Vulnerable Senior in Boulder County Housing.

I had no warning of the power outage. I can’t register with Xcel because Boulder County is the account holder on my apartment building. Xcel states you have to have an account to use their outage map and to register for updates/warnings. The Boulder County Housing Authority would be who was notified, then if they were a responsible landlord, they would warn their tenants. When they were called by tenants, an email response was sent out by Amanda Guthrie, stating they knew about the outage and “don’t call them”.

I found out about the outage when a traffic light wasn’t working. I went home and then discovered one of the elevators in our building worked, but was pitch black inside. We have a generator. But soon found out it only powers some lights in the common areas and the elevators. Our apartments were without power, no, lights, cooking, hot water, ability to charge phones, get internet, or heat. We have fire doors that automatically shut and lock, over the elevator doors, when the power goes out, so even though we could hear the elevators moving behind the locked doors, we couldn’t access them, or know if it was safe to use them. I called Disbatch and asked for the fire department to come and open the fire doors, but they never came. We were trapped on our floors. Most of we seniors are not able to do stairs, so we stayed put. We lost phone service and reception., and the ability to charge the phones, thus all of our communication shut down. It was impossible to know that there was power near by, we couldn’t ambulate the stairs, thus we were trapped in our dead quiet, dark, scary apartment, feeling vulnerable, helpless and hungry. It got cold at night and now I have a sick bird. I’m hoping she’ll recover. I never knew the whole time what was happening outside or with the residents on the other floors. I ate canned food out of the cans because I couldn’t cook. After the power came back on 44 hours later, I had to throw out all of my refrigerated food because it spoiled. This experience was an emergency NOT an inconvenience. I don’t feel I can ever go thru something like this ever again. If I was told in advance, how long it would have been, I would go to a hotel. Please, give us enough warning to prepare.



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