Big Island Hawaii Electric Light Company is trying to determine what caused a sudden loss of power that affected 20,822 Big Island customers yesterday.
power loss
baffles officials
The sudden outage affected 20,822
customers across the islandStar-Bulletin staff
Power was out about two hours in communities across the island after 31.5 megawatts of the 133 megawatts on the HELCO power system were disconnected without warning at 10:43 a.m. by Hamakua Energy Partners, the company said.
"The sudden loss of generation prompted automatic disconnection of 11,436 customers in varied locations throughout the island."
Additional generation was added by 11:02 a.m. and power was restored to 8,562 of the customers.
The company decided at 12:05 p.m. to disconnect 9,386 customers in the Puna and Kahaluu areas to restore power to the 2,874 customers remaining without service since 10:43 a.m. in the Kealia and Huehue areas.
Power was restored to all those affected by 12:47 p.m. after Hamakua Energy Partners repaired the problem with the generators.
Police and fire officials reported no problems during the outage.