Hawaiian Electric grilled at Downtown Honolulu board meeting: ‘Unforgivable’

DOWNTOWN-CHINATOWN, Hawaii (KHON2) — Some Downtown-Chinatown members described Hawaiian Electric’s blackout response as unforgivable at a Neighborhood Board meeting on Tuesday.

The meeting came after two extended outages left thousands in the dark for days in June.

Hawaiian Electric said customers had a 30-day deadline to file claims related to losses from the first outage that ended on June 13, but HECO still needs 30 days to complete their investigation into the underground fire that caused the more recent outage on June 18. The Neighborhood Board was not too happy.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to give the community more time to file their claims than 30,” Downtown-Chinatown Neighborhood Board vice chair Sean Fitzsimmons asked HECO Customer Service vice president Brendan Bailey. “Than just 30 days?”

“The claims process is governed by tariff rate. So we’re a regulated public utility. Our tariff rules establish the timeframes that we have to consider claims. I’m not saying that there’s no leeway way for flexibility,” Bailey said.

That flexibility could come if customers can not get documents together in time to prove they sustained financial loss. Other members pointed out that some customers were left without power for days.

“You did not even bring one single generator into the community and that is unforgivable,” board member Chu Lan Shubert-Kwock said.

“I hear the frustration. I understand it. I know where you’re coming from. If there was something more we could have done with providing temporary generation, we would have done that. We just don’t have the capability to do that,” Bailey said.

About 150 claims have been filed since the outages and Hawaiian Electric said they are on standby to assist anyone with technical issues.

“Every claim is treated as unique. So we’ll look at each claim individually. We’ll look at, you know, what’s submitted, we’ll look at the circumstances for that claimant, and then we’ll review their claim independently of all of their claims, and then we’ll proceed,” Bailey said.

One point of agreement during the meeting was gratitude for Honolulu police officers who provided traffic control at 19 intersections 24/7 for multiple days.

“We did do a lot of burglary mitigation patrols during the night because we recognize that alarms may not have been on. And I believe that those efforts were successful because I don’t believe there were any major incidents during those times,” said Paul Okamoto with Honolulu police.