Downtown Los Alamos Power Outage Affects 436 Customers; Service Restored

Approximately 436 electric customers in downtown Los Alamos and east toward the Pajarito Cliffs site lost power March 6, Los Alamos County posted on its news feed. The county later posted an update that included the truncated line "power had been restored to af" in the public notice; the follow-up post did not appear to include a complete restoration sentence in the excerpt provided to the public.

A County news release republished by the county and distributed to local outlets said, "Power has been restored to all Community Services Department (CSD) facilities affected by the recent power outage." The release states, "As of 10:15 a.m., the following facilities have resumed regular operations:" but the excerpt provided did not include the full list. The Betty Ehart Senior Center and White Rock Senior Center were explicitly reported as closed for the day due to snow conditions.

The county release detailed impacts to the Aquatic Center: "the main pool at the Aquatic Center remains closed due to pump issues caused by the prolonged power outage. As a result, all scheduled activities, classes, and events in the main pool are canceled until further notice. However, the Therapy Pool is open and available for public use." The county provided a direct contact for questions at the Aquatic Center: (505) 662-8170.

Local reporting has placed the March 6 outage in a cluster of mid-March service problems that also involved communications blackouts and fiber cuts. Boomtown Los Alamos reported contractors severed another Lumen Technologies fiber optic line while working on the NM 4 water transmission line replacement project, and described the situation as a "second blackout in a week." That account noted two outage locations were about 1,000 feet apart while crews worked on the same construction project, but the supplied texts do not explicitly state the March 6 electrical outage was caused by the fiber work.

County broadband officials and emergency planners have framed redundancy as the long-term fix. Jerry Smith, broadband manager for Los Alamos County, said, "The solution is not to never cut the lines. The solution is to have redundancy." Boomtown reported the Los Alamos Community Broadband Network project is progressing, including plans for a separate fiber path in partnership with San Ildefonso Pueblo and an expectation that the first customers will have access "by the end of the year" in the project summary.

Public-safety communications remain layered, county sources told local reporters. "We utilize ham radio operators in the event of an emergency. We also have a backup conventional system, UHF and VHF," Simpson said, adding, "Our radios are currently fine. So public safety is not an issue as far as communication with each other." The same account included a garbled reference to deploying "cell on wheels%2C,day%20and%20in%20restricted%20spaces.)" units in large-scale emergencies in the supplied excerpt.

For historical context, an outage-aggregator snapshot dated Aug 06, 2025 showed no reported outages in Los Alamos County at that time (Customers Tracked: 96; Customers Out: 0), but that snapshot is many months earlier than the March 6 incident and is not contemporaneous. The county has said it will update its Emergency Operations Plan communication annex once new broadband infrastructure is in place to better address commercial-service outages; the Community Broadband Network and the promised physical redundancy with San Ildefonso Pueblo are the county's primary planned mitigations.