Sunday's islandwide power outage knocked out every traffic light on the island, and nearly 1 in 5 was still out of commission during morning rush hour yesterday.

The result was traffic backups and a few minor collisions.

By 2 p.m. yesterday, 740 of 800 intersections across O'ahu had been manually reset, and city Department of Transportation Services Director Melvin Kaku said he hoped to get the lights at the island's busiest intersections up and running before the heavy afternoon traffic began.

But with only 13 people trained to do the work and continuing power surges adding even more lights to reset, the repairs had the eight teams running all over the island.

"We're responding on a priority basis," said Kaku.

The most-traveled intersections were to be fixed first, meaning crews were concentrating in downtown Honolulu and Waikiki before fanning out to Central, Leeward and Windward O'ahu.

In addition to having to visit each intersection to manually reset the lights, the initial power surge fried circuits at some intersections, which meant the DTS workers had to do some reprogramming to get the lights to work.

Honolulu police began directing traffic as soon as the power went out on Sunday and were prepared to keep traffic flowing.

"We're going to staff the major intersections until they're working again," said police spokeswoman Michelle Yu.

Reach Treena Shapiro at tshapiro@honoluluadvertiser.com.