Lights out? No big deal

Sunday’s islandwide power outage had little impact on most businesses.

Diann Hartman, spokeswoman for the Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort &Spa, said the resort is ready for outages.

They have a generator backup that kicks on immediately to power many needed areas. Guestroom door locks are on batteries so guests are still able to come and go. Restaurants switch to a manual system of writing down orders and can only do room charges.

“The power wasn’t out for very long here so there was no real inconvenience,” she said Monday.

Melissa McFerrin Warrack, Kukui Grove Center spokeswoman, said the power outage did not have any major impacts there.

Merchants have different ways of dealing with a power outage, she said. Some have backup generators ready to go and they stay open, while others have protocol that calls for closing their doors.

She said business owners are generally well prepared for such outages, and shoppers take them in stride.

“It was a beautiful day, everyone was in good spirits and got back to business as quickly as possible,” she said.

KIUC’s utilized rolling outages Monday and was expected to this morning to meet demand.

In Hanalei, businesses was brisk due to rains as people left the beach behind and turned to town for food and shopping.

A rolling outage shut down electricity for about half an hour about 11:30 a.m. Monday Some shop owners closed completely during that time as their point-of-sale systems stopped working.

Kelli Bowen, owner of Hula Beach Botique and Sarang Shop, dodged that problem because her store is still using older cash registers.

In fact, Bowen said Hanalei’s morning blackout didn’t do anything to dissuade her customers and she made a $200 sale while the lights were out.

“People were coming in, shopping in the dark,” she said. “We just have a regular cash register so it didn’t affect us too much. There was not credit card machine, so it was just cash or we were taking credit card numbers.”