Powerless in Boulder County

Dear Ms. O'Donnell,

I and my family members are some of the 55,000 people who endured the consequences of the intentional, precautionary outage conducted by Xcel to reduce the possibility of wildfire. We did not receive any notice of Xcel's "plan" until late afternoon or early evening on Friday, April 5. The notice we received stated that electricity would be turned off for the duration of the High Wind Warning, which was 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 6 until 12 noon on Sunday, April 7. The stated reason for this power shutdown was to prevent another wildfire (like the Marshall Fire in 2022).

We are well aware of the Marshall Fire and the devastation it caused in Boulder County. We watched it all day and we were on the verge of evacuating our home on December 30, 2022, until the weather changed to snow and the winds shifted. While we have no quarrel with Xcel's stated goal of minimizing wildfire risk, the more direct way to address this risk is for Xcel to better maintain its power lines!

Our electricity was shut off at 3:09 p.m. on Saturday. But Xcel did not turn it back on at noon on Sunday as promised - even though there was no wind in our area at all on Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, or Sunday evening! We did not receive any follow up notice from Xcel until 2:14 p.m. on Sunday. In this notice Xcel stated that the "restoration process will extend into Monday, April 8, and possibly longer for some customers." Again, there were no extreme winds on Sunday in our area. Those winds, which were not nearly as extreme as those that occurred during the Marshall Fire, had ended in the early morning hours of Sunday.

Our electrical power was not restored until after 12:00 p.m. on Monday, April 8. By this time, the extreme winds had been over for 36-40 hours. During this entire weekend event, the power at my office, which is 3.5 miles from my home, remained on. However, the traffic lights along Arapahoe Avenue from 30th Street to Cherryvale Avenue were not on and many homes and businesses along this route also did not have power as of late Sunday afternoon. There were no downed trees or other wind damage in the area around my office, at my house, or along Arapahoe Avenue, which further attests to the fact that the area did not endure extreme winds. Ironically, the electricity in the Table Mesa area of Boulder was not shut off according to one of our friends who lives there, even though Table Mesa is closer to the foothills and there was one 97 mph gust recorded at NCAR, which is located above that neighborhood, on Saturday night.

In my opinion, Xcel Energy grossly overreacted to this weather event, and did not adequately consider the consequences of pre-emptively turning off electricity. Instead of allowing Xcel carte blanche to turn of the power whenever it perceives potential liability for Xcel, the Colorado PUC ought to require Xcel to better maintain the power lines that it "de-energized" on Saturday afternoon. Then it would not be necessary to de-energize them in the first place in order to minimize wildfire risk.

Sincerely,

John Sullivan