Xcel Energy crews prepare for heavy, wet snow to hit Colorado

Xcel Energy crews are preparing for a Winter Storm that will bring significant snowfall to Colorado on Tuesday night into Wednesday. Crews are ready in case the power goes out. 

The energy company also has advice for those who experience an outage: report the outage on the app or online. 

Xcel Energy Western Slope area manager Brad McCloud said crews will be out in full force to keep outage time to a minimum.

"We've got crews all over the state from Western Colorado all the way out to our partners that we work with out on the Eastern Plains. So we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of employees that are working and ramping up and ready to go the moment there is a need," said McCloud. 

Xcel advises everyone to stay away from downed power lines and always assume an electric line is energized and dangerous. 

First Alert Meteorologist Ashton Altieri called for a First Alert Weather Day starting at 5 p.m. Tuesday. 

The First Alert Weather Team has increased the snow forecast for the Denver and Boulder areas to 6-12 inches and now expects as much as 14 inches of snow on the far east and southeast sides of the metro area for locations such as the airport, SE Aurora, Parker, Franktown, and Elizabeth.