Hawaii - Friday Night's Electrical Fire (06MAR2009)

Aloooha,

so we moved from the downstairs Ohana Studio to the upstairs Hale Apartment at 3PM this afternoon. Two hours later, as we're sitting in the sofa quietly typing away at our respective laptops...POOOF and a humongous blue flash shoots out from 'somewhere behind the TV'. Being from NYC, we first thought lightening had hit, but there was no thunder and aside from some rain, there really was no sign of foul weather. But we open the front door to check, because the POOOF also took with it a few light bulbs in the kitchen/living room area where we had been sitting. As we open the door, we see something resembling a fireball on the power pole out by the road, then we notice smoke emerging from the heavy tree (over)growth between the road and the house, and THEN we notice smoke billowing out from the grey plastic electrical box at the end of the house - OUR rental house!! Then 911!

It took three hours of fire department, electric company, cable guys, and fairly heavy rain (without rain coats as they were in hte house and the fire department told us to stay outside) before the power was off, the gutter and screen door were cleared from being potentially 'live', and an 'emergency temp job' had been placed on the house to allow power back in.

In summary, the overgrown trees had pulled out the 'neutral' from the power pole to the house, rendering the electrical current hot-in-the-house looking for an alternate return path. It chose the Time Warner Cable route, taking with it three of the house's 4 television sets (100% fried) and - unfortunately - the internet, as the house was on RoadRunner. Oh well!!
Fortunately, our $5000 worth of laptops were spared. They could have been fried too!!

Anyway, here are a few visuals should you be interested. We have two nice videos which we will put at the bottom of this post. Steve says it so well...

For the photo portion, let's start with the melted electrical box mounted to the back of hte house. Pretty, isn't it? Note the deformed plastic on top and on the side. Had we not been home at the time, god knows what the outcome might have been...ouch!!


See the blackened cable and melted plastic at the left edge of the photo above? Well, here is a close-up:


And here, a close-up what the electric company took an entire hour dismantling - the external cable. In other terminology: Here, you see 'the internet' cut into very many not-so-useful pieces:


Below, the offending tree (i.e. the MOST offending of a total of about 20 overgrown trees). As you can see, the offense seems to have begun several circumferential inches (a.k.a. tree rings) ago. And in case you are wondering, yes, this is considered 'property owner negligence'


And finally, the so-called 'emergency temp fix' that the electrical company's emergency crew spent one hour assembling in the pouring rain, sparks flying (close to hair and clothing!!). The poor guy - who was both caring and competent - got all the Friday Night (8-9PM) he could muster. ..


Here are the 2 videos depicting the situation - complete with Helco Generator sound effects:





Altogether, a different kine of 'meet the locals' Aloha Friday sort of adventure...

Pau Hana (no kidding!)
Kepani & Kamila