Read Reid's Blog

 

"Hawaii at Night"

I’ve been vacationing in Hawaii for the past few days and have a few minutes to dash off a quick post before I head off to do more family things.

Around 6:45PM on December 26th the island of Oahu plunged into darkness. I was in my Uncle’s apartment in Waikiki and outside we saw that our entire neighborhood was totally dark. While we found some flashlights and turned on the radio hoping to hear what was going on, I popped open my Android phone and, seeing that I still received a signal, I hopped onto Twitter. I did a simple search for [power outage] (not useful anymore since there are other power outages occurring around the world) and instantly saw tweets from numerous tourists and locals, reporting outages in downtown Honolulu, Ala Moana shopping center, and other parts of the island. Within five minutes I was able to deduce that almost the entire island was out of power and it would take nearly 12 hours for it to be restored. The collective tweets of numerous individuals provided a reliable amount of information and some funny quotes and thoughts about the situation – a few funny notes about eating in the dark and wondering if the Obama family had power. Even my parents found the information helpful, allowing them to modify dinner reservations with some friends and call family members to relay what we knew.

Almost 30 minutes later, the same information was reported and confirmed on the Honolulu Advertiser online and almost one hour later when an emergency broadcast was set-up on the local radio.

The one downside is that not everyone uses Twitter. One advantage the local radio station had was that a lot of people were driving around Oahu, looking for open gas stations and supermarkets. People were consistently calling in with what places were serving food and pumping gas, which I couldn’t find on Twitter. Until that happens, I guess my conclusion is that Twitter can be another useful source of information, alongside TV, radio, Internet, etc.

Alright, heading back to the Bay Area tonight on a red-eye flight. Mahalo!