Hurricane Lala took out power for hundreds of thousands of Hawaiian Electric customers when it swept across the Hawaiian Islands.
Now, with recovery efforts well underway, HPR spoke with HECO Vice President for Communications Jim Kelly to hear the latest on their restoration efforts.
More than 200,000 customers faced power outages for an extended period of time, and some are still in the dark a week after the Hurricane hit Hawaiʻi Island.
Interview Highlights
On restoring power to Hawaiʻi Island
JIM KELLY: As of (Thursday morning), we have 1,432 people out. And our crews went out at daybreak, and they're really attacking these remaining areas where there are clusters of customers that are still out. … One of the last big transmission lines was restored yesterday, which enabled us to bring on about 1,500 people by the end of yesterday, and we're really hoping to knock down most of the rest of these today and into tomorrow.
On preparing after past storms
KELLY: We had a storm pass by in 2024, and we really made a point to stock up on Hawaiʻi Island. Because Hawaiʻi Island, nine times out of 10, gets the first hit and usually the strongest hit from anything coming through. And so we made sure that we beefed up our inventory of critical equipment like poles, transformers, all the things that we know that we need immediately after the storm passes to start restoring people. So our stock of equipment is good, and that hasn't been an issue.
Interestingly, and for those who were around for Iselle back in 2014; when you look at that storm, that really hit Puna hard but didn't really affect the rest of the island. There were, obviously, some storm effects, but it wasn't like Lala, which really did cause damage across the island. It wasn't just Puna. But in Iselle, we lost 210 poles, and they were almost all in Puna. This storm, we've lost 174 poles across the island.
So it speaks to a couple of things. One, we've been doing a lot of resilience work, some of it related to wildfire safety, but just regular beefing-up resilience work, so we lost fewer poles. And it's a lot easier to get people up when you're just restringing. The line might come down, you know, a tree might take the power line down, but if the pole's still intact and you can just reconnect it, that makes it a lot faster restoration work.
On receiving reinforcements from the continent
KELLY: This was the first time that we had ever brought in mainland crews after a storm. We were starting to plan this out about about a week ahead of time. We were starting to contact our mutual aid partners and just say, "Look, this one looks like it's going to be pretty bad, get ready." And so we were able to arrange with Southern California Edison; our colleagues there were able to put together crews. …
Certainly they're going to be here through getting everybody back online, which I'm hoping is going to be the end of this week. And then I think we'll reassess … and see what the weather is holding, if it looks like we've got some other bad weather coming in. For right now, I think we're clear, but they can presumably stay a little bit longer if we need them.
This story aired on The Conversation on Aug. 27, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
