Technicians began restoring service Friday to the 19,000 Southern Arizona homes and businesses left without natural-gas service during this week's extremely cold weather.
House by house, Southwest Gas employees started "relighting" the Rita Ranch area on Tucson's southeast side about noon, said company spokesman Libby Howell.
But it could take until Monday or Tuesday for utility workers to make a first visit to each home in the affected areas, and the company would not specify when technicians will be in specific neighborhoods.
Residents must be home for their service to be restarted, but after the first pass, technicians will go to each home up to two more times to relight their gas.
The lack of information frustrated many Tucsonans, who said they would like at least a vague idea of when their neighborhood would be restored.
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"As a customer, it would be nice to know what the heck is going on," said Howard Davis, a resident of the Sabino Canyon area. "We're living in the 21st century, and I think information flow, like gas flow, is pretty important."
In New Mexico, more than 20,000 customers lost gas service throughout the state Thursday, but the New Mexico Gas Co. has been able to give frequent updates on its website as to which areas are affected and where employees are restoring service.
At 3:10 p.m. Friday, for example, the utility reported: "Silver City: Relights are in progress and crews hope to complete the last remaining homes this afternoon."
At a Friday morning news conference, the director of administration for Southwest in Tucson, Bennett Burke, called informing the residents too complex.
"It would probably be a bigger disappointment to people if we tried to estimate, then missed that estimate of when we'd be in that neighborhood," Burke said. "It's just very, very complicated to try and predict when we'll be in a particular neighborhood or home."
(The Arizona Daily Star started a Twitter feed Friday, using the hashtag #SWGas, for residents to alert neighbors when technicians are in their area.)
Arizona elected officials expressed understanding of Southwest Gas' predicament and contentment with its response.
"I'm satisfied," Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup said Friday morning. "I'm very pleased with how we all mobilized."
The Arizona Corporation Commission received complaints about the gas outage, but so far the commission is only monitoring the situation, not planning any action, spokeswoman Rebecca Wilder said. In contrast, New Mexico's Public Regulation Commission - the state's equivalent to Arizona's commission - is planning to hold a hearing on that state's outages within a week or so.
In a news conference at the Tucson Fire Department's headquarters with Walkup and others, Burke acknowledged that the areas where gas was turned off weren't necessarily the areas experiencing lower pressure on Thursday.
"We simply have to pick the areas where it maximizes our ability to keep the majority of customers on," Burke said.
In addition to the 14,600 Tucson-area customers without service, about 4,500 customers from southern Sierra Vista to Hereford also lost service Thursday. Technicians began "relights" there at noon Friday, Howell said.
Southwest Gas blames low supply from the main pipeline that comes here from Texas for the shortage. Southwest had a contract for adequate supply during the cold snap, but El Paso Natural Gas, which owns the pipeline, could not fulfill it, Burke and Howell said.
"We contract to receive gas at a certain pressure, and El Paso's system was so drained that it couldn't deliver enough gas," Howell said.
In an e-mail, El Paso spokes-man Richard Wheatley called its contracts confidential. However, El Paso has acknowledged it could not provide adequate gas pressure to supply the demands in areas along its pipeline.
The Phoenix area, which is also supplied by the El Paso pipeline, did not suffer any outages. There is an additional pipeline serving Phoenix, which comes down from Northern Arizona, Howell said.
Also, El Paso's pipeline can receive additional supply from points west of Phoenix and move them back east into the metro area, Wheatley said. A similar system is available in the Tucson area, he said.
Gas pressure in the pipeline began picking up in southern New Mexico Friday and reached levels above the minimum considered acceptable, Wheatley said.
In Southern Arizona, about 200 technicians, half of whom were brought in from outside the Tucson market, are working on restoring service, Burke said.
"We're throwing everything we can at it," he said
Only nine local residents took advantage of the two shelters set up Thursday, at the Udall Center and Pantano Christian Church, Walkup said. But he said he would rather err on the side of over-responding than under-responding.
Only the Udall shelter remained open Friday night.
Contact reporter Tim Steller at 807-8427 or at tsteller@azstarnet.com
