A firefighter doused a fire yesterday in a transformer at the pump station in Niu Valley.
Niu fire and power
failure coincide
A fire scorched the rear of the Board of Water Supply's booster station in Niu Valley yesterday after an electric transformer overheated.
Firefighters were called to the station on Haleola Street at 11:03 a.m. The blaze was smothered using carbon dioxide gas at 11:26 a.m.
Water service was not affected.
The cause of the fire is under investigation, and a damage estimate has yet to be determined.
At about the same time, a power failure affected about 100 Niu Valley customers.
Lynne Unemori, spokeswoman for Hawaiian Electric Co., said a tangled overhead line on Haleola Street caused the outage. Workers untangled the line and restored service to customers at 1:40 p.m.
Power at the water pumping station was expected to be restored once the transformer was replaced and repairs to the cables that feed the transformer were completed.
The booster station feeds a nearby reservoir that supplies water to area customers, said Board of Water Supply spokeswoman Tracy Burgo.
"We had adequate storage in our reservoir when this happened," Burgo said.
Workers had set up an emergency pumper yesterday to boost water from the station up to a reservoir if the water level dropped.
