HONOLULU (KHON2) -- After back-to-back-to-back power outages that left residents and businesses in downtown and Chinatown frustrated, power was restored this afternoon.
The first outage happened a week ago today, affecting hundreds of businesses, office buildings, residents and key government buildings. Then, Monday night, power went out again, this time mainly affecting the Chinatown area following an underground fire.
Power was restored to majority of customers Tuesday night. But last night, HECO says a "flash arc" forced crews to shut off power to about 3,000 customers.
HECO this afternoon answered some questions and showed us the conditions crews are working in.
We got an up-close look at the downtown power crisis culprit: a tangle of charred circuits and cables still reeking of burned rubber and smoke, all pulled from an underground network built for reliability in the state's financial hub, but proving to be anything but.
KHON2 asked, what was the first thing to blow? Where did it start?
“We're trying to go over the forensics right now, so we need to get our experts in here,” explained Rudy Tamayo, HECO’s vice president of energy delivery. “It could have been any one of these heavily charred areas. Once it flashes -- what we call an arc flash -- which is a super extreme high temperature they call it almost like a plasma heat, and it's a very high energy in a short period of time because we have protected devices that interrupt. But really once it propagates, it just moves to the next circuit and all of a sudden we have a cascading failure.”
That failure caused Chinatown businessowners to stay up at night with anxiety but out of business and revenue, as the second major outage in as many weeks stretched into a fourth day.
KHON2 asked: Is there any precedent where HECO has paid for business interruption and for loss of potential revenue?
“I don't have any information or background on that, but I don't want to be listing the things that people can or cannot put in for (on damage claim forms),” explained Jim Kelly, HECO vice president of government and community relations. “We know every situation is unique and that's why we look at every situation in a unique way. The first thing we have to figure out is, what was the cause of the outage?”
Mom and pop shops throughout Chinatown turned to off-the-shelf generators to salvage whatever they can from loss and spoilage.
KHON2 asked: Has HECO or will HECO consider bringing any large-scale diesel generating capacity to this area that these small businesses could tap into?
“Yes, we've actually looked at that. We feel like by the time we get that done that we will have the additional 600 restored,” Kelly explained. “So it's somewhat complicated. It adds another degree of complexity to bring in a generator and have it in the street, the size of what you need to run some of the businesses.”
KHON2 pointed out it's also the second outage in two weeks.
“Yes it is the second in two weeks and we're still looking at whether that original outage on June 13 is related to the one this week,” Kelly said.
KHON2 asked HECO: So the businesses watching would ask the similar dialogue we're having. It seems appear likely to happen again. What more can HECO do to bring some kind of power reliability, and a backup, immediately?
“Once we're done doing this work for the restoration here, the underground crews and others and engineers, everybody in this building, are looking at the entire downtown system and looking for opportunities to see if there's any equipment or any sort of situation that looks like it could lead to another outage,” Kelly said.
KHON2 wanted to know where else could be at risk? We asked, are there similar areas that are equally as vulnerable as downtown has been?
“This downtown network is unique to Hawaii and only on this island,” Tamayo explained. “It was only initially built to serve the financial community similar to on the mainland, obviously they have a much broader customer base in their financial district. This is unique to HECO. We have similar equipment but the way it's configured, it's unique.”