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The thing that was most unclear with this incident in Colorado was: How did they decide which areas to shut down? It didn't make me feel like the people in char

The thing that was most unclear with this incident in Colorado was: How did they decide which areas to shut down? It didn't make me feel like the people in charge knew what they were doing, when we left our neighborhood where the power was intentionally turned off (for over a day) to go to our friends' house where it was kept on, despite them having much stronger winds both in the forecast and in actuality. Their house is also in an area with much higher fire risk, surrounded by dry windswept vegetation. It's hard to trust an organization that says "we're turning off your power due to your area's unique risk of fire" when that conclusion seems incomprehensible to anyone aware of the weather and geography of the area. It's very hard not to wonder whether they are ignorant or are not being forthright. Maybe there is some information that would show that they made the right decisions, but if so, they certainly haven't shared it yet!

zmj 3y ago
Agreed this was confusing. It seems like the risk factors that would lead to turning off a neighborhood (non-buried power lines, exposure to wind and available fuels) should have been known and announced in advance. I'm in Lafayette, and it seemed strange that our power was on when neighborhoods in Louisville and Erie were out.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yep, and pretty much the entirety of Boulder preemptively turned off, but not the areas south along 93 and to the east into Arvada near Rocky Flats, which are the exact super dry and windy areas where the Marshall Fire began. I actually do think there must be some plausible explanation, but it's hard not to feel sympathetic to the people who are convinced it is a tit for tat by Xcel, targeted at people who have been involved in recent legal confrontations with them. There are good reasons they aren't being given the benefit of the doubt here. I honestly worry more that truth is they were just winging it without any strong process or data with which to make the decision, and that this is their plan moving forward. But the good news is that the PUC investigating what happened is the way to get these answers, and is exactly what Governor Polis is pushing for.
michaelrpeskin 3y ago
My power wasn't turned off - I did get the "we might have to turn your power off" warning though. I live in probably one of the worst areas for wind, and had gusts to 100 that Saturday night - didn't get any sleep! I had studied the local grid a bit for some other reasons a while ago, here's how I would put the pieces together: My neighborhood is all buried lines, and everything is buried starting right near our substation. No raised distribution lines to worry about. However, it's still not really distribution lines that are going to cause wildfires, it's the transmission lines that go through the dry forest. Wind taking out a distribution line isn't that big of a deal, and it wouldn't cause much downstream fire risk. My co-worker who lives about a half mile from me was without power for nearly 2 days. In other power outages, we've compared notes. Even though they live closer to my substation than I do, they're on a different substation. The transmission line that powers their substation goes right through the mountains. It's really close to lots of dry fuel and the towers are very far apart, so it would be easy to get those lines to swing in the wind. Additionally, the way the winds blow, if their lines did arc and cause a fire, the wind would sweep it right into town. So you really don't want to look at "why was my neighborhood without power, we didn't get much wind." You want to look at "where does my substation get it's power, and would an arc on that transmission line be catastrophic". At least in my immediate area, the substations that were shut down were exactly the ones I would have shut down just by looking at a map and saying "if it's windy and dry here, do I want an energized line?". I don't know about the decisions in the wider Front Range area, but I would be willing to bet that 1) it's a pain to de- (and re-) energize lines, so they don't do it without weighing the risk, and 2) much of our transmission lines out here are in the mountains to the west, which is terrible when you have westerly winds that will blow the fire into town, so they have a high risk weighting.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Great comment! I'll look this up myself too, but do you have things I could read on the relative risk level of transmission vs distribution lines? They seem risky in different ways to me. At least in the case of what (possibly) started the Marshall Fire, I thought that seemed like a distribution line that was knocked down, not a transmission line that arced. But that could be wrong (and of course it's disputed that it was a cause of the fire at all). > At least in my immediate area, the substations that were shut down were exactly the ones I would have shut down First of all, how did you determine which ones were shut down? A big part of the problem, in my view, is that information of the form "this is what we're shutting down, and why we think it's high risk" did not seem to be forthcoming anywhere. To put it more broadly and with a finer point to it: there was no communication and nobody, including, apparently, the municipal emergency services organizations, had any idea what was going on, or why. But secondly, from cobbling together information from their website, gossip, social media, and driving around that day, my impression was the opposite of yours, for my surrounding area. My impression was that the pattern was extremely mystifying. But sure, maybe the communication issue is the first order problem to solve. I certainly hope you're right that they based the decisions on a good risk analysis. But if so, they didn't tell people what that was. And lacking information on that, few will be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that you're giving them on this, even if they deserve it. And I don't just mean communication in the period of time just before during and after the storm. Did I ignore an email from them in the past few months announcing that they are planning on incorporating emergency preemptive shutoffs during this fire season? I don't think so! (It's also weird to me that they seemingly didn't need to make the PUC aware of this ahead of time, with an announcement like that being required as part of approving that plan; it isn't only Xcel that I think messed up here.) It's easy for monopoly service providers to come off as arrogant and aloof, and lose peoples' trust!
bunabhucan 3y ago
Your assumption is that the outage is about the houses that are dark and not some line of silent poles/towers stretching beyond where the people are. The N Boulder outage was probably for rural lines N of Boulder rather than any neighborhood risk. I work in GIS for utilities and know where about a mile of my feeder comes from but I can't figure out where exactly it goes after that. Somebody probably overlaid a few maps (weather forecast, estimated fire risk, electric lines) and picked feeders based on that.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  That wasn't my assumption, for what it's worth. I understand that it's about the lines not the end points. It's a good point though, that the lines they worried about the risk of might be nowhere nearby. I suspect you're right about what the process was. I think a more succinct version of my view is this: I think we shouldn't need to speculate about this, we should have the details of this process available to us. I understand that info about specific lines might be sensitive, but we should know what the process is for this.

