Lihu‘e was hit with sporadic power outages yesterday shortly after 11:30 in the morning. Lights flickered in many businesses, and some facilities lost power to portions of their buildings. “At the Lihu‘e switchyard, there are multiple circuits and various loads,”
Lihu‘e was hit with sporadic power outages yesterday shortly after 11:30 in the morning.
Lights flickered in many businesses, and some facilities lost power to portions of their buildings. “At the Lihu‘e switchyard, there are multiple circuits and various loads,” said Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative Production Manager Brad Rockwell. “There are three transformers and one of the transformers failed so it affected about a third of Lihu‘e.”
At the offices of The Garden Island, half of the building went dark before the whole building lost power. At the 76 Gas Station next door, there were no problems.
“(The failure) only affected one phase of the three phases that come through one of the three transformers,” Rockwell said. “That’s why some facilities had partial power flickering.”
The utility focused its initial troubleshooting on getting the most critical areas, including Wilcox Memorial Hospital, switched to another circuit. Rockwell said it was approximately 50 minutes before everyone was back with power.
Utility crews were able to reroute the load to other circuits while they figured out how to repair the down transformer. “We don’t fully know yet how it happened, but there should be no more outages while we repair it,” Rockwell said.
