The most customers without power at any given time was about 10,000, beating the 9,300 in Archuleta County who were left in the dark in December 2007, agency spokeswoman Indiana Reed said.

In December 2008, a five-day outage left 5,000 customers in La Plata County without electricity.

In addition to the 13,000 customers who lost power, many others endured ”the blinks,” brief breaks in service.

LPEA had 12 crews in the field at a given time, Reed said.

The hardest hit areas in La Plata County were Crestview, the area around Fort Lewis College, the Bayfield/Gem Village area and Forest Lakes.

Power was out for an hour in the area around the Durango-La Plata County Airport, but was quickly restored.

In Archuleta County, about 2,000 customers in neighborhoods served by the Ponderosa substation were the most affected.

Crews can work 16 hours per LPEA policy, Reed said. If outages extend into the night, crews could be rotated, she said.

Some teams have been on the job since 4 a.m. Tuesday, she said.

In a pinch, LPEA has received help from Empire Electric in Cortez, Reed said. But she didn’t know if Montezuma County was hit as hard Tuesday as La Plata and Archuleta counties.

Larger outages were addressed first. The highest number of customers were in the Gem Village/Bayfield area (791), Forest Lakes (188) the East Eighth Avenue/College Drive area (175).

Outages can occur for several reasons, Reed said. A branch or a tree can fall across a power line, the weight of snow alone can bring down a line or the accumulation of snow on a power pole crossarm can break the arm, taking down a power line.

daler@durangoherald.com