On Monday, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission held a two-hour hearing to hear from Xcel about its decision to shut off power and what it will do in the future.
, when it purposefully shutoff power to more than 50,000 customers in six counties, in part, to avoid its equipment from starting a wildfire in high winds.
“We were unable to activate our EOC in person because we were part of the planned safety power shutoffs,” Nathan Whittington, Jefferson County Emergency Manager, said. “We were going to lose power to our Emergency Operations Center, so we had to go to a remote activation level, which we did.”following the meeting, he explained that the emergency operations center will not have a reliable backup power system until next year.
“These three examples are three of 35 that we ran, and those simulations helped us determine that PSPS was, indeed, called for,” Michael Lamb, Xcel Energy senior vice president of distribution and gas operations, said. “The data shows that within eight hours, an ignition at any one of these locations could reasonably be expected to burn thousands of acres, destroy between 100 and 700 buildings and impact hundreds of individuals.
“You just can’t use the 911 emergency notification system for this, and the reason is because you get to over warning, where people get too many messages that are not emergency-related,” Hodges said. “It has to be immediate life safety, and I know there could be an argument that this could be that. I’m just telling you that the law says that they can’t use it for that specific purpose.”
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