Hawaii Power Blackout Emergency Preparedness Tech Grades: Is There an F-?

A little over two years ago we had an earthquake in these parts that resulted in a statewide power outage and a demonstration of the inability of the electric company on Oahu, the State government and the City&County government to provide timely information to a public literally in the dark.

A Tiny Taste of "Jericho": Tech Grades After an Earthquake

We had an island wide (Oahu only) blackout starting at 6:30pm Friday evening. About 50% of the people were back on the grid about 12 hours later. For me it was 21.5 hours off of the power grid. So, what was the result of 2 years and 2 months of learning and preparing from a tech perspective? I provide my 2006 grades and comments along with 2008 commentary below.

2006 - B+: Designated emergency information commercial radio station. It took about 30 minutes to get useful information on the air. Once they did though, they get an A+ for basically being the only information source available.

2008 - B: The first live person on the air came from another radio station to be the voice of the designated emergency information commercial radio station. The poor guy didn't have any more information than the rest of us. But, I thought he did a good job of being a calming voice and trying to provide info as it came in. The FM radio station was off air for many hours because of (if I recall correctly) a tripped circuit breaker that had to be manually reset. The AM radio station stayed on air.

2006 - B+ : Telephone company (wireline). I may be biased here. I spent the 90s working for a large telco. The lines stayed up. The all circuits busy message was expected (at least by me). The people who thought their phones weren’t working probably had a phone that required A/C power. Folks, get a cheap phone that can be powered from the phone line. It will still ring when the power goes out.

2008 - B+: Telephone company (wireline). It kept working. My phone rang for incoming calls. I could make outgoing calls Nuff said. My neighbor with a voice line from the cable TV company was out of service right away.

2006 - C- : Electric company. No lines down or damage to any generation plant. But, the complexity of the infrastructure only allows them to restore power to less than half their customers 12 hours later. What would happen if one or more of the power plants was taken out by a hurricane or more nefarious forces?

2008 - C-, maybe a D+: No reason given yet for the blackout. There was some lightning and associated thunder. There was heavy rain in spots (my area remained dry throughout), and I didn't note any wind warning. One saving grace is that the electric company had a well-spoken rep in the radio station for much of the evening providing what little information he had.

2008 - F: Neither State nor City & County Civil Defense said anything until 7:45pm, a full one hour and 15 minutes after the blackout began. When various officials came out, they said the same thing someone else had mentioned 10 minutes earlier. Repetitive and uninformative. They did not provide mobile browser friendly web sites that people could check using a mobile phone. Or, if they did, I never heard it mentioned while listening to the radio continuously for hours. There was no evidence to the public (me) that anything had improved in 2 years.

2006 - F : T-Mobile’s voice and data service went down soon after the power went out. Other cellular services (Cingular, Sprint PCS, Verizon Wireless) stayed up. I called T-Mobile the next day (Monday) to ask what happened. The response was something about tower problems? What? All the towers? According to people calling in to the radio station and face-to-face discussions, the service went out all over the island of Oahu. I don’t buy this so-called tower explantation. I also don’t get much satisfaction since they only offered to add minutes to my plan as compensation. I don’t need more minutes. I’ve got plenty of minutes. I need a viable explanation for the failure of their service.

2008 - F: T-Mobile voice and data service went down and stayed down for the duration. I tried two different phones (a Nokia N96 and T-Mobile Dash) to make sure it was not a problem with my phone.

2008 - B+: For both AT&T Wireless and Sprint PCS. I lost AT&T voice and data for an hour or two. But, it came up and stayed up for the rest of the time my area was out of power (21.5 hours). My home is an AT&T 3G dead-zone. But walking just a few meters outdoors I found a couple of places to stand where I could get a 3G signal. I don't have a Verizon Wireless account. But, my understanding is that their network (including 3G EVDO) remained running during the blackou.

2008 - A: Twitter! The designated emergency information radio station went back to normal programming 11pm Friday night and returned to all-talk information around 6 or 7am. That gave way to normal programming later in the morning when I was still without power. Throughout the situation, Twitter was probably the best source of specific hyper-local information about power restoration, available resources (food, gas), and general community information. I used an iPhone 3G to check Twitter throughout the power outage.

Twitter search: #hipower

Addendum: 2008 - A-: Local daily newspaper: One of the two daily newspapers decided to publish online only on Saturday (Dec. 27) with a mobile device (phone) friendly format. News items were easy to read on my iPhone and loaded/refreshed quickly. I wish they were able to provide more hyper-local information. But, regardless, it was a good effort that I think everyone in town with a web-enabled phone appreciated and found it useful and informative.

Honolulu Advertiser mobile edition

My personal overall impression is that nothing has improved in the past two years. The one bright spot was Twitter which once again proved to be a source of near real-time community information and discussion during a relatively minor crisis in this neck of the woods. It is a good thing that the weather was not much of factor after the blackout.