HECO Says No More Quake-Caused Outages; Communication Failures Still Not Discussed

Today’s Honolulu Advertiser front-pages Hawaiian Electric’s bold assurance that earthquake-caused massive power outages are a thing of the past (“Quake outage won’t recur, HECO says”).

The story’s sidebar lists three technical problems (Problem 1, Problem 2, etc.) that address the equipment and procedural failures that produced the prolonged blackout on October 15th.

But Problem 4 is missing from the list – the company’s failure to communicate effectively with the public until well into the outage. Unless we’ve missed it, HECO has yet to explain what it has done to fix Problem 4, which has been CHORE's focus all along.

A host of communications failures that day – not just by HECO but at State Civil Defense and many broadcast outlets – made Earthquake Sunday worse for most people. Frustration can turn to anger when the public is left in information limbo.

HECO’s reluctance to discuss these matters is puzzling. Company officials brushed off questions about the communications problems when asked about them at the October 23rd open meeting at the State Capitol, and they don't seem to have talked about them in public since.

A HECO spokeswoman is quoted in today's story: “In wake of the outage, we’ve had many lessons learned and there have been many meetings at all levels of the company, from the executive level down to the detailed operations level.”

If any of those meetings covered public communications issues, we’ve yet to hear much if anything about them. It can’t hurt Hawaiian Electric to be as open about Problem 4 and it seems willing (or required) to be with Problems 1 through 3.

Problem 4 made 1-3 worse.