East Oahu power failure hits during Super Bowl

About 62 people in East Oahu remained without power at about 9 p.m. yesterday and were expected to be in the dark for several more hours as crews tried to repair the problem.

A Hawaiian Electric Co. underground cable fault caused the outage at about 3 p.m., said Jan Loose, HECO spokeswoman.

The outage affected 1,045 customers during the second half of the Super Bowl from Hawaii Kai to Kaimuki. About 700 customers had power back in 45 minutes, Loose said.

Crews were working in Black Point last night near the end of Hunakai Street to fix the problem.

The power failure also affected about 2,000 Oceanic Time Warner Cable customers in Kaimuki, said Norman Santos, Oceanic's vice president for operations.

Oceanic crews tried to back up power with their own trucks, but the problem was just too widespread, Santos said.

Santos said most people no longer have rooftop antennas, so he was doubtful they could see the game without cable.