From approximately 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday telecommunications were disrupted when an accidental severing of a fiber optic cable took place in Waikoloa Village.
Community members and visitors in Kona, Ka‘u, and Waikoloa Village areas lost cellphone, internet and voice services for hours. While data is still being collected on any 911 calls that were missed— and how many individuals may have been affected — police said that they were unaware of any emergency situations that were missed due to fiber optic issues.
“Once we were notified of the outage we put out a Nixle alert to inform the public,” said Reed Mahuna at the Hawaii Police Department. “Land-line phone service was out at the Kailua-Kona and Kau Police Stations, but we continued to have functioning police radios and computer aided dispatch capabilities. However, we are not aware of any crimes or emergencies missed due to the telecommunication problems.”
More, the police maintained a regular dispatch Tuesday.
“We maintained our regular watch strength for all districts and responded to calls for service without interruption,” he continued.
Similarly, the Hawaii Fire Department reported, communications weren’t interrupted.
“As far as we know, there were no outcomes that changed due to the fiber optics going down,” said Chief Kazuo Todd. “Although, just because we don’t have that data yet doesn’t mean that there weren’t. The shutdown affected the ability to call 911, but our radio system is independent of that. So it didn’t mess with our dispatch or communications. We were still fully functional.”
At Kona Community Hospital, doctors and nurses were able to communicate via IM and FaceTime, according to Judy Donovan at the hospital.
“Patient operations continued smoothly without interruption,” she continued.
She also added that no life-saving procedures were affected due to the telecommunication problems.
In the radiology department, however, some scans had to be postponed due to procedures nurses were unable to call 911 if something went wrong.
As of press-time, Hawaii County Civil Defense had not responded for comment regarding what efforts were made to inform the public.