The great 2008 Oahu blackout

Around 7 pm last night, the power went out in our down­town Hon­olulu condo. My wife kept her Win­dows lap­top on while we pulled out can­dles, bat­ter­ies, a radio and flashlights.

Then I hopped onto my iPhone and started twit­ter­ing. Within 15 min­utes, it was appar­ent that most of Oahu had lost their elec­tric­ity. We decided to stay home and lis­ten to the radio.

The Asso­ci­ated Press story called Hawaii’s Oahu island regains power after black­out pro­vides a quick sum­mary of the night.

All in all, the expe­ri­ence was a lot smoother than the 2006 black­out. There was no earth­quake this time, but it was a Fri­day night with plenty of peo­ple out on the streets to go to par­ties, events and concerts.

A HECO rep­re­sen­ta­tive who was dis­patched to KSSK radio con­firmed that light­ning strikes had dam­aged sev­eral trans­mis­sion lines near the Keha gen­er­a­tion facil­ity, forc­ing Oahu’s elec­tric util­ity to start load shedding.

Read Nathan Kam’s arti­cle Light­ning dances across Oahu skies — he’s also posted a YouTube video of last night’s cloud light­ning — it’s called Amaz­ing light­ning show across Oahu skies.

Keha 4 even­tu­ally shut down, set­ting up a black start sce­nario sim­i­lar to the 15 Octo­ber 2006 earthquake.

Early in the black­out, Ryan Ozawa sug­gested a Twit­ter hash­tag of #hipower. hash­tags are short strings of text that Twit­ter users can include in their mes­sages, to help other users find con­tent regard­ing a loca­tion or event.

By 10 pm there were a cou­ple of hun­dred mes­sages in that cat­e­gory. You can read these mes­sages using this Twit­ter search link.

Ryan also man­aged to post an arti­cle called Hon­olulu Power Out­age Cov­ered Online from his Mac­Book and Sprint EVDO connection.

John Gar­cia used Twit­ter to chron­i­cle his efforts as he helped assem­ble the Hon­olulu Advertiser’s dig­i­tal edi­tion. The Adver­tiser decided to upload the PDF page proofs for this morning’s edi­tion, as there was no power for the print­ing presses. It’s under­stand­able con­sid­er­ing the cir­cum­stances, and the Adver­tiser did pub­lish an arti­cle called Adver­tiser apol­o­gizes for no print edi­tion today.

The Hon­olulu Star-Bulletin had sim­i­lar prob­lems. See their arti­cle called Oahu get­ting power back grad­u­ally.

KGMB chan­nel 9 (CBS) set up a live stream­ing video feed. There are some details in this video called Black­out Behind the Scenes at KGMB9 . KHNL chan­nel 8 (NBC) sent its reporters out into the epic traf­fic jams to gather news.

A few min­utes ago, Russ posted a blog entry called Home — Waialae/Kahala — Hele Broad­band about his res­i­den­tial Inter­net con­nec­tion. Twit­ter reports and KSSK indi­cated that Time Warner Oceanic’s Road Run­ner and VoIP ser­vices went down dur­ing the blackout.

Our Ver­i­zon and AT&T mobile phones kept their con­nec­tions, and I had 3G ser­vice through­out the blackout.

Cap­sun Poe posted his expe­ri­ences in an arti­cle called
The Big Bad Box­ing day Black­out of 2008.

Related arti­cles and pages on billso.com

• Oahu black­outs
• 11 April 2008: Cel­lu­lar base sta­tion uses wind and solar power
• 19 Octo­ber 2006: Pre­vent­ing an Oahu black­out is hard work
• 17 Octo­ber 2006: Gov­er­nor con­sid­ers emer­gency radio sta­tion, airport power
• 17 Octo­ber 2006: Oahu cell phone net­work was over­loaded after the quake
• 17 Octo­ber 2006:Clear Chan­nel, KSSK cited for late response
• 17 Octo­ber 2006: Hon­olulu mayor says plan worked well
• 17 Octo­ber 2006: Leg­is­la­tors plan inves­ti­ga­tion over Oahu power outage
• 16 Octo­ber 2006: Why was the entire island blacked out?
• 16 Octo­ber 2006: 16 hours later…

Tagged as: #hipower, blackout, electricity, hardware, Hawaii, Honolulu, Internet, iPhone, mobile, network, security, video