Power failures hit West Oahu

An unexplained power failure cut electricity to about 7,500 West Oahu customers yesterday morning and about 2,800 customers again in the evening.

Residents in Pearl City, Waipahu and Ocean Pointe in Ewa Beach lost power starting at about 3:45 a.m., said Hawaiian Electric Co. spokesman Darren Pai.

Power was incrementally returned before it was completely restored at 9:45 a.m. HECO was still investigating the cause of the outage.

Then shortly before 7 p.m., electricity was dropped from about 2,800 customers in parts of Pearl City and Waipahu. By 8:45 p.m., power had been restored.

Pai said HECO was trying to determine the cause both failures, and it was not known whether the first outage was related to the second.

“;We're still investigating, and we have troubleshooters working on it,”; he said.

Coast Guard rescuers busy

The Coast Guard airlifted two injured persons yesterday from Midway Atoll and dropped off supplies for an injured 65-year-old man at Kure Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

The three cases are unrelated, the Coast Guard said.

The Coast Guard received a call at 2 p.m. Tuesday that a 42-year-old crewman on the container vessel Kaoshiung was suffering from severe abdominal pains.

The ship was 450 miles northwest of Midway when the ship's master called for help. The Coast Guard sent a C-130 plane and met the man, who had been brought ashore.

The Coast Guard got a call at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday from the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources that one of its volunteers whose finger was reportedly crushed on Kure Atoll needed medical supplies, the Coast Guard said.

The C-130 was already headed for Midway when the Coast Guard was called to medically evacuate a 35-year-old man, a contractor on Midway, who had an infected wound.

The plane picked up the two men from Midway at noon and, on its way back, dropped off the supplies to the injured volunteer on Kure. The plane was scheduled to return to Honolulu last night.

HPU gets funds to teach English

The U.S. State Department is giving Hawaii Pacific University $472,000 to develop English-language teaching materials for use overseas and to host a Summer Institute next summer for 26 English-language teachers from other countries.

HPU announced the grant in a news release.

The project is being managed by Sandra McKay, an HPU visiting professor in the College of International Studies.

The classroom materials will illustrate the diversity of American life and promote English-language learning and cross-cultural awareness, the university said. HPU will revise and expand teaching materials that have already been developed by the State Department's Office of English Language Programs.