Will Thursday's Papers Answer this Question?

Three days of newspaper journalism and one 30-minute TV special have failed to answer the one question that Hawaiian Electric Company ultimately must address about why it lost power throughout Oahu after Sunday's earthquake.

HECO's representative managed not to answer it tonight in KGMB-TV's special, even though it was put to him in a pretty direct manner. Here it is:

Why did HECO's computer system select the "dump the generators" option instead of the "shed the customers" option on Sunday morning when the load suddenly exceeded the carrying capacity of the power plants?

Surely both options were available in the moment it took for the computers to decide what to do. Load shedding is a legitimate option, and had it been exercised, the hours-long outage would not have occurred.

HECO's infamous "Black Wednesday" outage of July 13, 1983 was caused by an all-generator shutdown after HECO's circuit breakers failed to react quickly enough to isolate a fault on a 138,000-volt transmission line in Ewa. A thorough engineering study concluded the relays had been set to react too slowly and that the shutdown was necessary to protect the generators.

Will the study of "Earthquake Sunday" reach the same conclusion, or will it find that the load-shedding option could have and should have been chosen? More to the immediate point, when will journalists ask -- repeatedly, if necessary -- why HECO's system selected a path that debilitated our entire island?

Maybe the "ask" should go higher up HECO's organization.