Xcel Energy’s “public safety outage,” which began April 6, left people bundled up in chilly homes, jails and emergency services in the dark, restaurants scrambling to save perishable ingredients, a pharmaceutical-maker losing millions of dollars and a whole lot of chaos and confusion.
That is the picture that emerged from testimony Wednesday at a Colorado Public Utilities Commission hearing on the decision by Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity provider, to shut down part of its grid to reduce wildfire risk in the face of high winds.
At Gov. Jared Polis’ direction, the PUC has opened an investigation into Xcel Energy’s decision and its execution of powering down the lines serving 55,000 people, including the city of Boulder, from April 6 through April 7.
“It’s clear there were some real difficult repercussions from the weekend,” PUC Commissioner Megan Gilman said. “It is clear we had some potentially catastrophic near misses.”
More than 160 people signed up to testify and while the majority were from Boulder County, people from Douglas, Arapahoe and Larimer counties and Denver also addressed the commission.
“The next steps forward to make things better is to understand what happened,” PUC Chairman Eric Blank told the meeting. “We can’t do that without your experiences.”
Xcel Energy, in a statement, said: “We acknowledge there are ways to improve executing these safety measures in the future and are listening closely to what our customers are sharing with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.”
The company is facing nearly 300 lawsuits from homeowners, local governments and Target in connection with the Marshall fire, on Dec. 30, 2021, which killed two people and destroyed 1,084 homes along with commercial properties for more than $2 billion in total property damage.
An official investigation, by the Boulder County Sheriff and the district attorney’s office, concluded that an Xcel Energy wire blown loose by high winds was one source of the fire. The utility disputes the findings.
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One pervasive complaint voiced at the PUC hearing was that for a planned event, local agencies and governments and residential and business customers received little warning.
“We only had five hours to prepare,” Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett said. The loss of electricity impacted the emergency operations center, the jail, the homeless shelter, the drinking water treatment plant, which had to run on auxiliary power for three days, and several fire stations.
The wastewater treatment plant lost power, creating the risk of raw sewage spilling into Boulder Creek and prompting emergency calls to the utility. “There was less than 10 minutes to spare when the power was turned back on,” Brockett said.
We only had five hours to prepare.
— Aaron Brockett, Boulder mayor
Businesses got even less notice. Agilent Technologies, which has a Boulder facility making pharmaceuticals, got a recorded phone call Saturday, two-and-a-half hours before the shutdown. “It will result in product loss of several million dollars,” Lorri Brovsky, the company director of facilities, environmental, health and safety, told the commission.
“We never did receive any updates on when the power would be restored,” Brovsky said. The power was restored after 26 hours.
Hosea Rosenberg, owner of Blackbelly Market and Restaurant in Boulder, said he got a text from Xcel Energy 30 minutes after the power went out.
There was $50,000 to $60,000 of food inventory in the restaurant, Rosenberg said. “We were lucky enough to borrow a refrigerator truck and save most of our food.”
There was also much confusion as to who was blacked out and who wasn’t and who was purposely cut and those who were out because of actual weather-related outages. About 100,000 people lost power in because of the storm.
Bettina Swigger, CEO of the Downtown Boulder Partnership, called the communications “chaotic” and pointed out that while the power was out at the east end of the city’s busy pedestrian zone, it was on along the west end.
“One side of the Pearl Street Mall was dark and the other was not,” Swigger said.
An initial partnership survey put downtown business losses at about $1.3 million with $242,000 in lost wages for workers.
“We recognize that being without this essential service brings challenges to our customers and using a public safety power shutoff is a last resort,” the Xcel statement said. “We stand by our decision to protect the public from wildfire risk and firmly believe our actions contributed to preventing a wildfire during the most recent extreme wind event.”
Amy Petre Hill, assistant director of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, and Nick Torres, advocacy director for the American Lung Association, voiced concerns about inadequate planning for at-risk communities.
Two of Hill’s friends, one with a spinal injury and another with ALS disease, survived the outage on backup batteries, she said.
If public safety outages become more frequent, posing challenges to those on supplemental oxygen and oxygen concentrators, Torres said, outreach to this community should be a priority. During the outage, he said, some people were forced to go to hospital emergency rooms for oxygen.
The Fullen household passed the outage in the chilly dark, George Fullen recounted in written testimony, one of about 700 comments filed with the PUC.
“During this 24-hour period, we gradually put on more clothes as the house cooled,” Fullen said. “When it started getting dark, we rounded up all of our flashlights and lanterns, and had a cold supper. Good that my wife did not need her oxygen.”
When the power did come back on it blew out two appliances in Scott Glick’s home in Larimer County.
“I’m a Marshall fire survivor,” Eileen Berry told the commission. “ I understand having had my house completely burned down, possibly by Xcel power lines, why they chose to shut off the power.”
“Perhaps this is the new normal,” Berry said. “However, I do think there needs to be much better notice.
The PUC’s Blank said that Xcel Energy will be submitting an updated wildfire mitigation plan in the coming weeks or months with a power shutoff program that sets in place rules and other guardrails surrounding planned outages.
Perhaps this is the new normal.
— Eileen Berry, Marshall fire survivor
While all this turmoil swept across the region, Paul Culnan, a south Boulder resident, told the commission he was “blissfully unaware of what was going on.”
Culnan’s home is outfitted with photovoltaic solar panels, solar thermal heating and hot water and he has a backup battery. “My home was fine other than shaking in the wind,” he said.
The bliss was reenforced by the fact it was two days before Culnan got a text about the outage.
“Xcel’s got a lot of smart people,” Culnan said. “It is inconceivable they could bungle this bad just by accident. It is hard to imagine.”
Type of Story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
