ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – Crews spent Friday morning fixing broken power lines after dozens of reports of outages after Thursday night’s thunderstorm. At around 12:30 a.m., many New Mexicans woke up to the sound of thunder and the sight of fried powerlines “This was an especially violent lightning storm, with, with multiple, multiple lightning strikes which caused those widespread outages,” said PNM spokesperson Kai Porter.
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At the peak of the outage, over 8,000 customers were left without power, with one of the most widespread outages on Albuquerque’s Westside knocking out power for over 800 customers in one neighborhood. Over the course of the day, 30 linemen with PNM travelled around the metro to fix damage from the lightning strikes and trees crashing into power lines.
Porter described one operation on 12th Street and Indian School. “They’re going to have to replace this entire power pole; lightning damaged the top of that pole, so they have to dig a new hole, place the new pole next to the damaged line, and then transfer all of the wires over,” said Porter…