Boulder County residents may have differing opinions about whether Xcel Energy should have cut power on April 6 to lessen wildfire risk. But there’s widespread agreement that the situation was marred by confusion from poor communication that posed its own hazard.
Confusion arose as some neighborhoods experienced power outages lasting over 24 hours, while nearby areas remained unaffected. The pattern of outages seemed random: Areas with underground powerlines were sometimes spared, while others with similar infrastructure faced blackouts. Critical facilities serving vulnerable populations — like Frasier Meadows assisted living, medical clinics and buildings and the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless — lost power often with minimal warning, even as adjacent buildings had electricity. Despite being powered by two substations for redundancy, the city’s wastewater treatment plant lost power, prompting urgent efforts to stop raw sewage from entering Boulder Creek.
Compounding the confusion, a blurry map Xcel Energy shared with media hours after the shutdown incorrectly showed all of Boulder without power.
So why did the outages appear as a patchwork that, on the surface, seemed too random to be part of a wildfire prevention strategy?
Xcel points to the nature of the electric grid, though even the utility has admitted to lapses in its communications. “The energy infrastructure is a pretty complex system,” Andrew Holder, director of community affairs with Xcel Energy, told Boulder Reporting Lab.
Boulder’s electric grid is complicated and fragmented, shaped by the city’s age and the way homes and buildings were added over time. This tangled network consists of substations and feeder lines that extend like tentacles to convey power to just a few customers or up to several hundred. As Boulder grew, more feeder lines were added to accommodate new developments, creating a layout that bewilders residents during outages. Even though your neighbor is right next door, they might be connected to a different feeder, explaining why some homes lost power last weekend while others nearby did not.
“Imagine something of a spiderweb look that grows over time as development happens,” Carolyn Elam, sustainability senior manager with the City of Boulder, told Boulder Reporting Lab. “Imagine this happening over more than a century as growth and infill occurs.”
Elam illustrated the grid’s complexity with a story about her neighbor’s new garage. Because there wasn’t enough capacity to power the garage, Xcel switched her neighbor’s service to a feeder powering a nearby apartment building. As a result, during an outage, Elam might have electricity, while her nextdoor neighbor, living in the same style home, might not.
The randomness of the feeder lines might explain why some areas, even those without any apparent fire risk, experienced power outages. Feeders can be miles long, and without access to Xcel’s infrastructure maps — withheld for security reasons — residents can’t trace the feeders’ paths to or from their homes. Nor can they ascertain whether there’s a wildfire risk along those feeder lines.
For example, a feeder might start at a substation in Boulder Canyon with overhead lines and then go underground to supply power to an area downtown.
“You can be in that downtown block and see no overhead lines,” Elam said, “but it was the area of the feeder farther up in the canyon that was overhead that was the wildfire concern.”
Holder of Xcel said that the preemptive power cuts, even in areas with buried lines, reduced wildfire risk. In addition to electric poles snapped by the wind north of Boulder heading to Lyons, Holder mentioned “significant damage” to powerlines near Eldorado Canyon, close to where the Marshall Fire began.
“We have full confidence in saying that we did mitigate wildfire risk by systematically de-energizing,” Holder said.
Lapsed communication sent the city scrambling, threatened to put vulnerable people at risk
The community’s greatest frustration was with Xcel’s communications around the shutoffs, with unclear communication to everyone from restaurant owners to senior living facilities. Even the City of Boulder and Boulder County’s Office of Disaster Management was forced to operate with far less information than it needed to ensure public safety.
“There was a lack of critical communication,” said Sarah Huntley, a spokesperson for ODM.
Huntley said ODM first learned about the possibility of preemptive outages at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 5. The director of ODM asked Xcel about the specifics of the shutdown, including locations, timing and the criteria Xcel was using to preemptively de-energize. But by 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 6, ODM only received “a very vague note,” according to Huntley. The note said that power would be shut off at 3 p.m. that day, without “any maps or any guidance as to which parts of the system would be shut down,” she said.
She said Xcel acknowledged its communication could have been better. She suggested the insufficient communication could have stemmed from Xcel being caught off guard by the extreme wind conditions. While Xcel had been working on a wildfire mitigation strategy, she said, it had not yet ironed out the details when last weekend’s winds triggered the possible use of preemptive outages — “the tool of last resort,” according to Holder from Xcel.
“I think they were caught a little bit off guard with needing to implement this particular strategy before they had had a chance to daylight it with impacted communities,” Huntley said.
Huntley said that ODM and the City of Boulder have told Xcel that more dialogue needs to happen, both about its preemptive shutdown strategy but also before major weather events. The goal is to incorporate input from those working with vulnerable communities. While wildfire poses an obvious danger, power outages also have consequences.
