Boulder County food bank forced to toss 2,000 pounds of food after weekend’s Xcel power outages

A food bank serving Boulder and Broomfield Counties was forced to throw out about 2,000 pounds of food after its Louisville facility lost power for 40 hours during the weekend’s severe weather.

“We didn’t actually realize that we were part of the outage until Sunday,” said Kristina Thomas, director of marketing at Community Food Share, on Tuesday. “It’s always difficult for us to waste food as a food bank.”

When Xcel Energy made the controversial choice to mitigate wildfire risk by shutting off power across six counties, including Boulder and Broomfield, Community Food Share counted as one of 55,000 customers impacted by the planned outages. More than 150,000 lost electricity over the weekend due to the corporate decision and extreme winds.

Xcel called the food bank’s office line on Friday to give a heads-up about the outage, but it occurred after business hours, Thomas said. The team didn’t realize they were impacted until an executive stopped by the facility on Sunday.

As a result, they had to toss thousands of pounds of food, including prepared meals, cheese and 45 gallons of milk.

Thomas understands the preventative steps taken by Xcel because “we’re not too far away from the fire line from the Marshall Fire” of 2021, and the food bank is now “back up and running.”

But she said the situation could have been avoided with more notice. In that case, the nonprofit would have arranged for refrigerated and freezer trucks to store the product during that time, she added.

“Us going without power for 40 hours was certainly unexpected, and could have been devastating,” Thomas said. “With grocery prices being what they are, it’s challenging for any of us to have to go back to the grocery store and replace food.”

However, the nonprofit’s largest freezers and fridges contained about $80,000 worth of product, and remained sealed through Monday, keeping consistent temperatures. Thomas called that fact “a big sigh of relief for all of us.”