With the power out and the pumps down, Dobovan hustled down to Pukalani to buy fuel for his generator, only to discover that just about everyone’s electricity was out.

“Pukalani was out. Makawao was out. Kahului was out. I’ve never seen that before,” Dobovan said. “The big storm last December, Kahului was still powered. I was able to get gas down on Dairy Road. But this morning, nothing.”

Dobovan was one of about 65,000 people across Maui who lost power early Tuesday morning after a high-voltage short circuit at a Maalaea substation triggered generating units to trip offline at about 2:45 a.m., according to Hawaiian Electric.

At 9:15 a.m., crews were working to restore power to about 15,000 customers. By 10:15 a.m., most were back online, with about 100 still without electricity in Central Maui and pockets of Upcountry and Haiku. By 2 p.m., power had been restored to all customers, Hawaiian Electric said.

Pono Outdoor Program kindergartner Harbor Haas, 5, gets an extra boost of speed from dad Daniel Haas while skateboarding on Keopuolani Park’s half pipe Tuesday afternoon in Kaulului. With school canceled at more than a dozen Maui campuses due to an islandwide electrical outage, Harbor had a full day, including surfing at Launiupoko and catching her biggest wave ever. “That’s a good Tuesday off from school,” Daniel Haas said. The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo

“This is a highly unusual event — the last outage to affect a large number of Maui customers occurred after a lightning storm in 2017 — and the company is looking into the cause of the short circuit,” Hawaiian Electric said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon.

The state Department of Education canceled school for 14 Maui campuses — King Kamehameha III Elementary, Princess Nahienaena Elementary, Lahaina Intermediate and Lahainaluna High School in West Maui; Haiku Elementary, Paia Elementary, Pukalani Elementary, Kula Elementary, Kalama Intermediate, Makawao Elementary and King Kekaulike High School in Upcountry and East Maui; and Iao Intermediate, Pomaikai Elementary and Wailuku Elementary in Central Maui.

All campuses are set to reopen today, the DOE said.

The Maui Interscholastic League also postponed one of its two girls volleyball matches on Tuesday night. King Kekaulike High School was scheduled to play Lahainaluna in the Lunas’ on-campus gym, but the match was postponed due to the power outage and will be rescheduled at a later date to be determined.

The match between Kamehameha Maui and Baldwin at War Memorial Gym in Wailuku went on as scheduled.

For residents and businesses, the power outage was a rude awakening as they scrambled to save perishable products or reboot computer systems.

Dobovan said he woke up at about 3:30 or 3:45 a.m., “gasping for air” after the power knocked out the CPAP machine he needs for his sleep apnea.

He lives on the same property as his Kulahaven Farms operation, which harnesses the technology of aquaponics to raise Rainbow trout and organic watercress on the slopes of Haleakala.

Dobovan had recently purchased a new 30-kilowatt backup generator that could power the entire farm in an emergency like this, but he hadn’t yet gotten the chance to fill up on gas.

By the time he got the generator going to run the pumps and compressors that supply oxygen to the tanks, thousands of fish had died — an estimated 900 of the largest fish that are ready to sell and 4,000 of the smallest fish that are crucial to the growth of the farm. That’s nearly half of the 10,000 trout at Kulahaven.

“Unfortunately we lost almost all the small fish, which is our livelihood starting in March, and almost all our market-ready fish, which is our livelihood right now,” Dobovan said. “Now we only got medium-sized fish, which I can’t sell. It basically put us out of business.”

The farm is currently on a “research and development scale,” the first phase of what Dobovan had hoped to expand into a much larger and more profitable operation of sustainable agriculture.

Now, he doesn’t even have the cash flow to cover the next few months and is uncertain about the farm’s future, pointing out that it takes about 11 months to go from an egg to a one-pound trout.

“I’m not going to quit. I’m going to keep farming. I just don’t know how we’re going to go forward,” he said.

At Home Maid Bakery in Wailuku, workers arrived at 4 a.m. to find the power out, Manager Amy Kozuki said. There was little staff could do with the oven and fryer out of commission, and a batch of malasadas in the walk-in refrigerator that needed to stay closed during the outage.

Fortunately, workers had baked all the bread and rolls they needed the night before. With the register down, they took cash-only sales and didn’t include taxes. Kozuki said the bakery lost a lot of sales throughout the morning because the register wasn’t working and because some customers didn’t have cash. By lunchtime they were able to get the system back up and running, but Kozuki said the outage left issues with their server that they’ll still need to fix.

Given the struggles of the pandemic, “every single sale is important to us,” Kozuki said. “Whether it’s an effect of a couple hours or half a day, it’s huge for us.”

The outage also impacted state and county facilities.

At the Maui Community Correctional Center, the electricity went out at 3:30 a.m., state Department of Public Safety spokesperson Toni Schwartz said.

“The backup generator immediately kicked on to power the essential security equipment as well as the lights in the main building where medium security inmates are housed,” Schwartz said. “The full power was restored at the facility by 12 p.m. During this time inmate programs were cancelled.”

Transports to and from court weren’t affected, but seven remote court appearances from the jail had to be rescheduled.

At the Maui County Service Center in Kahului, phone and internet services went down but were restored by noon for all but one office. The Pukalani Satellite Office for the Division of Motor Vehicles and Licensing also temporarily lost power.

The outage impacted 35 traffic signals, most of which returned to service quickly, though about a half dozen needed work by the Department of Public Works’ Highways Division.

One signal in Kahului at the intersection of Lono and Wakea avenues is expected to remain in flashing mode until it can be repaired today, the county said. Drivers should temporarily treat the intersection as a four-way stop.

Anyone who is still experiencing an outage should reset their home breaker or contact the Hawaiian Electric Maui County Trouble Line at (808) 871-7777.

* Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com. Staff writer Rob Collias contributed to this report.