Sunday's earthquake thankfully was more about inconvenience than tragedy, but that should not prevent a serious assessment of what didn't go according to plan and needs improvement.

Communications is at the top of the list. Sunday's performance suggests that some lessons learned about responding to islandwide power outages have been forgotten.

The public relies on radio stations for critical information. How did O'ahu's radio industry fare during the blackout?

At least eight stations were off the air all day and did not resume operations until yesterday morning at the earliest, which begs the question about their ability to serve the public during an emergency. Some of those stations serve residents who don't speak English, leaving them in an information blackout during the outage.

The most popular O'ahu radio stations remained operational with generator power, but they continued to broadcast a pre-recorded public affairs program for nearly 45 minutes after the earthquake, which was obviously severe enough to trigger an immediate programming change.

We need to ask those and all stations here about their ability to remain on the air and what their plans are to interrupt non-urgent programming and begin broadcasting "live" within minutes. The industry's shift to cost-cutting automated programming may have left our community vulnerable during emergencies.

Most radio stations participate in a test of the State Civil Defense emergency broadcast system at 11:45 a.m. on the first weekday of each month. That system appears not to have worked. The only time we heard from state officials was during their individual telephone calls to radio stations.

When an attempt was made to broadcast the governor's remarks over numerous radio outlets using a conference call, her remarks were garbled and unintelligible, and the broadcast was terminated by O'ahu's most popular station. Is there no reliable way for the governor to speak to the state's population over all radio stations simultaneously?

Finally, Hawaiian Electric Co. might well dust off its emergency procedures manual, which was written and revised repeatedly in the 1980s during a string of islandwide power outages.

It took the company more than four hours on Sunday to make its first detailed statement on why generators had tripped off and why it would require many more hours to restore service to hundreds of thousands of HECO customers.

As the power outage wore on into Sunday evening, O'ahu's No. 1 radio station returned to pre-recorded programming once again — the John Tesh Show — even as half of O'ahu still was without power. Big Island radio stations were the best source of news about school closures and other quake-related information.

Sitting in the dark is one thing, but a news blackout should never occur. Communication in an emergency must be nearly nonstop to keep the public informed.

Everyone in Hawai'i's emergency information chain — rather than congratulate themselves on a job well done — should revisit their emergency response procedures and start rewriting.

The community deserves a better response than what we received on Sunday.

Doug Carlson is a Honolulu-based communications consultant. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.