On Saturday morning, a sudden power outage cut electricity to roughly 1,349 customers in Nānākuli and took out traffic lights at one of the Leeward coast’s busiest intersections, turning Farrington Highway into a slow-moving mess. The outage started around 10:17 a.m., leaving the Farrington Highway and Nanakuli Avenue intersection dark and forcing local businesses to lean on backup power or, in some cases, shut down altogether while crews scrambled to respond.
KITV reported that about 1,349 customers were affected and that power was expected to be restored by roughly 12:00 p.m. The cause had not yet been identified, but officials said utility teams were on scene and “working to restore power as quickly as possible.” Emergency responders coordinated traffic control in the area while repair crews assessed the damage and worked on fixes.
Why Nanakuli Keeps Seeing Outages
Nānākuli has been in the middle of a multi-month Hawaiian Electric project to swap out aging direct-buried cables, work the utility says is meant to shore up reliability on the Mikilua 3 circuit, which serves about 1,500 customers. That ongoing upgrade effort, combined with a run of storm-related and equipment-related interruptions over the winter, has contributed to a pattern of repeat outages along the Leeward coast, according to Hawaii News Now and utility briefings.
Dark Signals, Slow Commutes, And Safety Warnings
With the traffic lights out at Farrington Highway and Nanakuli Avenue, drivers were urged to treat the intersection as a four-way stop and use extra caution, KITV noted. Hawaiian Electric’s customer-safety guidance advises anyone who spots a downed power line to stay at least 30 feet away and to report outages or hazards to its Oʻahu trouble line at 1-855-304-1212…