“There’s a tendency to look at power outages, especially those that might last a few hours, as an inconvenience,” Huntley said. “But really, we understand that for businesses and restaurant owners in particular, critical infrastructure facilities like hospitals and nursing homes, and the more vulnerable residents we have in our community who don’t have the income to be able to replace two weeks worth of groceries, outages actually have a real significant impact on people.”
Foothills Hospital and Frasier Meadows senior living facility were both without power for some time. There’s a possibility city officials could have coordinated with Xcel to maintain power for those critical facilities.
The wind event did pose a wildfire risk, however, raising questions about how to balance community safety with the use of this shutdown tool in the future.
Huntley emphasized the need for backup systems to protect essential services like Boulder’s wastewater treatment plant, which does not have generators and instead relies on dual substations for power. Both substations experienced outages, nearly leading to raw sewage overflow into Boulder Creek, underscoring the importance of planning and coordination with Xcel.
“We counted on Xcel’s assurances that there would not be situations where both substations would go down at one time,” Huntley said. “We did find ourselves in a situation of some stress, Saturday afternoon, because there was no power at that facility.”
Huntley said that thanks to a tank being offline for construction, staff were able to divert sewage into the empty tank to buy enough time to contact Xcel and get one of the plant’s power sources back on. She suggested earlier communication might have helped remind Xcel of the plant’s critical power needs.
Even as Xcel introduces preemptive power outages for wildfire prevention, it’s also exploring other strategies to reduce wildfire risk without resorting to shutoffs. According to Holder from Xcel, this includes burying power lines, reinforcing overhead lines to be fire-resistant, and installing sectionalizers to isolate outages to specific areas.
“There’s a number of different things we can continue to do to advance the technology on our energy grid,” Holder said. “And we’ll continue to employ those over the years to come.”
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify details about Foothills Hospital. Over the weekend, Boulder Reporting Lab spoke with several Foothills Hospital staff members on four different occasions. Each time, the staff said that the hospital was using generators. Later, a Foothills spokesperson said that only specific clinics within the hospital system were affected by the power outage and required generators. The Anderson Medical Center and the Tebo Family Medical Building, which are located on the Foothills campus, also lost power and were operating on generators.
I also think discussions about burying high risk lines should be part of the discussion too. We should be planning for more resiliency as these events may be more common in the future.
This is so true! Instead of telling us that we will have either have to endure random shut offs of power or get burned up in wildfires, xcel needs to get busy on the 3rd and alternative of making the infrastructure able to withstand the high winds that we normally have out here. Just like we have with homes and other built structures where we’ve upgraded codes to require them to withstand 110 mile an hour winds, the conductors and poles need to be able to do this as well. Reinforced concrete poles and attaching wires to high strength cables are two fairly easy ways of doing it when burying them is difficult or impossible.
As regards the water treatment plant, it would appear initiating conversations about installing emergency generators or solar powered battery storage should begin immediately to avoid a future public health disaster.
I appreciate your complete article on this stressful event. I am glad to have Boulder Reporting Lab as a go-to resource.
Thank you for this article. I have lived in the County just north of Lake Valley, and in 21 years we have consistently experienced ferocious winds during the winter. In 20 of those years, the longest outage by far was during the Marshall Fire. All other outages, which I can count on one hand, were a few hours at most. But this year, we’ve had no power on at least three occasions. One was last weekend for 36 hours. A week before, the outage was 9 hours, with no wind and no explanation from Xcel.
We fully understand the need to mitigate wildfire risk, yet Xcel’s cavalier attitude towards its customers is puzzling. Their messaging system is horrible. A simple warning from them via my phone app would have sent us to the store to get ice. Despite all their “managing” of this crisis, I can only conclude they are preemptively shutting down the grid in order to avoid lawsuits. And you can bet the sooner we transition to solar, the happier I’ll be to be rid of them.
Fortunately, Foothills Hospital has powerful generators that were on for the duration of the outage.
Thank you for this article!
