Electrical outage delays Sunday paper delivery
Advertiser Staff
Many Honolulu Advertiser customers received their Sunday newspaper late yesterday, and we apologize.
An electrical outage that knocked out circuits to The Advertiser's Kapolei printing plant affected the normal printing of the newspaper and made for late deliveries to customers.
Hawaiian Electric Co. troubleshooters responded to the 11:27 p.m. power failure and electricity was restored at 12:41 a.m. Some 123 customers, most of them commercial, were affected.
Bill Bogert, vice president for production who oversees The Advertiser's printing facility, said the power failure set the printing process back six hours.
"The reason is the press is computerized, and the components don't reset right away," Bogert said.
The printing resumed at 6 a.m., but two pages from the sports section covering college basketball and the National Basketball Association, and "For the Record" did not get into Sunday's delivered editions.
"We apologize for any inconvenience to Sunday Advertiser readers," said Mike Fisch, Advertiser president and publisher.
HECO spokeswoman Lynne Unemori said a flashover that caused the problem occurred in an electrical vault on Advertiser property.
"It was a freakish thing that it happened to occur where the primary and backup feeds are both located," Unemori said.
"The problem was located exactly in the vault where the transfer would normally take place, so it caused both circuits to go out of power."
Unemori confirmed last night that repair crews found a rat in the vault and said, "It could possibly have caused the flashover."
The Advertiser went out to subscribers as soon as possible, although it took several hours before the papers were delivered.
Some subscribers earlier received portions of the newspaper but were missing the front, local news and sports sections. The remaining sections were later delivered to them.
"We got the paper out," Bogert said. "(The power failure) was freakish, and it was something we couldn't foresee, but now that it happened, we're going to take steps to prevent it from happening again."
