BY ELLEN WALTON
Los Alamos
The residents of the County of Los Alamos were cut off from each other and the outside world yet again on March 17, 2025. These random outages affected safety, business, community, and feeling of well-being; and they were preventable. One thing I learned working theater productions in New York was to always have a back-up plan for power and communication. The show can’t go on without these things. Is the community of Los Alamos more expendable than a theater production?
The knowns in this utility project on State Road 4 were that the communication lines were buried, they did not have a tracer line to help locate them and they were brittle due to age. Given that information, it was highly likely the lines would be cut accidentally during the construction. The County’s emergency management had already determined vulnerability due to the single buried line in its 2024 Emergency Operations Plan, and testing out that vulnerability by cutting the lines randomly has proved disastrous.
Beyond what this is costing the County and communications providers is the cost to every resident and business in money and peace of mind. Financially, we do not have an estimate of the losses, only excuses as to who is not to blame for them.
Would it have not been wiser to assume lines would be damaged and to schedule the outages needed to install new communications lines or even temporary lines along the route with a proper emergency plan in place? Instead, the old brittle lines are repaired at every accidental break that happens, and we are left without essential services. The saving of a few dollars is coming at a very high price, perhaps even the price of someone’s life if the breaks keep happening in this manner.
A third time is not the charm, and the stakes are too high to just keep plowing into the lines at random. It would be better to change course and create a proper plan than to risk further harm to the community. Please, Los Alamos County DPU, put community safety and well-being first; don’t make us the victims of poor planning a third time.