HONOLULU — All electrical power was restored to the downtown Honolulu-Chinatown area on Thursday afternoon after an outage that began Monday night shut down businesses and traffic signals, and affected countless thousands of residents and workers.
Hawaiian Electric Co. crews completed “all the major repairs needed to restore customers in the Chinatown and downtown Honolulu areas that were impacted by Monday’s outage” at about 3:45 p.m., company officials said.
“This is a very unusual situation to have an outage of this duration outside of a storm situation,” Jim Kelly, Hawaiian Electric vice president of government and community relations and corporate communications, said at a news conference just before full service was restored.
“We know this has had an effect on all kinds of businesses — in particular, Chinatown, a lot of bars and restaurants and lei shops and a lot of small businesses — that this is having a big impact on them, and it’s very disruptive.”
According to the company, a Monday night fire damaged underground power cables and equipment, resulting in an outage that initially affected around 3,000 customer accounts in the Chinatown area. Many of those accounts were for buildings and condominiums.
About 2,400 customers had their power restored on Tuesday night.
But as crews continued to try to restore service to the remaining 600 customers late Wednesday night, power was shut off again for about 3,000 customer accounts after an “arc flash inside a manhole … set back repair efforts.” Power for 2,400 customer accounts was restored again Thursday morning, and for the remaining 600 later that afternoon.
While officials said it is still unknown what initiated the fire Monday night, they are “pretty certain that it was something within the system,” Kelly said, adding that foul play is not suspected.
“We’re still doing the forensics to figure out what initiated (the fire), but we do know that it was some kind of electrical failure that propagated to a fire and then subsequently caused collateral damage to equipment within the manhole,” said Hawaiian Electric Vice President of Energy Delivery Rudy Tamayo at the news conference.
This week’s outage was the second in less than a week in the downtown-Chinatown area. Power went off to 900 customer accounts for most of June 13, shutting down traffic signals, office buildings, condominiums and government buildings including the state Capitol. Hawaiian Electric officials noted last week that many of those 900 customer accounts were “master-metered office buildings and condominiums that have hundreds of tenants.”
The June 13 outage was caused by an “overload of power” at the Iwilei substation, following an outage between Bishop and Mililani streets the day before, Hawaiian Electric officials said.
The system of underground circuits in downtown was “built to serve the financial community” in that area, Tamayo said, and is the only system configured in this way. Installed between the 1950s and ’60s, the system is a network of manholes through which the cables are connected throughout the downtown area.
Tamayo said Hawaiian Electric has an underground inspection program and that the manholes and downtown system were being monitored but that he was unsure whether the fault that caused Monday’s fire could have been detected.
“We do monitor the manholes, but a fault like this, I can’t say that we could have detected this,” Tamayo told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “We have instrumentation and meters that feed this area, (but) the way it faulted, it was probably instantaneous.”
Moving forward, Tamayo said, the company will be “accelerating” upgrade work to improve the reliability of the downtown system — a process that will likely last for years.
“Work continues to replace one of the main transformers as we speak, and we’re hoping to get that installed within the next few months. That will restore the capability of the substation to serve that area,” Tamayo said. “We will continue to look for improvements so we can secure the system and continue to provide reliable power to the folks in downtown.”
With the power back on, residents and small-business owners in Chinatown are shifting their attention to filing claims with Hawaiian Electric for compensation.
“Over the past four days, our teams have been speaking with very many customers, and we understand the personal and financial pain that this outage is causing our customers,” Hawaiian Electric Vice President of Customer Service Brendan Bailey said at the news conference.
Bailey said customers with damage or loss related to the outage can submit a claim on Hawaiian Electric’s website and that each claim will be looked at on a case-by-case basis.
“It’s a process. You won’t know right away whether or not things can be paid, but it will definitely go through the process,” Bailey said.
But there are concerns among the community about getting these resources to all who live and work in the area — some of whom do not speak English and might have trouble finding resources.
“There’s a language issue,” said Chu Lan Shubert- Kwock, president of the Chinatown Business & Community Association. “Most of the Chinatown merchants are very poor at English, and they don’t understand the system of filing a claim.”
Shubert-Kwock said many of the merchants are Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants who are “not English- educated.”
“I don’t know if there’s been any outreach to those individuals (who don’t speak English),” said Leonard Kam, president of Chinatown 808. “I think they’re probably getting secondhand information from those who are bilingual that are able to communicate that to them. I think it’s really detrimental to the residents who live there because they’re in the dark, literally and figuratively.”
Shubert-Kwock said that while the CBCA tries to help people with this language barrier as much as they can, there’s a “limit to how much they can do.”
“This is something (policymakers) have to put out a PSA on, to get bilingual people to come out to the streets, in Chinatown particularly,” Shubert-Kwock said. “We just want people to know how to file a claim and how to get emergency help.”
Kam said that because the situation was so sudden, there are few initiatives in place to help residents and business owners with language barriers.
“I think this is one of those, ‘Oh my gosh, what just happened?’ and there’s nothing in place. There’s no protocol, really,” Kam said. “The residents there are probably the ones who have the least amount of touch points with the agencies or people that could help them.”
Following the outages this week, Kam said, the community has seen “more of a push for groups to try to generate mass interest in going back to Chinatown and patronize the businesses that have been suffering” over the past few days.
City Council member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam and Downtown/Chinatown Neighborhood Board Chair Ernest Caravalho will host a community walk in the area Saturday morning to “bring positive attention” to the area.
“The recent blackouts caused significant challenges for businesses in Downtown and Chinatown,” Caravalho said in a news release. “It’s important that we as the people of Honolulu unite in solidarity for those that have been hit hard.”
“Our small businesses are hurting,” Dos Santos-Tam said in the release. “We need to support them, we need to help them bounce back.”
With this push, Kam said he thinks there will be a “trickle down effect” from businesses to residents.
“We are trying to get the word out for people to visit Chinatown and spend time and spend money there and help out those businesses that have been affected,” Kam said. “It helps not only (the small businesses), but also residents.”
