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Showing posts from May, 2011

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 al