the public utility’s history, with twice the number of major outages compared to the previous year. Many called the integrity of Kit Carson’s infrastructure into question, but the more resounding complaint we heard from residents was that many found it difficult to get clear, direct, timely answers from the public utility about when their power would be restored.

Last week’s wind and ice storm, although milder than 2021’s, saw a very different response from Kit Carson, putting on clear display the policy changes its CEO, Luis Reyes, has been working on following the 2021 disaster.

Despite winds that reached up to around 80 miles per hour the afternoon and evening of Feb. 23, no major outages were reported on KCEC’s electric grid. Minor outages, most of which affected only single households, numbered less than 10. In addition, no internet or propane outages were reported.

Liam Easley delves into greater detail regarding Kit Carson’s on-the-ground response (along with that of our other public safety agencies) and its infrastructure in his front page story this week. The story found that KCEC’s service area fared much better than others in terms of outages reported. But we were maybe most impressed by how well KCEC communicated during the storm.

Before the weather arrived, KCEC issued an alert on its text messaging service to members, warning of the severe wind advisory forecast by the National Weather Service, followed by another message, notifying members where it was staging crews to respond to outages around the county and stating it would increase staffing at its headquarters to respond to increased call volume. This was an excellent use of this messaging service; our only feedback here would be that Kit Carson reserve this text service for emergencies only, as it’s been used for less-urgent notifications as well, such as the utility’s signing a contract extension with its new power provider, Guzman

Energy. If you overuse said system, customers who might need it during an emergency like last week might begin to ignore it when a KCEC text comes through.

What some of our readers might not know is that Reyes himself also sent emails throughout the day providing detailed updates to our newspaper and public officials in the storm’s path, information that we then relayed on taosnews.com through our reporting.

We know we join many of you in expressing our gratitude for how smoothly last week’s severe weather was handled — by all of our public safety agencies and their employees — and we particularly commend the leader of one of our most critical public utilities for listening to feedback and responding with change we all benefit from.

Next, we hope KCEC will continue to assess vulnerabilities in its infrastructure, particularly where it comes to areas at the greatest risk for wildfire.