Cause of downtown electrical fire released by Colorado Springs officials
Jerilee Bennett, The Gazette
Six months following the underground downtown electrical fire that left hundreds without power and impacted dozens of businesses, city officials on Friday provided answers as to what caused the early morning incident on Sept. 11 — a nicked wire.
Laying blame on the culprit, however, has proven elusive.
The underground fire erupted at roughly 2:30 a.m. on E. Kiowa Street, between Nevada Avenue and Tejon Street. The fire triggered a massive downtown power outage that impacted at least 280 customers, including several downtown businesses.
Restoration efforts lasted over seven weeks, and cost the city roughly $1.2 million, city officials said.
“The downtown network is a very, very intricate system. If you saw a map of it, it’s not very clear where it runs, it overlaps each other — it kind of a big spaghetti mess,” Somer Mese, the city utility’s Chief Operations Officer, said.
While some of the city’s power is derived from overhead power lines, the downtown network is a complicated underground system, creating backup power redundancy.
“There’s benefits to that, but also cons because if something happens it takes longer to figure out where it’s coming from because it’s underground. You can’t see it,” Mese said.
According to Mese, investigative efforts by the city unveiled the cause to not be the previously believed underground transformer box.
“The initial thought was that it was a transformer, it was not the transformer,” Mese said.
Through, “extensive studies,” conducted on the transformer, it was found to pass necessary testing and ultimately could have been put back into service, Mese said.
“We opted not to,” Mese said, adding that instead the transformer was proactively replaced to not have to disturb the area in the future.
As excavation efforts continued to examine the underground system and search for areas of failure, crews discovered two electric vaults that received damage in several spots, consistent with a core drilling operation.
Where the damage was inflicted, crews discovered the hole had been covered by a piece of plywood and had been asphalted over. The pavement of the roadway indicated the damage could have been inflicted years ago, Mese said.
Plywood patch discovered over the damage caused to concrete vault.
Mese explained that the damage to the electric vaults had ultimately caused damage to the wires running through the vaults.
“That nick created damage to create an energy leak, so the energy wasn’t flowing through there like it should. This happened in three different places on almost five (electrical) lines,” Mese said.
“What that means is all that energy transfers to the good two lines, causing an overheat of the system resulting in an arc or fire.”
Officials added that although aging infrastructure is present throughout the downtown system, the September fire was a result of the damage done to the wires, not a maintenance failure.
Although efforts were made through reviewing city permits and other records, ultimately the city was unable to definitively identify who caused the damage.
Liz Bell, a co-owner of Bell Brothers Brewing Company on Tejon Street said she would like to see an increase of communication from the city as a way to minimize impact to residents and businesses downtown if another incident were to arise in the future.
“This fire happened at 2 a.m. in the morning. I saw the lights were out as I was on my way to work and just said to myself, “I hope the brewery was okay.” It wasn’t until my bar manager came in four hours later that I knew what was going on,” Bell said.
“If there had been a text at 2 in the morning, I at least would have known when I woke up at 6 a.m. I think that to me is my biggest concern — how do we communicate better going forward to minimize the impact in the future.”
While there’s no way to completely eliminate the possibility of a similar incident in the future, Mese said in the history of the downtown system’s existence, dating back to the 60s, nothing like the Sept. fire has ever happened before.
As a way to prevent further incidents and outages in the future, Mese said the Colorado Springs Utilities is working with multiple contractors to identify problem areas throughout the system to hopefully avoid unnecessary excavations and further outages.
“To go back and inspect everything would be a massive undertaking, that would mean disconnecting lines and testing them, causing massive outages. We know that’s not ideal,” Mese said. “We’re working with vendors to see if there’s camera technology that we can run through those lines to identify damaged wires.”
Additionally, the city is looking at technology that will automatically indicate line failures, leading to proactive fixes.
“We are starting that project this year. Hopefully, we can get ahead, and take those preventative measures,” Mese said.
As a way to streamline communication between Colorado Springs Utilities, the city, tenants, and business owners downtown, Colorado Springs’ Economic Development Manager Jared Miller said the city is working to evolve from sending automatic calls to texts as a way to make information on outages and construction more accessible.