Many still reeling from power shutdown
Company’s lack of communication for planned outages during wind storm angers customers
Xcel Energy sent shockwaves through the community last weekend when it announced plans to intentionally shut down power to parts of Boulder, Gilpin and Jefferson counties, including to 55,000 customers in Boulder County, amid a powerful wind storm that brought wind gusts of more than 90 mph to some areas.
Many people throughout Colorado are still reeling from the impacts of the company’s decision and feel angered by what they say was a lack of clear or timely communication from Xcel around its plans. However, planned power shutdowns in other states are not new — in fact, the practice, though relatively new, has been adopted in a growing number of places, particularly as wildfire threats intensify.
Daniel Swain is a Boulderbased climate scientist who studies weather, climate and wildfires at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of California, Los Angeles. Swain told the Daily Camera that planned safety power shutdowns were first implemented in California in the early 2010s, but they’ve also happened in other states, such as Oregon and Texas.
“Each of these follows a particular episode of extreme fire weather conditions, during which powerline utility-related fire ignition generated a catastrophe.
So each one was literally reactive in response to a specific disaster,” Swain said.
The December 2021 Marshall Fire, which devastated parts of Boulder County and destroyed more than 1,000 homes, is still fresh in many people’s memories. After a year-and-a-half-long investigation, officials concluded the fire likely had two origin points, one of which they believed was near a broken Xcel power line.
An ‘undesirable but necessary stopgap’
Last weekend was the first time Xcel has preemptively shut down power in Colorado, but Swain said he sees these planned shutdowns as an “undesirable but necessary stopgap” during potentially dangerous weather conditions.
“I’m 100% certain there are at least some circumstances under which it is justified, given the current state of electrical infrastructure, both here and generally, to turn off the electricity in certain areas preemptively prior to certain weather events,” Swain said. “Unfortunately, the reality is is that these points can pose a major risk of ignitions under the worst possible conditions.”
However, these planned outages come with risks and costs to communities. Although Swain didn’t offer an opinion on whether Xcel should or should not have shut down power last weekend, he said the decision to execute a planned outage should be based on multiple factors — not just wind speed, but also the level of moisture in vegetation.
“Overall, the intersection between strong wind and very dry, or record-dry, vegetation is really what we’re concerned about,” he said, adding that that combination was a driving factor in the Marshall Fire. Leading up to the fire, the area had seen record warmth and dryness along with record-low vegetation moisture levels.
Xcel claimed earlier this week that the vegetation moisture levels have been low. But Swain offered a different assessment.
“This is a bit of an edge case, because it’s not sopping wet … but it’s also not super dry. In fact, if anything, it’s less dry than it would normally would be in early April around here,” he said. “So that makes it a pretty tough call. Because the risk clearly isn’t zero, but it’s also not nearly what it would be had this occurred at a peak dry spell, or during a severe drought, which we do not have currently.”
Scientist: Shutoffs cause ‘growing pains’
Swain said a clear pattern has emerged where various utilities that have implemented planned outages have gone through “growing pains” when the planned outages are first rolled out and that the initial implementation of the outages is “often far from optimal.”
But at least in some places, the process has gotten smoother over time, he said.
Some community members in Boulder County have said that while Xcel’s choice to shut down power was understandable, they felt it was executed poorly. Some said they received no warning before losing power, while others reportedly were warned but never lost power. Many who lost power said they received no information about how long it would be out.
Xcel’s planned power shutdown has also had complex and multilayered impacts in the Boulder County area that are continuing to unfold. The outage itself led to schools, retirement homes, shelters and other essential facilities losing power, vehicle crashes from traffic signals going out, broken trees and even a few small fires that were quickly put out.
At Thursday night’s Boulder City Council meeting, City Manager Nuria Rivera-vandermyde said the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless had no power Saturday night. Kurt Firnhaber, Boulder’s director of Housing and Human Services, brought his own generator to power the shelter.
Additionally, the city narrowly avoided raw sewage spilling into Boulder Creek when the Water Resource Recovery Facility northeast of Boulder lost power to its two substations. The facility temporarily stopped operating, but city staff were able to divert wastewater overflow into an empty storage tank, Rivera-vandermyde said.
Vulnerable residents among the hardest hit
People in vulnerable communities have in some ways borne the brunt of the fallout. Food banks responded to a spike in demand for food assistance after food spoiled in household refrigerators. And people in the disabled community have also been hit hard in ways they might not have expected. Mary Nicolaides, who usually goes by the name Vasna Zago, is paraplegic and lives alone in the Boulder Meadows mobile home park in north Boulder. Zago said she was sitting in her electronically-powered recliner when the power went out. She was stuck in her recliner for nearly 30 hours while she waited for the power to come back on so she could move out of her seat.
Nerve damage from spinal injuries like Zago’s can cause bladder and bowel problems, she said. For more than a full day, she was unable to get up to use the bathroom or take care of any other basic needs, though she had food nearby to eat.
“I was just sitting in urine for 30 hours, which was really horrendous,” she said. “I’m over it now. It happened. It’s done. I didn’t die, you know, but it still made me wonder what they were doing. (Xcel) said they thought the power might come on at noon on Sunday. But then it didn’t come on for another six and a half hours.”
Zago said she doesn’t fault Xcel for shutting off her power, and she got several emails from the company notifying her of the outage, but she said she hopes it will become more aware of the disabled community in the future.
“We often get stuck in positions that we don’t plan for and can’t help,” she said.
During a meeting Wednesday at the Capitol with state legislators and other local officials, Xcel executives admitted to “imperfect” communications around the planned outage while defending the choice to shut down power. However, they expressed a willingness to have more conversations with affected communities and improve how the company handles similar situations in the future.
Boulder officials invited Xcel representatives to attend Thursday’s Boulder City Council meeting.