LIHUE — Kauai’s wild chicken population has been known to keep local residents and visitors up nights.
Only once in the history of the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, however, has one of the feral fowl been responsible for knocking out power for nearly half the island.
“The chicken didn’t survive the encounter with our high voltage equipment,” KIUC spokesman Jim Kelly said.
The outage occurred at 6:32 p.m. Sunday, when a chicken got into co-op equipment at the Kapaa switchyard, tripping the circuit breakers. The facility is located just off Kuhio Highway, near the Kapaa Shopping Center.
Kelly said the outage spanned from Kapaa to Haena and affected about 13,000 of KIUC’s 30,000 customers. It marks the first major outage since the islandwide outage in May, which resulted from a failed fuel valve at KIUC’s Port Allen Generating Station.
While other critters, including rats and cats, have caused outages in the past on Kauai, Sunday’s incident involving a chicken is a first in KIUC’s history.
“It’s extremely unusual,” Kelly said.
Unable to close the circuit breaker automatically, KIUC workers responded to the facility where they found the bird lodged in equipment 30 feet off the ground. Kelly said they had to use a pole to remove the bird before manually closing the breakers. Power was restored at 7:40 p.m., 68 minutes after it went out.
While Mainland electricity companies have been known to have issues with squirrels, Kelly said Kauai can now add chickens to its list.
He said KIUC extends an apology for the inconvenience, especially in light of Sunday’s hot and muggy weather conditions, and worked hard to restore power as quickly as possible.
Chris D’Angelo, environment writer, can be reached at 245-0441 or cdangelo@thegardenisland.com.
