Xcel Energy Investigation Pending After Fatal Hopkins Pole Collapse

A utility pole collapsed onto a car in Hopkins, killing 31-year-old Kenny Green.

Sunday marks 12 weeks since the fatal accident occurred, and Xcel Energy still has not determined what caused the 29-year-old pole to fail. FOX 9 reported that the utility company’s inspectors last checked the pole in 2023 and recorded that it had 93% strength.

Xcel said that it never received any calls regarding that pole or any others in the area. The company has maintained since August that what happened is still under investigation, but representatives did not have an answer when asked when the review would wrap up.

Structural Experts Address the Unusual Failure

Structural experts have pointed out the unusual nature of the failure. Less than a week after the incident, a structural engineer at the University of Minnesota addressed the rarity of the event.

“Extremely uncommon, and it’s one of the first times I have experienced or heard [of] something like this happening,” Pedram Mortazavi, a structural engineer at the University of Minnesota, told FOX 9 in an August 28 interview. “Sometimes, the soil around the base of it, due to different reasons, could lose its pressure, and then it’s easier for the structure to get tilted and eventually topple over.”

Legal scrutiny has followed the lack of external regulatory oversight into the accident. Minneapolis attorney Joshua Newville wrote a letter to the Public Utilities Commission to try to get answers, but the agency informed him that it does not investigate deadly accidents.

Hopkins police are not involved because there was no crime. That leaves Xcel Energy as the only entity investigating what went wrong.

Newville has said that setup is a problem and that someone needs to examine whether this could happen again.

“Utility poles don’t just fall over and kill young fathers on random days of the week. Like that – that’s absurd,” Newville told FOX 9 in September. “We can’t honestly believe that Xcel is going to just, out of the goodness of its heart, regulate itself.”