Islandwide power outage strikes Kauai

LIHUE — Traffic lights turned off Sunday around 1:15 p.m. as an islandwide power outage struck Kauai.

Businesses closed down temporarily as people managed the highways and streets without the aid of stop lights.

Kauai Island Utility Cooperative announced the outage via their Facebook page, stating, “There’s an outage impacting most areas of the island. We are still diagnosing the problem and expect that it will be a minimum 2 hours before power is restored. We will provide more information as it becomes available.”

Power in Lihue came back on around 3:30 p.m., and the cause of the power outage was still unknown as of press time.

“We have restored roughly 30 percent of our island’s load and we continue efforts to restore power to remaining members,” KUIC wrote on their Facebook page at 3:44 p.m. Sunday.

Reports of traffic accidents circulated over social media during the power outage as 72,000 residents and thousands more visitors coped with the loss of electricity.

The last power outage of this proportion came in November of 2018 when a technical problem occurred with KUIC.