zmj 3y ago

Agreed this was confusing. It seems like the risk factors that would lead to turning off a neighborhood (non-buried power lines, exposure to wind and available fuels) should have been known and announced in advance. I'm in Lafayette, and it seemed strange that our power was on when neighborhoods in Louisville and Erie were out.

sanderjd 3y ago
Yep, and pretty much the entirety of Boulder preemptively turned off, but not the areas south along 93 and to the east into Arvada near Rocky Flats, which are the exact super dry and windy areas where the Marshall Fire began. I actually do think there must be some plausible explanation, but it's hard not to feel sympathetic to the people who are convinced it is a tit for tat by Xcel, targeted at people who have been involved in recent legal confrontations with them. There are good reasons they aren't being given the benefit of the doubt here. I honestly worry more that truth is they were just winging it without any strong process or data with which to make the decision, and that this is their plan moving forward. But the good news is that the PUC investigating what happened is the way to get these answers, and is exactly what Governor Polis is pushing for.

michaelrpeskin 3y ago

My power wasn't turned off - I did get the "we might have to turn your power off" warning though. I live in probably one of the worst areas for wind, and had gusts to 100 that Saturday night - didn't get any sleep! I had studied the local grid a bit for some other reasons a while ago, here's how I would put the pieces together: My neighborhood is all buried lines, and everything is buried starting right near our substation. No raised distribution lines to worry about. However, it's still not really distribution lines that are going to cause wildfires, it's the transmission lines that go through the dry forest. Wind taking out a distribution line isn't that big of a deal, and it wouldn't cause much downstream fire risk. My co-worker who lives about a half mile from me was without power for nearly 2 days. In other power outages, we've compared notes. Even though they live closer to my substation than I do, they're on a different substation. The transmission line that powers their substation goes right through the mountains. It's really close to lots of dry fuel and the towers are very far apart, so it would be easy to get those lines to swing in the wind. Additionally, the way the winds blow, if their lines did arc and cause a fire, the wind would sweep it right into town. So you really don't want to look at "why was my neighborhood without power, we didn't get much wind." You want to look at "where does my substation get it's power, and would an arc on that transmission line be catastrophic". At least in my immediate area, the substations that were shut down were exactly the ones I would have shut down just by looking at a map and saying "if it's windy and dry here, do I want an energized line?". I don't know about the decisions in the wider Front Range area, but I would be willing to bet that 1) it's a pain to de- (and re-) energize lines, so they don't do it without weighing the risk, and 2) much of our transmission lines out here are in the mountains to the west, which is terrible when you have westerly winds that will blow the fire into town, so they have a high risk weighting.

sanderjd 3y ago
Great comment! I'll look this up myself too, but do you have things I could read on the relative risk level of transmission vs distribution lines? They seem risky in different ways to me. At least in the case of what (possibly) started the Marshall Fire, I thought that seemed like a distribution line that was knocked down, not a transmission line that arced. But that could be wrong (and of course it's disputed that it was a cause of the fire at all). > At least in my immediate area, the substations that were shut down were exactly the ones I would have shut down First of all, how did you determine which ones were shut down? A big part of the problem, in my view, is that information of the form "this is what we're shutting down, and why we think it's high risk" did not seem to be forthcoming anywhere. To put it more broadly and with a finer point to it: there was no communication and nobody, including, apparently, the municipal emergency services organizations, had any idea what was going on, or why. But secondly, from cobbling together information from their website, gossip, social media, and driving around that day, my impression was the opposite of yours, for my surrounding area. My impression was that the pattern was extremely mystifying. But sure, maybe the communication issue is the first order problem to solve. I certainly hope you're right that they based the decisions on a good risk analysis. But if so, they didn't tell people what that was. And lacking information on that, few will be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that you're giving them on this, even if they deserve it. And I don't just mean communication in the period of time just before during and after the storm. Did I ignore an email from them in the past few months announcing that they are planning on incorporating emergency preemptive shutoffs during this fire season? I don't think so! (It's also weird to me that they seemingly didn't need to make the PUC aware of this ahead of time, with an announcement like that being required as part of approving that plan; it isn't only Xcel that I think messed up here.) It's easy for monopoly service providers to come off as arrogant and aloof, and lose peoples' trust!

bunabhucan 3y ago

Your assumption is that the outage is about the houses that are dark and not some line of silent poles/towers stretching beyond where the people are. The N Boulder outage was probably for rural lines N of Boulder rather than any neighborhood risk. I work in GIS for utilities and know where about a mile of my feeder comes from but I can't figure out where exactly it goes after that. Somebody probably overlaid a few maps (weather forecast, estimated fire risk, electric lines) and picked feeders based on that.

sanderjd 3y ago
That wasn't my assumption, for what it's worth. I understand that it's about the lines not the end points. It's a good point though, that the lines they worried about the risk of might be nowhere nearby. I suspect you're right about what the process was. I think a more succinct version of my view is this: I think we shouldn't need to speculate about this, we should have the details of this process available to us. I understand that info about specific lines might be sensitive, but we should know what the process is for this.