Posted at 4:43 p.m., Monday, October 23, 2006
Consumer Advocate seeks formal power outage probe
Advertiser Staff
The state Consumer Advocate has asked the state Public Utilities Commission to open a formal investigation into last Sunday's outage which left 291,000 Hawaiian Electric Co. customers without power for hours.Consumer Advocate Catherine Awakuni said such an investigation would determine whether HECO acted reasonably and in the public interest before and after the Oct. 15 blackout.
Awakuni's request comes after two state lawmakers, Sen. Kalani English (D, Hana) and Fred Hemmings (R, Kailua) called for a similar investigation by the PUC into the outage, which was triggered by a 6.7 magnitude earthquake off the coast of the Big Island.
