The Great Power Outage Of 2008
December 29, 2008
December 26, 2008 will go down in Hawaii history as the Great Power Outage Of 2008!
That was a fun day. First of all, it was the day after Christmas, so I believe there were a lot of people in the stores looking for after Christmas sales. It all started around maybe 6pm when I started hearing all kinds of crazy thunder going on outside. I figured that there must have been a lot of lightening for there to be so much thunder, so I went out on my back patio to watch the sky. Yup, there was a lot of lightening.
I think at one point, I saw about 6 bolts of lightening near Tripler Hospital in about 5 minutes. It was crazy. I haven’t seen that much lightening in one storm since my days in Tucson. At one point, I saw one bolt come down and then all of a sudden, all of the streetlamps in my neighborhood went dark for about 30 seconds and then came back on again. More lightening continued to come down and by that time, I was pretty sure that the power was going to go out at some point, so I came back in, turned my computer off and went out on the patio again.
I then saw a bolt come down and then all of a sudden, I saw the power go out grid by grid until it reached my house. That was actually pretty neat. It was around 6:30pm, so it was already dark here. Thankfully I had my keys in my pocket and I always try to keep a flashlight on my keychain, so at least I could find a flashlight in the dark.
After the power went out, it was all just kind of wait and see what happens. From my patio, I could see that a lot of west Oahu had no power. My mom then told me that the outage appeared to be island wide. Whoa. I don’t have a portable, battery operated radio, but my mp3 player does get FM radio, so I turned it on and found out then that the outage was suspected to last about 12 hours! Holy Crap!
After that, my mom came over and gave me one of those portable radio with a crank generator which was pretty cool actually. It even had a built in lamp and flashlight. I just kept the radio on all night and would periodically crank that thing to keep it’s juice up. I also had a crank up flashlight too, which I love to have around because it also doesn’t need batteries! Yea!
So, that night was a pretty mellow night. I am just glad that I had an early dinner, so Ididn’t need to cook anything and that I had previously charged both my mp3/media player and my cell phone, so I didn’t have to worry about those running out of power that night as well.
My cat Rayne did freak out because of the darknes though. I lit a few candles, just to get some light for her and she seemed pretty content with that. She actually slept through a lot of the blackout.
I don’t know what it is though. This is the second time in 2 years that the whole island went without power like this. Granted both times were acts of nature – the first time was because the generators shut down due to an earthquake and this time the lines tripped because of lightening, but the only other times I know of when we lost power like this was because of hurricanes.
I just hope that this happening will make people realize the importance of having emergency supplies around the house – just in case. You never know what stuff like this is going to happen and it would suck to be completely unprepared.
I think our power was out for about 14 hours. I am not 100% sure since I stayed up a little late watching part of a movie on my mp3/media player and the power was on when I got up. I went outside to look around and then saw this double rainbow!
It’s a little hard to see, but it’s there. Pretty neat, eh?
Filed under: Whatever
