LIHUE — Traffic lights turned off Sunday around 1:15 p.m. as an islandwide power outage struck Kauai.
Businesses closed down temporarily as people managed the highways and streets without the aid of stop lights.
Kauai Island Utility Cooperative announced the outage via their Facebook page, stating, “There’s an outage impacting most areas of the island. We are still diagnosing the problem and expect that it will be a minimum 2 hours before power is restored. We will provide more information as it becomes available.”
Power in Lihue came back on around 3:30 p.m., and the cause of the power outage was still unknown as of press time.
“We have restored roughly 30 percent of our island’s load and we continue efforts to restore power to remaining members,” KUIC wrote on their Facebook page at 3:44 p.m. Sunday.
Reports of traffic accidents circulated over social media during the power outage as 72,000 residents and thousands more visitors coped with the loss of electricity.
The last power outage of this proportion came in November of 2018 when a technical problem occurred with KUIC.
Would be great if KIUC put up more informative online status statements sooner–like in real time, and with updates. For one thing it would limit tying up their phone lines–unless they’re down, like today’s were. I know there’s an outage “map” showing the %-age of zip codes affected (minimally useful) but a quickly posted communique giving a preliminary idea of the length and severity of the outage would be most helpful toward planning your strategies, near and long term. Visitors, our core economy, need to plan for activities and flights. Maybe keep some of that credit you give us and work on it. That, and maybe a back-up system for traffic lights.
As usual, nothing in this article that isn’t on Facebook. How about actually reporting and doing research on the cause of the outage? We can read press releases online. Geez.
Citizan Cane… KIUC and the County were actually pretty quick on posting updates yesterday on FB. Not sure where else they would post it. KIUC needs to get on it tho, this is only going to get worse with the amount of construction going on. They need to really get ahead of this problem.
Please remember that during these outages any traffic light that is completely out should be treated as a four way stop. Saw too many people who were on the highway whizzing through dead lights in Lihue yesterday, which is an accident waiting to happen. I stopped at a dead light yet the person in the lane next to me came up from behind and never slowed down, went right through it. Very dangerous!!! Mahalo!!
Where would the generators be located? This looks island wide because one main generator blew out.