Where were you when the lights went out?

The ball dropped a little early in the Dicus aerie in Wild West Waikiki. Not the Times Square ball, but the small blue globe my dad gave me for Christmas last year. About the size of a baseball, it floats in the air, held in place by an electromagnet, rotating clockwise or otherwise according to the prevailing wind in the condo. It fell Friday when the electricity went out, though I didn't notice that until hours later. Where were you when the lights went out? If you're too young to remember that phrase, that was what everyone said after the massive power outage that started in Canada and blacked out the entire Northeastern United States on Nov. 9, 1965. It was also the title of a 1968 movie (Doris Day, Patrick O'Neal, Robert Morse, Terry-Thomas, Lola Albright and Jim Backus) whose plot occurred during the outage. And the song that was the theme of the movie, sung by the Lettermen. I was in my home office, which commands views of Waikiki, Kaimuki, Manoa and Punchbowl, so I could see the outage was a big one and that traffic was gridlocked almost immediately on King, Kalakaua, Kapiolani and McCully. Bernadette was at Sam's Club, where they were surprisingly unprepared for a blackout. She waited there for more than hour before braving the traffic home, then downstairs waiting for her son David to be rescued. David, a fifth grader. was with me until his dad arrived downstairs to pick him up. He had the misfortune to be riding in the elevator when the power went dead. He and a woman were stuck for hours, nowhere close to a door to get out, because our building has one bank of elevators for lower floors and another for upper, and they were in the intervening area where the only doors are on the other bank. David's dad, by the way, was driving past Honolulu airport when he saw a spectacular lightning strike on a HECO power line and then Kalihi went dark. He watched the outage spread as he drove the rest of the way to Waikiki. How prepared were you for this? I got an old telephone from Hawaiian Telcom, the kind that draws power through the phone line itself and works during a blackout unless Telcom has its own separate emergency, which it didn't. But I hadn't plugged it in. Fortunately my Verizon Wireless cell phone still worked fine, which also meant I knew what time it was. I have a crank radio but found it had been broken -- a certain fifth grader and I will be discussing this topic. It was a big, noisy, old one -- they make better ones now that also provide light if desired. As it happens, thanks to Bernadette, this wasn't a problem. She has long wanted to use emergency batteries to power fans at the farmer's market, and bought one, asking me to test it out at home to see what it would do and for how long. We had charged it fully. It has a built-in line that is quite bright, and two regular power outlets. I plugged in a lamp and a portable TV-radio. It lasted all night and used less than two thirds of its stored power. KSSK was on the air. Initially its coverage was sloppy, with the on-air personnel interrupting callers, even official sources with new information, but later Perry & Price got to the station and proved once again that they deserve their premiere spots in the local radio scene. Perry manages to keep thing moving and extract useful information even from people whose natural inclination is to babble. Price is funny, disarming even Gov. Lingle, whose witty side I have seen in private but never gotten her to display on the air. Most importantly, both stay calm. The initial word from Hawaiian Electric was that we had dodged a bullet -- the Kahe power station had kept running, so the system wouldn't have to be cold-started, which, as we learned after the Oct. 15, 2006 earthquake, takes hours. A couple hours later the story had changed. The Kahe plant had also gone down, and the power would be out all night. As we would learn later, it was worse even than that: sewage plants in Wahiawa and at Sand Island had problems and discharged incompletely treated wastewater into Lake Wilson and into the ocean outflow pipe. Waikikians took it well at first. Visitors howled and bayed at the sky like dogs. Hilton Hawaiian Village lit up the sky by proceeding with its regular Friday night fireworks. Traffic jams provided plenty of emergency lighting. The police mobilized pretty fast to direct traffic and did a good job, their first priority making sure nobody hit pedestrians crossing streets in the dark. Stores reacted unevenly. The 7-Eleven across the street simply closed. The ABC Store allowed three people at a time to come in and make purchases. The Smokehouse bar on Hobron gamely sold hotdogs all evening. When Bernadette bought a bunch for the people rescuing David from the elevator, the proprietess was content with a promise to pay some of the money the next day (and on Saturday tried unsuccessfully to convince Bernadette to pay less than the full price). Otis Elevator repair people came fast after one of the building guards mentioned that there were people stuck. David handled the crisis manfully, though he likes to talk about stuff he learns from The Military Channel and his older companion may have been traumatized. When we woke up Saturday morning, the whir of the bathroom fan was my first clue that the electricity was back born. This was pleasant. It was, I'm sure, far less pleasant for people whose juice didn't come back on until noon or later. A year after the earthquake I had a Hawaiian Electric spokesman on to find out what was learned in the company's allegedly exhaustive review of its actions after the quake. I knew there was internal debate among HECO operations managers about whether to do a faster restart -- some felt they could not safely have moved any faster than they did, while others felt there were ways to move more quickly -- and I assumed they would announce some kind of modification of their procedures, even if only incremental. Instead, I got precisely the same response the company had given two days after the outage, which was that they were reviewing their procedures. It will be interesting in coming days to hear whether HECO is still reviewing its procedures. It may be that they simply decided there is no way they can do this faster but they're loath to come out and say that. I think this is understandable. The public has been given a reasonable explanation for Hawaii power outages to take longer when entire grids shut down, but not why it takes several times longer. I'm not saying there is no explanation, only that we haven't heard it. What I've heard so far, applied to the Friday outage, would justify an outage in which some people started to get their lights back around midnight and the stragglers were reconnected by dawn. In the meantime, my own personal outage preparedness needs work. I have to get a new crank radio. I want another DieHard Portable Power Unit. Oh, and more sardines. Man cannot live exclusively on the candy one gets for Christmas. And bottled water that isn't kept in the refrigerator, since the refrigerator keeps cool for a day only if you don't open it. In the case of HECO it remains to be seen, but I definitely dropped the ball.

Comments

[Marvo]

I remember seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder and then thinking to myself, "I think the power is going to go out." so I shut off my computer and waited. Sure enough, the power went out. Fortunately,I had a flashlight and crank light with a USB port so I could charge my iPod if needed via cranking.

I think I'm going to go buy some candles.