HECO Briefing Reveals Resolve To NOT Tell Public About Changes in Its Communications

Hawaiian Electric Company’s question-and-answer session at the State Capitol yesterday may have been captivating to the Public Utilities Commission staffers and retired engineers in the audience. Beyond them, I’m not sure it shed much light on what the public wants to know. Coverage today in The Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser suggests as much.

As we see it, the public deserves to know more that just the technical reasons why the whole island went black on October 15th and stayed that way for a dozen or more hours for most of us.

Ninety minutes of talk about which generators and transmission lines tripped when and why on Oahu, Maui and the Big Island had a numbing effect.

The non-technical members of the public – that’s 99 percent of us – probably want to know this: “What has HECO done in the past week to improve its communications to the public in a major power emergency?” The next one could happen at any moment, and when it does, few would welcome a repeat of Earthquake Sunday’s information blackout.

The public didn’t get any answers about that at the briefing. Even when asked directly about what the company has done to improve the information flow to the public, the answers weren’t forthcoming. It even seemed HECO’s representatives were determined to avoid answering.

“We’re Not Going to Talk About That”

The impression was confirmed after the session ended in side conversations with HECO’s communications staff members. They said they have no intention to tell the public what the company is doing to improve public communications. One rep defended that stand by saying: “The only thing the public wants to know is when will I get my power back on.”

That’s all the public wants to know? We don’t want to know why there’s an emergency, what the sequence might be to restore power, what the company’s advice is on protecting sensitive equipment, what it has done to correct the communications problems? We only want to know when MY power will come back on?

Continuing, these communicators said they’re not going to talk in public about why information was so slow in coming on October 15. The reason, it seems, is that doing so might not be appreciated by some of the weaker links in the communication chain to the public beyond HECO.

All of this is discouraging to say the least. I had doubted whether a post to CHORE about the technology-oriented Q&A session would be worthwhile. That all changed when HECO’s strategy was revealed to keep the lid on its communications assessment and what it’s doing to improve the information flow.

This is especially ironic because company officials said yesterday the one thing they know they could have improved during the blackout was their communication with the public, yet how they're working to do that was the one thing they resolutely refused to discuss.

More than nuts-and-bolts lessons about communicating with customers has been forgotten over the years at the electric company.

Aftershocks

The Saturday post to CHORE had a reference to the press conference State Adjutant General Robert Lee held on Friday afternoon. The location was previously announced to be the Lingle campaign headquarters on Kapiolani Boulevard. Word now comes that it wasn't in the headquarters; it was in the headquarters' parking lot. Well, that clears it up.