5/2 Blackout Blamed on Lightning Storm, but HECO Doesn’t Bother To Share Any Details

Here’s the status of emergency communications in Honolulu as revealed in the May 2 lightening-induced power outage:

KSSK, the designated emergency broadcast station, continues to entertain us with listeners’ phone calls rather than inform us with aggressive reporting, and Hawaiian Electric Company doesn’t go out of its way to inform us either.

Whereas you’d expect communications expertise to increase over the years, just the opposite is happening in Honolulu. KSSK’s on-air personalities once actually engaged spokespersons in Q&A sessions to elicit information important to listeners, but that doesn’t happen anymore. (We’ve already riffed on KSSK’s deficiencies during emergencies.)

It now appears that Clear Channel’s news center records Hawaiian Electric’s spokesperson during blackouts, and that recording is later slotted into the stations’ programming when convenient.

As late as two-plus hours after the outages began today, HECO’s recorded message was telling us what we already knew or could surmise – that the outage was weather-related, that the company knows this is a really inconvenient time and that HECO crews are working as fast as they can to restore the power.

Tell Us What We DON’T Know!

We never learned or heard a hint of what the problem precisely was. HECO’s Ward Avenue nerve center has millions of dollars in computers and sensing equipment installed there. Personnel who operate the center are highly knowledgeable about the system – how it works, where the problems are, everything.

It is inconceivable two-plus hours after the blackout that they would not know the precise location of the lightning strike that presumably set off the chain of events that blacked out tens of thousands of homes. Not a word was offered to answer the biggest question of all: How long does HECO think we'll be in the dark?

So what’s going on? Who’s muzzling these knowledgeable professionals, and why?

This is just a guess, but it seems likely that there’s been an unfortunate internal philosophical shift away from openness with and accountability to the company’s customers. Those operating principles have been replaced by a circle-the-wagons mentality to protect the company’s interests.

Who’s Responsible for This?

I can’t imagine any professional on HECO’s corporate communications staff keeping the lid on the information flow as HECO so obviously has been doing during recent outages.

So the suspicion here is that corporate gate-keepers are closing down the communications flow to the media and the company's customers – HECO’s attorneys or investor relations managers or other executives who are simply clueless about the importance of customer communications.

During this evening’s outage, residents tuning in to the designated emergency broadcaster didn't hear anything substantive about the outage from HECO or anyone else. Instead, they heard an endless stream of phone calls from customers asking whether power was on here or there, or reporting on traffic conditions, or describing water spouts, etc.

What we didn’t hear was a Q&A by KSSK’s news staff with the National Weather Service, a Q&A with Hawaiian Electric’s spokesperson, a Q&A with the Honolulu Police Department, a Q&A with other emergency responders, etc. We essentially heard nothing that hinted of professional journalism, and we didn’t hear anything from HECO that we didn’t already know.

Unfortunately, there’s no evidence this sub-standard emergency communications performance by any of the responsible parties is about to change. We deserve better.