.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....
For Santa Fe tour operator Monique Schoustra, the past year was “the offseason that just kept going and going and going.”
The final credit card transaction she ran in 2020 for Great Southwest Adventures, the business she co-founded in 1998, was on March 10 the day before New Mexico announced its first three cases of COVID-19 disease and declared a public health emergency.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic stymied her business at the beginning of its crucial season bringing tour buses to sites around northern New Mexico: the Bandelier National Monument, Chama River Valley, Pecos and Chaco national parks and Taos, among other locations.
“We were hopeful, like everyone was, that this was just going to be a few months … a temporary blip,” she recalled.
May 13, 2021
ROSWELL, N.M. Residents and oil producers in southeast New Mexico watched the turmoil on the East Coast over the Colonial Pipeline closure with a mix of amusement and anxiety as Americans panicked at the sudden loss of fuel.
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia were in a declared state of emergency by Monday. Fourteen of those reported gas outages just days after the nation’s largest pipeline east of the Mississippi River shut down over a ransomware attack last week.
The brief cessation of the pipeline’s four primary lines running 5,500 miles from Linden N.J, to the Gulf Coast in Houston, which transport 45 percent of the fuel consumed on the East Coast, sparked an energy crisis just less than four months into the Biden presidency. Long lines, high prices, and empty gas stations up and down the eastern seaboard provoked flashbacks to the last time an administration embraced green energy as a replacement, rather than a supplement, when still dependent on
Pause on oil and gas drilling permits puts New Mexico in precarious position Shelton Dodson
Replay Video UP NEXT
New Mexico, one of the poorest states in the nation potentially has a problem after the Biden administration paused issuing any new drilling permits on federal land.
Each year, the state draws about one-third of its entire budget from royalties off oil and natural gas production.
CBS4 traveled to Hobbs, New Mexico, an oil town and the heart of the state s economy.
The oil fields mean everything to Randy Fields and his brother, Marc.
They opened a retail store in the oil town of Hobbs nearly 40 years ago.
Michael Benanav / Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here by permission.
For most New Mexico businesses, the arrival of COVID-19 wreaked havoc, caused shutdowns or threatened doom. But for one enterprise potentially one of the world’s largest nuclear waste sites the pandemic offered an unusual opportunity.
A long-planned nuclear waste storage facility in the southeastern New Mexico desert was rushed through the approval process during the pandemic, according to New Mexico’s congressional delegation, environmentalists and other opponents.
Typically, project foes would have been able to voice their disapproval at Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearings around the state. The coronavirus brought an end to such public gatherings, however, so New Mexico lawmakers asked the NRC to pause the hearings.