HELCO

[Gus]

Power has now been out 5 hours in OLE. Is there a Helco site that gives any information about outages? I’m used to the mainland, where they simply lie, but at least you have hope!

[DaVinci]

Google Helco. They have a website. Call the outage number. Listen to the dumb music for 10 minutes and then tell the nice lady that you don’t have any power. It is of course, storm related... possibly confined to Orchidland... but if you call you can give them your number and they’ll call you back when the engineers decide they’ve fixed the problem. If you don’t have power, you can inform the engineers that their work is not yet done.

Also, now that you live in Hawaii, advise that you purchase a generator. We are the frontier. You must be prepared to take care of yourself! Aloha!

[kimo wires]

HELLco. No power North of Orchidland store(including store and minit stop, for 6 hours ! UGH... Widespread outage. Got my generator running again and at least can keep fridge cold. I want to take a shower but no hot water !

[Gus]

I did Google and came up with no information. Eventually I called and listened to the recording. She started naming places without power and the list was endless. I knew there was no hope. She said hours, that was at 6 PM, and I believe her. I have a generator. It came with the house. I started it, it ran for 6 minutes, then stopped. That was enough time to get my hopes up, as it took 5 minutes for the internet and Directv to start, then stop. I startedit every 5 minutes a dozen or so times, until it finally worked.thing again. It did this 5 minute trick 10 times, it realized I wasn’t giving up, and finally it started. And as I wrote tnat sentence, the power came on. Hallelujah!

[TomK]

Apparently, there were about 3000 lightning strikes from today's thunderstorms, so in this case, I would cut Helco some slack, I'm fairly sure their crews would have been overwhelmed. The strikes also did quite a job on observatory instrumentation at the MK summit as well...

[kimo wires]

Tom's right. We are pretty lucky lately with the Hurricanes missing us.Could be a lot worse.
I think I'm going to buy a better generator.
Typical though. I dug out the generator. Had to go for Gas in Pahoa because Orchidland stores were closed. Ambling around in the dark for a while getting everything set up then bam. Power comes on.

[TomK]

Gus - Helco also has a twitter account which tends to be a little more up-to-date and informative when things go bad:

https://twitter.com/hielectriclight?lang=en

(You don't need to have a twitter account to read it).

However, they didn't mention OLA until power was restored, but as I said earlier, I suspect they were extremely busy and the amount of info they could put out was just overwhelming.

[leilanidude]

HELCO generally knows who doesn't have power, within seconds of the outage, unless it is an individual customer issue that caused it such as the feed that is from the road to your house is

[Obie]

https://www.hawaiielectriclight.com/safe...er-outages

The twitter feed runs on the left side of this page.

[terracore]

We had a big explosion right above our house at the same time the power went out, so thought it might be more localized. I tried calling Helco but gave up after 15 minutes on hold. The wife later learned the hold time was 90 minutes (who waits that long?) and the outage was widespread. I put electricity just to critical systems (refrigerator, flat screen, internet) with our golf cart batteries (solar power gathering under dark skies was virtually zero) for about 6 hours when our pressure tank ran dry, so I started up the generator and ran it about 2 hours while the batteries charged and we had whole house power (ceiling fan was nice). Just as I was getting ready to switch back to battery power for the night the grid came back. Outage was almost exactly 8 hours.

"HELCO generally knows who doesn't have power, within seconds of the outage"

I used to never bother calling them because power outages always remedied themselves. Then one time our power was out for half a day, we had checked with a neighbor (also out) and figured Helco was "on it". But using the internet everybody else was reporting no outage. The neighbor called Helco who reported there were no outages so that they would send a truck out. Sure enough, it was just a tiny localized outage only affecting a few customers and they didn't know about it. They told us if the power goes out to report it, otherwise they never know.