Xcel Energys Public safety power outages that began on April 6 left people stranded in cold homes, jails and emergency services in the dark, restaurants scrambled to preserve perishable ingredients and a drugmaker lost millions, and chaos and chaos.
That’s the image 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 parts of the grid to reduce the risk of wildfires posed by high winds.
At the direction of Gov. Jared Polis, the PUC has opened an investigation into Xcel Energy’s decision and its implementation to close operations including Boulder from April 6 to April 7 Lines serving the city’s 55,000 people.
PUC Commissioner Megan Gilman said it was clear the weekend had some really difficult impacts. Clearly we had some potentially catastrophic near misses.
More than 160 people signed up to testify, and while most were from Boulder County, people from Douglas, Arapahoe, Larimer and Denver also spoke to the committee.
PUC Chairman Eric Blank said at the meeting that the next step in making things better is to understand what happened. We couldn’t do this without your experience.
Xcel Energy said in a statement: We acknowledge there are ways to improve enforcement of these safety measures in the future and are listening carefully to what our customers share with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.
The company is facing nearly 300 lawsuits from homeowners, local governments and Target related to the Marshall Fire on Dec. 30, 2021, which killed two people, destroyed 1,084 homes and commercial properties, and destroyed property. Losses totaled more than $2 billion.
An official investigation by the Boulder County Sheriff and District Attorney’s Office concluded that an Xcel Energy power line blown away by high winds was one of the sources of the fire. The utility disputed the findings.
In February, a downed Xcel Energy power line sparked the record-breaking Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas, which burned more than 1.2 million acres in the state’s Panhandle.
A common complaint at the PUC hearing was that local agencies, governments and residential and commercial customers received little warning about a planned event.
Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett said we only had five hours to prepare. The outage affected the emergency operations center, the jail, homeless shelters, a drinking water treatment plant that had to rely on auxiliary power to operate for three days, and several fire stations.
The wastewater treatment plant lost power, creating the risk of raw sewage leaking into Boulder Creek and prompting emergency calls to the utility company. When the power came back on, less than 10 minutes remained, Brockett said.
We only had five hours to prepare.
Aaron Brockett, mayor of boulder
Businesses receive even less attention. Agilent Technologies, which has a pharmaceutical plant in Boulder, received a recorded call Saturday about two and a half hours before the shutdown. Lorri Brovsky, the company’s director of facilities, environment, health and safety, told the committee it would result in millions of dollars in lost product.
“We’ve never received any update on when power will be restored,” Brodsky said. Power was restored after 26 hours.
Hosea Rosenberg, owner of Blackbelly Market and Restaurant in Boulder, said he received a text message from Xcel Energy 30 minutes after the outage.
Rosenberg said the restaurant has $50,000 to $60,000 in food inventory. We were lucky enough to borrow a refrigerated truck and save most of our food.
There is also a lot of confusion about who is without power, who is not without power, who is without power intentionally, and who is without power due to actual weather-related outages. About 100,000 people lost power due to the storm.
Bettina Swigger, executive director of the Boulder Downtown Partnership, called communications chaotic and noted that while the east end of the city’s busy pedestrian zone was without power, the west end was without power.
One side of the Pearl Street Mall is dark, Swiger said, but the other side is not.
A preliminary collaborative investigation revealed that downtown businesses suffered losses of approximately $1.3 million, including $242,000 in lost worker wages.
“We recognize that the lack of this essential service creates challenges for our customers and use public safety power shutoffs as a last resort,” an Xcel statement said. We stand by our decision to protect the public from wildfire risks and firmly believe our actions helped prevent wildfires during recent extreme wind events.
Amy Peter Hill, assistant director of the Colorado Interdisability Alliance, and Nick Torres, director of advocacy for the American Lung Association, expressed concern about the lack of programming in high-risk communities.
Two of Hill’s friends, one with a spinal cord injury and the other with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, survived the outage with backup batteries, she said.
Torres said if public safety outages become more frequent and pose a challenge to people using supplemental oxygen and oxygen concentrators, outreach to that community should be a priority. He said some people were forced to go to hospital emergency rooms to get oxygen during the outage.
The Fullen family spent the outage in the freezing darkness, George Fullen recalled in written testimony, one of about 700 comments submitted to the PUC.
Over the course of 24 hours, as the house gets colder, we gradually put on more clothes, Fullen said. It was getting dark, so we put away all our flashlights and lanterns and had a cold dinner. Luckily my wife doesn’t need oxygen.
When power was restored, two appliances burned out at Scott Glick’s home in Larimer County.
Erin Berry told the committee, I am a survivor of the Marshall Fire. I understand my house was probably completely burned out by Xcel wires and why they chose to turn off the power.
Maybe this is the new normal, Berry said. However, I do think better notifications are needed.
PUC Blank said Xcel Energy will submit an updated wildfire mitigation plan in the coming weeks or months, including an outage plan that lays out rules and other guardrails around planned outages.
Maybe this is the new normal.
Erin Berry, Marshall Fire Survivors
While all this unrest gripped the area, South Boulder resident Paul Culnan told the committee he was glad not to know what was going on.
Cournan’s home is equipped with photovoltaic solar panels, solar heating and hot water, and he has battery backup. He said everything about my home was fine except that it was shaking in the wind.
Cournan’s happiness was further enhanced by the fact that two days later he received a text message about the power outage.
Culnan said Xcels has a lot of smart people. It’s hard to imagine that they could make such a serious mistake by accident. It’s hard to imagine.
#Xcel #customers #testify #preemptive #power #outages #plunged #Boulder #County #chaos #storm
Image Source : coloradosun.com