Boulder County: Xcel gave inadequate notice before outages left 55,000 without power (2024)

“There were profound impacts,” said Sarah Huntley, spokesperson for the Boulder County Office of Disaster Management. “So we were scrambling to try to meet those needs.”

The utility decided it might cut power after the National Weather Service at 5 p.m. Friday forecasted wind gusts of up to 100 mph along the foothills Saturday into Sunday and sustained winds of up to 55 mph along the Interstate 25 corridor. The winds, coupled with relatively low humidity, prompted the Boulder office of the service Friday evening to issue a red flag warning starting at noon Saturday and going until 6 p.m. Sunday for parts of Boulder, Larimer and Weld counties.

But Huntley said the state’s largest utility did not let emergency response officials know about the shutdown until 7 p.m. Friday.

Once Xcel notified the county, office leadership “was trying very hard to get more details to understand which parts of the system they were going to shut down and which parts of the county and city were going to be impacted,” Huntley said, “but the office was not able to get a lot of detail.”

The next time the office heard from Xcel was at 10 a.m. Saturday, when Xcel said they were going to start the preventive outages at 3 p.m. that afternoon, Huntley said.

“But again they could not provide us at that point with maps or details about which parts of our community would be impacted,” she added.

Saturday marked the first time the utility has cut power ahead of high winds as a preventive measure. In the past, power has remained on through windy days, with the utility responding to any outages that occur.

On Tuesday, an Xcel spokesperson defended the utility’s handling of the shut-off, saying it was working on becoming “more confident and comfortable with the decisions to turn power off” before dangerous weather.

The utility wasn’t certain that a shut-off would actually be necessary Friday night, because of the chance that “winds might subside” and humidity rise by Saturday morning, said Hollie Velasquez Horvath, an Xcel spokesperson. When conditions worsened instead, affecting 55,000 residents instead of the original 25,000 Xcel suspected, they made the call to shut off power.

The move comes more than two years after an Xcel powerline was blamed for helping ignite the wind-driven Marshall fire that destroyed more than 1,000 homes and killed two people in Boulder County. High wind caused a power line to disconnect from its mooring and touch other lines, causing sparks to shower onto dry grass, investigators found. Velasquez Horvath said Tuesday the utility denies it was responsible for causing the Marshall fire.

More than 150 insurance companies and two survivors of the deadly fire are suing Xcel Energy for the utility company’s role in starting the December 2021 fire, Colorado’s costliest and most destructive in history.

Boulder County’s Office of Disaster Management is responsible for limiting the impacts of disasters on humans, property, environment and infrastructure through community preparedness, mitigation of hazards, effective disaster response and recovery. Alerts on the agency’s website and social media platforms are the primary method of getting the word out, Huntley said.

But without power or cell service, which became spotty during the windstorm, Huntley said the office didn’t know whom it was reaching. “We were trying to get the information out, but these are all electronic methods of communication,” she said. So they called on members of the community to convey information and “more importantly, to hear back from people about what was going on and what they needed.”

The impacts of the outage were far-reaching.

In Nederland, residents were in town buying food and supplies at 2 p.m. Saturday, after hearing that the outage would begin at 2:30. But the lights went out at the Mountain People’s Food Co-op 15 minutes before Xcel stated they would. With no way to pay, customers left without buying their candles, boxes of tea, canned goods and vegetables.

On the Facebook group Nedheads, residents listed a litany of other hardships they endured over the weekend.

Jennie Doerr McLaughlin, who lives on Ridge Road outside of town, wrote in a message to The Colorado Sun she’d been without power for three full days on Monday, despite the weather being “beautiful.”

McLaughlin’s family gets their water from a well, “so when the power goes out, no water,” she said. “We don’t have cell service, so we rely on wifi for connectivity. No power = no internet/phone. We do have a landline but it was dead the last two days because, we heard, backup batteries died in the phone boxes because there was no power. And we will lose everything in our fridge and two freezers,” which could cost the family hundreds of dollars.

We were trying to get the information out, but these are all electronic methods of communication.

— Sarah Huntley, spokesperson for the Boulder County Office of Disaster Management

Scot Gorbet, another Nedheads member who works at an undisclosed hospital in Boulder, said people came to the ER because without electricity their medical devices wouldn’t work, “including oxygen concentrators, which could have had very serious outcomes.”

“So I guess my question would be did (Xcel) not think through every situation before just cutting power?” Gorbet asked. “It didn’t seem like there was an emergency process in place. And Boulder County Public Health didn’t seem to do any outreach.”

The Boulder County jail lost power for a short while, said Vincent Montez, a commander at the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. That could have been bad had backup systems not been in place, “because the jail is basically a city inside of the county,” and security could have been compromised, he said.

And “mountain schools” without power in Nederland, Jamestown and Gold Hill were forced to close Monday, something McLaughlin calls unacceptable. “There are so few days in the school year and this hurts kids getting ready for graduation, CMAS testing, SAT testing, etc,” she wrote to The Sun.

On Tuesday morning, the Boulder County commissioners questioned the extent of the outages, and called on Xcel leadership to explain.

“Two or three days without power may create serious financial hardship and impacts to the health and wellbeing of our community,” the commissioners said in a joint statement, which called high winds in the foothills a common occurrence. “These disruptions do not impact everyone equally.”

The statement said commissioners and elected representatives from Boulder County communities met with Xcel leaders Monday to get more insight into the decision, and that the utility promised better communication in the future.

Xcel told the commissioners that proactive power outages are a small but crucial part of their emerging wildfire mitigation strategy, used in extraordinary circ*mstances and not for every flag warning. They warned other preventive shut-offs could come in the future.

But Velasquez Horvath told The Sun the utility will do everything it can to mitigate preventive power outages, through things like training staff meteorologists to recognize the risks of wildfire conditions, building up a workforce that can do outreach to communities long before and in immediate advance of outages and remove dangerous foliage from people’s property “with intention that it will never hit a power line.” The utility also plans to implement tools that will help them reach the industry standard of alerting customers 72 hours in advance of a preventative shut down.

Velasquez Horvath added Xcel has had 500 crew members out restoring power every day since the outage. “Typically we start with really big numbers, like 2,000 people on one electric line,” and move “down to the individual customers who had their electric service line directly fed to their homes,” she said. “Those are the outages we’re troubleshooting now.”

Xcel will continue meetings it began yesterday with the commissioners, mayors, and 115 small businesses at a town hall hosted by the Boulder Chamber of Commerce, adding ones with Gov. Polis and state legislators tomorrow and a Boulder city council meeting April 18.

But Huntley said, “What we’re hearing from our local fire experts was that, while they were concerned about the wind, we were not in the same situation we were in when the Marshall fire happened. Yes, they were closely monitoring, but it was a different set with a different situational picture.”