Communication was a joke

I don’t even know where to begin with this, but the level of incompetence is simply unacceptable. We were given notice that we would have a planned power shut off from 12pm-6pm on December 17th. It was then changed to 10am and our power was off for 80 hours. This means no water and no heat as well. First of all, for many residents like us that have animals, you can’t prepare for 4 days of no water when you think you’re looking at 6-8 hours. If we had been told we would go 1-2 days without power we would have filled every large trough we could find. But lucky for us, we had a generator so we could power our well pump to get water when needed. Just doing that cost $120 in propane for FOUR days, with the generator only running periodically to get water for the animals. Then, let’s talk about the nonstop conflicting messages from Xcel. First, we were told that the shutoff would be very short term (12pm-6pm) on one day. The ongoing communications continued to tell us everything from our power would be restored on 12/17 at 1:15 pm to that it had been restored on 12/18 at noon (it had not) to it would be restored on 12/21. Checking the outage map was useless. There was often “no record of an outage” at our location and even when there was, our address didn’t have an estimated restoration time. There is no excuse for such poor communication that left residents unprepared and unable to plan for keeping themselves safe during an extended outage. Finally, there was entirely inadequate public safety measures taken, such as making sure residents had clean water or that elderly residents were not freezing. It is embarrassing to live in a first world country that can leave its citizens in such a state. For all we pay in taxes and to Xcel itself for utilities, the government and the utility should be taking care of people in the event they do have to shut off power for days at a time.