The Northern New Mexico region is still reeling from a powerful winter storm that has dumped record snowfall and left as many as 50,000 customers at the peak, without power.
The Public Service Company of New Mexico - PNM - said early this morning that they’d restored electricity to 43 thousand of those affected customers while about 8,000 customers are still waiting, including more than 1500 in La Cienega and 3000 in Albuquerque.
But now there’s reports of new outages in the Santa Fe area including our station home, here on the campus of Santa Fe Community College and awaiting an update from PNM.
Meteorologist Nicholas Portelli of the National Weather Service in Albuquerque says many snowfall records are likely to get broken, once official numbers are in.
“For the eastern slope of the Sangres for areas including, Rociada and Las Vegas. These would be historic numbers: 30 inches in three days."
Las Vegas received two feet of snow in the past 24 hours for a total of 36 inches. In Santa Fe, the past 24 hours brought another 4 inches or so to the central areas and as much as 11 inches to the foothills. Ten more inches fell in Raton in the past day.
Schools are closed for a second day in Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and other Northern New Mexican communities.
Santa Fe city offices are open while in Santa Fe County, administrative offices are opening late and senior centers are closed due to the storm aftermath.
We may see some scattered snow showers today and as much as another 1-2 inches around Santa Fe.
Portelli told KSFR that the snow piles will soon shrink but more slowly than usual, especially for this time of year.
"The storm exits the region Saturday morning and we're going to have a brief period of warming early next week."
"So temperatures should start to rebound above freezing, which will cause the snow to start melting, but it may be a couple days because of the amount of snowfall that the region has had. It'll remain cold enough for the snow to persist for a couple days.
We’ll have a high temperature today of about 31 degrees. During the overnight hours it’ll be cloudy with a low of about 21.
On Saturday it’ll be sunny with a high in the mid-30s.
