LIHU‘E – The County of Kaua‘i experienced an island-wide power outage on Thursday afternoon, with the failure attributed to a malfunction with a Port Allen power generator.
The outage lasted for roughly one hour, beginning at 2 p.m., and ending with full power being restored at around 3:20 p.m., according to Beth Amaro, a member services and communications manager with Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC), the company in charge of the island’s electricity.
Based on feedback, Amaro said residents and businesses experienced a loss of power for some time between 25 minutes and one hour.
The Port Allen Station is a diesel power plant that powers most of the island’s electricity needs.
“One of our generation units at our Port Allen generating station lost power, and so it caused the system to trip and it caused an island-wide outage,” said Amaro an interview with The Garden Island. “So everyone was out of power until we could restart the generator.”
Amaro said all power “should be back up” during the approximately 3:30 p.m. interview, but she was not sure about what caused the generator to trip.
“It was probably some type of an equipment malfunction. I mean, we do have, you know, high security at the plant.”
Amaro noted that KIUC experiences outages from time to time, but she called an entire island-wide outage a pretty rare event.
“We’ll have to look into it and see what happened and do what we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” she said.
“We appreciate everybody’s patience. We were posting updates on our Facebook page and we had a whole lot of people looking at that and commenting on us. We’re happy that our crews were able to get the power restored so quickly.”
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Emma Grunwald, reporter, can be reached 808-652-0638 or egrunwald@thegardenisland.com.
