Water Treatment Plant Issues

I manage a drinking water treatment plant serving over 100,000 people in Northern Colorado that lost power for 24 hours. We had to go on to our backup diesel generators with very little notice. Running for that long on generators introduces a huge amount of risk to the public water supply, and we are lucky that a disaster was averted through our own emergency planning efforts, not through Xcel's poor management and poor communication. If Xcel had made a policy decision to shut down power in high wind events months earlier why weren't all critical facilities like water, wastewater, medical, fire facilities not notified when the decision was made, not 3 hours before an actual shutdown. Also, the weather forecast was calling for high winds 3 days out, why did Xcel wait until the last minute?. Xcel and the PUC needs to manage a list of critical facilities that should be notified if there is even a thought of a power shutdown so we can prepare. Xcel's communication and reliability is very poor. Our remedy will be to investigate annexing into our closest municipality and joining their power system and leaving Xcel permanently. We can no longer tolerate their poor service and putting the entire public water supply at risk.