Heavy rain blacks out cable channels

A 10-meter satellite dish in Mililani that receives more than 30 cable channel signals was inundated by heavy rain Sunday afternoon, blacking out the channels statewide.

"Water got into some of the electronic parts, which failed," explained Norman Santos, Oceanic Time Warner Cable vice president of engineering.

Water and electricity are never a good mix.

The affected dish is one of the main dishes at Oceanic’s Mililani campus.

A recorded customer service message reported the litany of channels that had been blacked out by the rain. Some were HD channels, whose digital and analog counterparts elsewhere on the dial continued to work because their signals are received by other, unaffected satellite dishes.

"The guys needed a bucket truck" to access the large dish, "but it was unsafe for them to be working last night," Santos said Monday.

Because the entire cable system had not been taken out of service by the torrential rain, the decision was made to wait to complete diagnostic and repair work first thing Monday morning, when safer conditions were expected.

Technicians were able to locate the piece of electronic equipment that failed and restore service by late Monday morning.

Other cable problems reported around Oahu, specifically in Waialua and Wahiawa, were power-related, Santos said.

Hawaiian Electric Co. spokeswoman Sharon Higa confirmed "there were outages related to the weather" on Oahu, though information about specific neighborhoods was not immediately available.

By just before 12:30 p.m. Monday, Santos believed that crews were nearly done, if not completely done, restoring service in affected areas.

BAD WEATHER PROHIBITS VIEWING

Channels darkened from Sunday afternoon until Monday statewide by rain inundation of a satellite dish at Oceanic Time Warner Cable:

Source: Oceanic Time Warner Cable