FYI
I live in Boulder County Affordable Housing, a Senior Building located in Louisville, called Kestrel. Our situation was horrible, and didn’t need to be as bad as it was. We were without power for 68 hours! We had no notice, our three-story building is all electric and we have a generator, which powers a few lights in the common areas and our elevators. Most residents are not able to ambulate stairs, some are on oxygen, CPaps, etc. Ours utilities are included in our rent and we have solar power which contributes to the grid. We are unable to register for advance notice with Xcel because we don’t hold the account with them. The majority of us were trapped on our floors because the emergency, fire doors automatically locked in front of our elevator doors. When I had cell service, (I have cheap phone service that piggybacks on the better carriers, thus with the towers also on generators and not at peak performance, my phone had one to zero bars), I called Disbatch to request the Louisville Fire Department to come and unlock the Fire Doors….. they never came! Our apartments had no, lights, heat, hot water, working stove, refrigeration, phone service or ability to charge our phones, nothing we needed to survive! And, to make it worse late around Saturday night, (when I still had a serviceable phone), I received an email from Amanda Guthrie, Director of Housing Operations Boulder County and Human Services, letting Kestrel Residents know that they were aware and that we, “ …do not need to notify BCHA of the power outage”. Oh, and of course, call 911 in the case of a medical emergency. They knew, but they did nothing to help us, they didn’t even want to take residents calls. I find their response unconscionable. I think it’s fair to say all of us living here are low income, or we wouldn’t have qualified to live here, and throwing out all our perishable food and trying to afford to replace it, is an impossible task. And, I don’t know about my fellow neighbors, but I am still suffering. I don’t know if I can put it into words, but even though it’s over, I feel traumatized. I’m not able to just, “shake it off”. I have a very sick bird because it got too cold, I couldn’t evacuate. I still can’t afford to replace the food I lost, and our management isn’t going to conduct themselves any differently, thus, I feel like I’m still being victimized.
Elizabeth, this sounds to me like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Your experience should never have happened. Please forward your comments to Governor Polis – so he can deal with Xcel – and to your state representative so they can question LFD and BCHA. What for most of us was a major inconvenience was for you a nightmare. You deserve not only explanations but apologies and assurances that this will not happen again.
Elizabeth, please define the acronym “BCHA” if it’s not Boulder County Housing Association? Thanks for the illuminating comment. Comprehensive, well spoken and deeply appreciated.
As well as their communications, XCEL reporting system either failed or failed to scale. I had their latest App installed on Android. When I checked Sunday to see what time we’d get switched on, the app said “No Outage reported” for my address. I submitted it.
Over the next few days I continued to check and everytime it still said “No Outage reported”. A few hours after the power eventually came back on Monday, I started to get a stream of text messages. Outage reported/Outage resolved etc. Indicating that the system XCEL was submitting the message to report had failed on the queue blocked after exceeding it’s limit. Think “voicemail full”.
Same thing happened to me. It was like being in a traffic circle with no exit ramp. For a company that large it’s a disgrace that they can’t get those communications better. But first and foremost, they need to notify people of “preemptive outages” ahead of time.
Thanks BRL for the great reporting on the outage. On one hand, no one wants any more utility induced fires. If we ran Xcel, we’d also be proactive about shutdowns. However, all would agree, they failed pretty miserably in their communication informing of the shutdown and when it’d be over. Along with the info about the shutdown, they ought to give a list of things people could do to minimize the impact: charge phones and backup batteries, get candles ready, have spare batteries, pull next three meals out of fridge and into coolers, buy ice (not a cube to be found for miles by sat evening), note that if you have a smart thermostat powered by electricity (nest, ecobee) your gas heat won’t work! And, oh, by the way, we have 600 miles of line to look at, and may not turn your power on as fast as we originally expected!
Since it seems that these kind of shutdown will happen more in the future, it would be awesome if you guys did a story on the best way, or the list of things that people should do to prepare.
My question is where were the Boulder Police when the power was out? At busy and critical traffic lights, there was no one even trying to maintain control over many dangerous situations. Chaos ensued and even though Boulder police reported minimal accidents, there could have at least been some degree of effort in keeping drivers from having to use a go and dodge strategy. I would like to see an accounting of what was more important than conducting traffic control during an emergency situation.
I have the feeling that Excel probably didn’t coordinate with Boulder police or sheriff department. Another lapse in communication with xcel. Perhaps they wanted to avoid being billed for the extra policing necessary if they were directing traffic.
Xcel Energy shut off electricity to prevent wildfire. This imposed cost to the people psychologically and in real time. People have to throw away foods and beverage from the refrigerator, to stay in a hotel overnight (especially the elders), stop working, close the store, etc. We denote this cost as P.
Could you estimate how much will cost Xcel if it did not shut off and there was in fact a wildfire? You can calculate this cost from last year’s Marshall fire. We denote this cost as E.
So, Excel’s action clearly shows that E must be greater than P.
This means that Excel must compensate the people’s loss and Excel is still better off.
The requirement of compensation is important, just to let Excel think twice or be more careful next time it decides to shut off the power. Boulder is a windy place. Excel will do this again and again if there is no shutting-off cost to Excel).
Life care communities, such as Frasier, should not be shut down preemptively except under extreme circumstances which did not exist this past weekend. That a shut down occurred indicates a lack of planning and good executive decision making.