ALCALDE — The Alcalde Community Center was crowded Tuesday afternoon with dozens of uniformed, but slightly disheveled, Albuquerque city police officers and a handful of New Mexico National Guardsmen.

They had spent a long night helping hundreds of other people — some professionals and some volunteers — turn natural-gas meters back on and relight pilots on gas heaters in Rio Arriba County. Hundreds of Rio Arriba and Taos county residents in towns and scattered villages entered their sixth day without gas service on Tuesday.

New Mexico Gas Co. crews trained the police and Guardsmen how to turn on meters. They made substantial headway in helping the 16,000 customers who on Monday still had been without gas. That total was down from last week's estimates of 25,000 to 32,000 customers without gas.

It has been a slow process, as crews go street-by-street and house-by-house to turn on meters they had spent a couple of days turning off.

By 2 p.m. Tuesday, New Mexico Gas officials said 92 percent of customers in the Española area and in three nearby pueblos had been visited and that service had been restored to 85 percent of them. The others were apparently not home to let crews in.

All Taos residences served by the utility had been visited and 75 percent had been restored their natural gas, according to the company.

Another storm was moving through the state Tuesday, though temperatures weren't expected to be as cold as they were last week.

Some people in Taos tried to put the situation in perspective. "We Taoseños, we're pioneers," said Wanda Quintana, who owns a State Farm Insurance agency in Taos and spent the weekend handling claims in an unheated office. "We just roll up our sleeves and get creative about what to do."

Meanwhile, New Mexico Gas announced Tuesday morning that it was putting $1 million in a fund to start paying claims filed by people affected by the gas outage. To speed up the process, the company urged customers to file claims first with their private insurance companies.

The gas company said Tuesday that 100 claims already had been filed through a telephone hotline.

Gov. Susana Martinez on Monday had ordered another 300 National Guardsmen out to help New Mexico Gas crews. The 46 Albuquerque police officers who aided the effort are part of an emergency response team, said Lt. Jeremy R. McRae. Another 36 Albuquerque firefighters also pitched in.

McRae said Albuquerque police arrived at 5 p.m. Monday. They worked from 3:30 to 6:30 a.m. and were back on the job from 7 to 9 a.m. The officers accompanied teams of New Mexico Gas Co. workers in part because of "anticipated hostility" from frustrated and angry customers, McRae said. But, he said residents overall had given workers "a very warm reception."

Mateo deVargas, head of Rio Arriba's Emergency Management Office the last three years, has dealt with massive snowstorms in Chama and other disasters, but none of this magnitude. Until the shelter closed Monday, he said, the emergency center and volunteers fed 200 to 250 people three meals per day. People who wanted hot showers were offered free rides from their homes to the Rural Events Center in Abiquiú. "We weren't affected there," deVargas said. "It runs on propane."

He said the Jemez Electric Cooperative had stepped in to help where it could, even reinstalling electric meters at the homes of customers with delinquent bills so they would have an alternate power source.

His staff fielded calls day and night from residents wondering when their gas would be restored and what to do in the meantime. New Mexico Gas Co.'s emergency and customer-service lines were quickly overwhelmed by calls when the crisis began last week, with people referred to the company website for updates.

According to deVargas, about a third of the 5,800-square-mile county was without natural gas beginning Feb. 2. That included villages from Dixon to Peñasco and Chimayó to La Mesilla.

He knows a lot of people are upset by what happened. A trained first responder and wildland firefighter, deVargas said, "I see this in terms of lessons learned." The lesson for New Mexico Gas, he said, is that it needs a much better way to communicate with customers, towns and emergency managers.

The claims for damages from the outage already are rolling in. Quintana said her staff had only handled eight so far, but were expecting many more. Seven of the claims were for water damage from frozen and busted pipes. The other was from a fire caused by overuse of a fireplace while a client was trying to stay warm.

"We have a lot of second-home owners," she said. "Many of them may not even know the magnitude of the problem (if they're not here)."

Quintana said State Farm has a 24-hour answering service. She's encouraging people to shut off water and drain pipes if they are frozen, then clean up any water and get a plumber in as quickly as possible. She urges people who can't return to their homes because of the damage to save all their receipts — including those from buying meals and renting another place to stay. Once a claim is filed, State Farm schedules an inspection.

Angela Thorpe, a State Farm Insurance spokeswoman, said more than 500 New Mexico customers have filed claims with her company since last week for damage caused by frozen pipes. She isn't sure how many of those are related to the natural-gas crisis. The company brought in a catastrophe unit to handle the increased number of claims.

Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.

FIND ASSISTANCE

• If your natural-gas service has not been turned back on, call New Mexico Gas Company at 505-697-3335 or toll free at 888-664-2726.

• To file a claim with New Mexico Gas Co., complete forms available at www.nmgco.com.

• Low-income homeowners in small communities could qualify for U.S. Department of Agriculture loans or grants to help them repair their houses. To learn more, call 505-425-3594 or visit www.rurdev.usda.gov.

• The New Mexico congressional delegation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Development Agency have scheduled a forum from 10 a.m. to noon Thursday at Española's Mission Museum, 1 Calle de los Españoles. An announcement said the forum "will bring together federal agencies and nonprofits to discuss assistance available to eligible New Mexicans whose homes and businesses were affected by last week's storm."