No food no light and a newborn

I gave birth last Friday. I am freshly postpartum, physically healing, emotionally raw, and caring for a newborn and a toddler. Instead of being able to recover at home in peace, my family lost power for a combined 72+ hours from Thursday through today.

I was recently laid off and unable to find work before giving birth. Because of that, we are currently SNAP recipients. We couldn’t even afford Christmas this year. Every dollar matters. For months, I carefully budgeted, waited for sales, and bought meat and frozen items in bulk to make sure my family wouldn’t go hungry. That food was our safety net.

And all of it is now in the garbage.

What was supposed to be a 12-hour outage in Boulder turned into nearly four days without power. During that time, we were repeatedly told by Xcel that power would be restored “today,” only for that promise to be pushed back again and again. If there had been honest, accurate communication, I could have moved our food to relatives’ refrigerators and saved it. Instead, the constant misinformation and overpromising left us stuck in limbo until it was too late.

We lost all our food, including stored breast milk. As a postpartum mother trying to feed a newborn, that loss is devastating. I had to pack up my children and all of our postpartum necessities for extend stays with relatives instead of being home healing and bonding. I couldn’t rest. I couldn’t establish a routine. I was constantly improvising during one of the most vulnerable moments of my life.

The stress of this situation was overwhelming and avoidable.

Xcel Energy is setting record profits, yet has offered no meaningful assistance to replace groceries for families who simply cannot afford to recover from losses like this. They also continue to delay burying power lines. I understand that burying every single line instantly isn’t realistic, but five years is absolutely doable, and prioritizing high-risk lines within a year is more than reasonable.

This outage was mishandled from start to finish. The lack of transparency, accountability, and compassion turned an already difficult postpartum period into a truly awful and traumatic experience. Families like mine deserved better.