Sometimes it’s tempting to make a joke out of it, although it’s pretty dark humor—on more than one level. Could it be a new Christmas tradition that at least once during Hawaii’s holiday season, a power outage turns out the lights? The fact that the first family was witness to both recent episodes—in 2008, shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, and again last week—adds to the irony and the embarrassment. Again Hawaii looks like a Third World country, struggling with its infrastructure, just at the moment when the national spotlight is tracking the president’s vacation routine.

The retailers at Ala Moana Center, however, saw the repeated disruption of their critical peak shopping days and lost a share of the revenue on which they were depending. They surely did not think it was funny to have such spotty electrical support over the course of not one but four days. For these businesses, the shoppers who were inconvenienced, and for the rest of us who merely watched, this was not an acceptable turn of events.

The torrential rain caused flash floods throughout the state and, as it turns out, the inundation of a component of Hawaiian Electric Co.’s Makaloa Substation, which supplies the nearby shopping center and other customers with power. Water was ponding around the housing of what’s called the switch gear, and when it seeped in, the water caused electrical arcing. Fire lit insulation and other elements, a transformer failed and a series of complicated workarounds ensued to reroute power on backup circuits and put the center back online. Unfortunately, the underground system was flooded and under duress, and faults on the line caused repeated spot failures.

HECO crews worked around the clock to restore service, albeit precariously. But it was the initial vulnerability of the switch gear that needs to be corrected.

Amid all the onlookers who were eagerly offering their Monday-morning quarterbacking was one who could contribute some real empathy, as well as constructive criticism. Alan Lloyd, an executive staff engineer at HECO who retired in 1996, said the outdoor substation is conventional in design, not unlike many thousands around the country. There are ways to waterproof switch gear units, he said, and if the flooding risk in the area doesn’t warrant such an expense, drainage improvements or elevating the equipment might be considered.

Colton Ching, HECO’s vice president for system operation and planning, said the team already is discussing ways to improve the staging of crews as storms approach, to shorten the response time if problems arise. That’s a good step, but the utility’s customers would also appreciate hearing what basic improvements will be made to reduce the risk of a repeat occurrence.

Ching told the Star-Advertiser in an interview Thursday that there is no way to entirely eliminate risk of failures and, of course, he’s right. Gold-plating every element in the grid is an inefficient way to invest the rate payers’ money for relatively little benefit.

But some reasonable upgrades should be considered at any of the grid’s weaker links. A crisis can illuminate in a way that helps an organization identify such weaknesses. That’s a benefit—assuming the problem gets corrected in the end.