Emergency managers in Santa Fe say they were ready for the worst when record low temperatures precipitated a gas crisis in Northern New Mexico the first week in February.

But at least one potential problem emerged: Santa Fe does not have many large buildings that do not rely on natural gas for heat and could serve as overnight shelters.

When mercury began dropping and rural communities started losing natural-gas service, City Emergency Management Director Joyce Purley was making phone calls.

Purley said she was surprised to learn that only the Santa Fe Community College and the Santa Fe Place shopping mall could fit the bill.

But, while the mall was willing to allow people to hang out during business hours to escape the cold, management was not keen on the idea of being an overnight shelter, Purley said.

"There were only two places where their heat did not run off natural gas. That was crazy," she said. "We are hoping that we can find more, especially now that things have died down."

Beth Riebschlager, general manager at Santa Fe Place, said mall officials had agreed that the shopping center could be identified as a daytime "warming shelter" for those who were without heat. The mall did experience more traffic, she said. "We saw more people coming in on Thursday (Feb. 3) to get warm. Our benches and food court and the settees we have around the mall ... we were seeing those fill up," she said.

Then, water pipes that serve the shopping center burst and left the facility without water toward the end of the day. The mall closed at 5 p.m. instead of 9 p.m., its normal closing time.

Meanwhile, at the Santa Fe County Regional Emergency Dispatch Center, Martin Vigil, director for the county's emergency management, was in touch with other emergency responders.

Vigil had heard a report from the National Weather Service about the forthcoming cold weather during a conference call, where officials said the region would get "record-low, arctic-type air flows." So Vigil began to work on preparing for the frigid temperatures before the gas shortage really started, he said.

Vigil was in contact with the community college in the event that it became necessary to open an overnight shelter there. The school, which can accommodate several hundred people, has long been a part of emergency-planning operations, he said, and has trained staff ready to respond.

He had a request in with the American Red Cross for hundreds of cots that would have come from out of state, and The Food Depot was on notice to provide food that could be prepared in the college kitchen, he said.

"Clearly, one of the first things that I did was I called Joyce Purley. What we were concerned about was if we had a large geographical section that was out of heat, how would we implement our emergency operations plan," he said.

Fortunately for Santa Fe, the need for those services didn't materialize because the county was largely spared from the gas cut-offs. Area firefighters did, however, respond to fires caused by people using fireplaces for heat and flame torches to thaw frozen pipes.

Statewide, Vigil said, only about 40 people reported to an established emergency shelter.

"One of the really important things that I would like to share with the community is just how resilient and self-reliant the citizens of Santa Fe County are," he said. "We knew people were out of gas ... yet people kind of just hunkered down. They relied on their families or they used their own disaster supplies."

New Mexico Gas Co. estimates that 32,000 homes and businesses in the state were without natural gas as a result of system failures during a cold snap. Especially hard hit were the cities of Española and Taos, where the company shut off gas lines.

Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.