Three-Hour Blackout Hits Kaua'i

December 16, 2003
By TOM FINNEGAN - TGI Staff Writer

Alarm clocks were blinking with that ominous "12:00" when many Kauaians woke up yesterday morning, as the entire island suffered a three-hour blackout at 12:22 a.m. Monday.

An insulator, a porcelain support cylinder that holds a 57,000-watt wire from touching the poles and other wires, broke last night at the Lydgate substation, causing the outage, said Gary Peers, vice president of production at Kaua'i Island Utility Cooperative.

"There was a dead short," when the insulator broke sent one wire arching towards another, said Peers. As a result, all the breakers were tripped, and the lights went down.

"The island went totally black," said Ann Barnes, communications coordinator for KIUC.

Since KIUC's trouble-shooting system, SCADA, was down as well, all linemen were paged, and sent to the substations, said Peers.

"By radio, they started closing breakers," said a tired Peers, who, with many other KIUC employees had been up since the outage.

KIUC then started their back-ups, and got some of the island's electricity back online within 30 minutes, said Peers.
But it took until 3:02 a.m. to get the whole system back on again, said Barnes.

"We finished restoring (the system) by 8 a.m.," said Peers. "Close to normal configuration" was back by then.
By then, though, alarm clocks were blinking and computers were failing.

The Kapa'a branch of the Kaua'i Community Federal Credit Union was forced to do all transactions manually, as their computer systems were down most of the day, said Rosemarie Narito, a financial services representative for KCFCU. Online and telephone banking, and the other branches, were not affected, said Narito.
"It's taking a little more time to get through" at Kapa'a, she said.

American Savings Bank, meanwhile, had all their machines running by the beginning of the business day, said Edie Barba, assistant operations supervisor at the Lihu'e branch.

One of their machines was down when employees got to work, but it was running by the time they opened their doors, she said.

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