Hawaiian Electric has restored power to about 3,000 customers, and it said businesses can recoup some of their lost revenue and products by filing a claim with the utility.
A power outage hit primarily the downtown and Chinatown areas on Monday after a fire damaged underground cables. It’s the second outage in the past weeks.
On Wednesday afternoon, the utility was able to restore electricity to everyone, but the disruption came at a cost to small businesses, which took a revenue hit after days without electricity.
“ I would tell people that if you had a loss and you want to put in a claim, just fill it out the best you can and we'll figure it out on our end,” said Jim Kelly, Hawaiian Electric’s vice president of government and community relations.
“ We look at each one of these individually, not as a group. Whatever people feel like they suffered a loss as a result of the outage, just go ahead and put that in,” he said.
Businesses have 30 days after the end of the power outage to file a claim, which they can do on Hawaiian Electric's website.
Officials encouraged customers to file a claim if the outage resulted in lost product or sales, but they warned the process takes time and there is no guarantee claims will be approved.
The outage had a significant impact on restaurants and businesses with perishable items. They lost their ability to cook or refrigerate foods and had to throw them away. Many had to close during the multi-day power outage.
Some stores were able to stay open, including many that don’t sell food — but their sales still took a big hit.
Jacob Carreia, the general manager of Skull-Face Books and Vinyl on Bethel Street, said the shop was open during its normal hours of the week, even though the store was mostly without electricity.
But while the store’s doors were open, the lights were off and it was dark inside, which Carreira said could have made it look like it was under construction.
Perhaps a bigger issue is that there were fewer people around — likely because they thought all the stores in the area were closed.
“When people aren't walking around and they're not coming to Chinatown because they think it's shut down, then obviously we lose a lot of people. I'm talking about 75% less sales since this happened, which is a lot,” Carreira said.
“I think yesterday I sold one book, and I was here for seven hours. That's crazy,” he added.
One customer did come in and wanted to buy a book with a credit card, but didn’t because the power outage meant that the store was only able to accept cash.
