Posted on: Friday, July 12, 2002

Halawa firms, prison suffer power failure

Advertiser Staff

A power failure yesterday afternoon affected the Halawa Community Correctional Facility and about 200 businesses in Halawa Valley. Power was restored to most of the customers about two hours later.

Nolan Espinda, warden of Halawa Community Correctional Facility, said the loss off power at 2:42 p.m. did not affect prison security, which is operated by a generator. When the power went out, the prison went into lockdown mode and all prisoners were confined to their modules. The power failure affected only lights and desktop computers, Espinda said.

Hawaiian Electric Co. crews restored power at 4:26 p.m. The outage was caused by an underground cable that failed. Hawaiian Electric switched the power to another circuit while it worked on the cable, said HECO spokesman Fred Kobashikawa.