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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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!

I hope this isn't getting too local and for HN, but...

"which substations were shut down" - I used to work for a company that did a prototype for image recognition to identify maintenance issues for the power company (vegetation encroachment, towers in need of repair, etc.) So I had access to the GIS for this area and memorized it. So I can tell by which houses are out which substations went down. Also related to that project, I do know that people (at least on the engineering side of the decision makers) do understand risk and alarm fatigue and all of that. So maybe based on my experience, I'm giving them more of a benefit of the doubt than I should be.

"communication" - communication wasn't great for THIS weather event, I got one email from them that "might" have to do something. But looking in my voice mail archives I see a call on 3/2 and 3/4 and also accompanying texts and emails that they might have to shut down for the same reasons (there were winds then too). Maybe they over communicated the first time? I didn't know that emergency services weren't told, that's weird. If I were pulling the plug, you can bet I'd be calling all of the affected Sheriffs.

"marshall fire" - Hope I don't get too conspiracy theory here. I live right by the ignition point, so I know that area well. I think the cult nearby was the real culprit, looking at the barn and everything the day of the fire. The Sheriff's investigation said that they did have a (legal) fire a few days before the event and did everything that they were supposed to to put it out and cover it, so there's no way they could do criminal charges. It's just the 100 MPH winds were able to start a few embers, and then the embers just hopped buildings over the ridge.

I know the distribution line by 93 was also considered an issue, but it never really looked like it sparked anything when I went by. I did talk to a deputy at school pickup and he was giving me some inside info about sneakiness on Xcel's part, but I don't think you could really pin this on them.

If you know the area, you have the barn from the viral video and houses all along the north side of Marshall road, and then you have the mesa along the south side. Granted, the mesa did burn, but it was just a "grass" fire, the houses along the north side were just catching the embers from the previous house and it was a chain reaction the whole way down. I ride Marshall mesa all the time, and I never saw any real evidence of ignition down by the power poles that they were blaming. Of course, you still have at least 20kV in those distribution lines and there could have been a spark from those 100MPH winds, but I still doubt it.

Back to the main topic...just going on what I know about the grid layout and the weather patterns here, they shown down the substations that I would have. And communication could have definitely been better. I talked to one guy who lives up in the mountains. After 24 hours without power, he called Xcel to ask when they were going to turn it on, and they didn't know his area was out (due to damage, not voluntary shutoff).

Also, when a live power line goes down, they get a signal that's pretty accurate as to where the break is. When a dead power line goes down and then gets damaged later, they don't know where it is and have to put eyes on every foot of line before they reenergize to make sure it's safe.

It's definitely too local for HN, but it's a good conversation so I don't care :)

> I didn't know that emergency services weren't told, that's weird.

Sorry if I implied they weren't informed at all, the reporting I read was that they weren't informed with enough certainty or lead time to sufficiently prepare.

And I think this also goes back to what I think is the deeper point that this shouldn't be an hours vs. days thing, but a months to years thing. If the monopoly utility for a region has concluded that wildfire risk has become so high that they need to start doing large-scale preemptive de-energization to safely manage it, for the first time ever, I think that should be highly publicized and closely coordinated with the municipalities and emergency services involved. Again, maybe this all happened and I just missed it, but I have looked and not found anything about it anywhere.

For instance, the stoplight situation was dire. Perhaps some of the stoplights on roads where the speed limit is 65 could be upgraded with a backup power capability, if there were some lead time on this? I dunno, maybe that's totally impractical for an outage that lasts over a day.

But that's another thing... Is it really acceptable for a discretionary outage to last for almost a day after the weather event has cleared up? I understand that it's very challenging to reenergize dead lines, but it's hard to be as sympathetic to that when turning those lines off in the first place was a choice, rather than a result of the weather itself.

> Also, when a live power line goes down, they get a signal that's pretty accurate as to where the break is. When a dead power line goes down and then gets damaged later, they don't know where it is and have to put eyes on every foot of line before they reenergize to make sure it's safe.

To me, this reads like a very good reason to not de-energize lines unless it absolutely cannot be avoided! And that's the thing, at the bottom of all of this, I feel like, I've lived here for decades, and it will be difficult to convince me that "preemptive power outages absolutely could not be avoided" was true for this storm, but not of any of the others like it that I have experienced in that time.

Another thing I just thought of...how many times does a power company need to communicate to first responders about shutting down power? It goes the other way a lot - first responders asking for power to be cut because of a fire or an accident or something. So I bet they have lots of policy and procedures around that, but going the other way, I wonder if they just don't have it all written down yet.

Yep, agreed. I'm sympathetic to a large amount of what I'm saying here just being growing pains as they figure out how to do a new thing. But IMO, monopoly utilities, and especially their regulators, have a responsibility to figure more of this stuff out beforehand.

People can't say "I'm not happy with how you handled this, so I'm switching to your competitor", and that necessitates a higher level of scrutiny and responsibility.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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