AURORA | Almost 200,000 Xcel and Core Power customers were without power, some for hours, across Aurora and parts of Denver, Arapahoe and Douglas counties after a transformer failed, Xcel spokesperson Michelle Aguayo said in a statement late Sunday.
The outage, affecting areas near DIA, across Aurora and south toward Douglas County was repaired in sections, with most areas no longer reporting outages at about 6 p.m.
Officials said CORE Electric customers were also affected by the outage because of the “connectivity” of the power grid.
“A transformer failed at an Xcel Energy substation resulting in damage to other equipment,” Aguayo said. “The failure and damage caused an outage that cascaded to include other substations.”
The widespread power outages Sunday afternoon prompted police to ask residents not to call 911 to report power electricity outages or non-functioning traffic signals.
At about 5 p.m., officials from the CORE Electric Cooperative reported to the Sentinel that about 45,000 customers in Arapahoe and Douglas counties were still without power.
“Crews acted quickly to reroute power and restore service safely,” Aguayo said. “The first customers were restored at 3:10 p.m. and by 5:47 p.m. all customers had power restored. “
Officials said Xcel will replace the transformer.
On a story in the Denver gazette it said that Excel listed no outages. Someone needs to check that journalist. We were without power for over 2 hours in central Aurora and everyone we know in Aurora and Parker were without power.
It was I who caused the outage.
Was pulling a 120-volt cable in the basement when the lights dimmed, brightened slightly, then went out.
Outside I turned off the main breaker. Then switched the individual circuit breakers off to prevent possible power surges from damaging sensitive circuits in refrigerator, microwave, washer, dryer, furnace and water heater, etc.
Left the circuit breaker to the kitchen lights remain on so we knowhen power was restored. (A radio plugged in would not turn ON providing audible notice.)
Why did our Verizon Wireless cell phones display SOS where signal strength ishown?
LindainCO the Xcel site listed no outages, even after I received a text saying I had one I refreshed the page and it still listed none.
That said, what is like to know is why my Verizon had no connectivity.. even going outside, I couldn’t get it above one bar and no ability to pull up even a simple web page. Thankfully I had starlink as a backup do I could still get online to check things like my workplace, which was also affected, but I expect cellular to have batteries and the ability to run for a few hours without Xcel power.
The worst part about this was all of the traffic lights that were out. Traffic was backed up sometimes all the way back to the previous intersection as cars took turns inching through intersections.