HONOLULU (KHON2) — Thousands of people across Hawaii were without power early Friday, Jan. 31 morning, but Hawaiian Electric has made progress in some areas while the storm moves on to impact others.
According to Hawaiian Electric spokesperson Darren Pai, the wind brought a wide variety of problems with the electric system.
“We saw a lot of instances where we had tree branches breaking off, and contacting power lines or trees getting blown into power lines. And so our crews were very busy, throughout the night, and they’re continuing working on addressing all those problems and restoring power. We’ve made significant progress in that effort.”
Despite the progress, the storm continues to bring strong rain and wind to the eastern portion of the state, particularly Hawaii Island.
“I do wanna just caution that, you know, we have seen the the number of customers affected go up and down,” Pai said. “Because the weather was just so severe, we would restore power in one area, and then the weather would move on and it would disrupt power in another area. So we have seen the numbers kind of fluctuate up and down over the last day or so. But we wanna assure our customers that we’re on the job, that we have our crews working out there, and they’re doing their best to get their power back on as quickly as possible.”
If you see something down, Pai would like residents to take the time to notify HECO.
“We urge our customers to stay safe. If you see any damaged electrical equipment or a downed power line or anything, don’t approach it. You can call it into our trouble line. We just also want them to know that our crews are continuing to work. They’re trying to be as safe as possible to make sure that they can do their jobs and come home safely and protect the public and get their lights on as quickly as possible.”
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HECO has outage maps available for Oahu, Maui County and Hawaii Island. KIUC has an outage map available for Kauai.