Colorado neighborhood hit with another Xcel Energy outage

After multiple power outages in a Littleton neighborhood, residents are raising concerns about ongoing reliability issues. CBS Colorado began investigating the problem in August and learned from Xcel Energy that a wildfire safety system setting was calibrated too low.

While several outages prior to the summer were caused by other things such as wildlife interaction and weather, the outages in July and August were undetermined and happening frequently, prompting residents to call CBS Colorado for help.

That's when Xcel says it discovered the issue with the mitigation system settings. 

"The settings that we had in January we created a tolerance, and the tolerance is to withstand the fluctuations that we have for seasonality, but they weren't set high enough," said Gilbert Salazar, Xcel regional vice president. "So they worked as designated for the majority of the year, but when we started seeing those higher temperatures and higher demand in July and August, that's when we start getting the trip on the line, and it really was a false positive."

Despite that discovery, the same neighborhood experienced another outage Thursday night into Friday morning.

Many of the same residents who reached out initially said they again didn't receive information about the cause of the outage.

In a statement Friday, Xcel Energy said more than 700 customers were affected between 2 and 9 a.m. as crews worked to replace utility poles. The company said the maintenance work is aimed at improving long-term reliability.

"We notified customers on Wednesday, Sept. 3, through automated voicemails -- which is how we normally notify customers of planned outages for maintenance," Xcel said in the statement. "We encourage customers to update their phone numbers to ensure they receive these notifications."

Xcel Energy told CBS Colorado it continues to collect public feedback on outages and billing issues in its customer response section online.