One of the worst days in The Advertiser's production history started a week ago Saturday at 11:30 p.m. when a rat got into a sealed 4-by-4-foot switch box at The Advertiser's Kapolei property and caused a short in the lines connected to two large HECO transformers adjacent to our printing press. Power also was lost in a small area around Kapolei.

We braced for the worst, and on our Web site we posted at 12:21 a.m. that the paper might be delayed. Several updates followed into the morning.

A HECO crew arrived at the plant at about 12:30 a.m. and removed the rat, and power to the plant was restored by 1 a.m. If the press could have been started then, The Advertiser would have gone out as expected and the firestorm that hit the following morning could have been avoided. But for the next four hours, some of the components that make up the press would not reboot. Our mechanical services technicians had to troubleshoot, reset, reboot and in some cases replace many of these components.

"Whenever the power shuts down unexpectedly, and then spikes when it comes back up, the press, in essence, crashes, much like a computer," said Bill Bogert, vice president of production. "There are literally thousands of circuits, chips, sensors and other solid state devices as well as software throughout the press." The power surge aftermath created huge electronic problems.

As the hours dragged by with marginal progress, President and Publisher Mike Fisch and Vice President of Circulation Mike Cusato had a crucial decision to make: Should they send the waiting carriers and distributors out with pre-printed sections of the paper (everything except the main news, Hawai'i and sports sections) so subscribers could have something in their hands, or wait until the press came back to life? At 3:45 a.m., with the press situation looking bleak, they opted to deliver the incomplete papers.

By 5 a.m., press operators had all but two towers operating, so they had to shift plates from those towers and reorganize the newspaper's layout. That meant that two pages in sports had to be dropped. But that small sacrifice meant we could get the press started by 6 a.m. The first delivery trucks hit the road by 6:28 a.m., and the entire run of newspapers was finished by 9 a.m.

We kept updating our Web site, letting readers know that the press would be started and predicting that most papers would be delivered by noon. Marketing director Alvin Katahara notified all the Cox and Clear Channel radio stations, including KSSK and KCCN, asking them to broadcast the reasons for the delay.

The avalanche of phone calls started coming in just as the presses started. Early risers who headed out to their empty driveways started calling our circulation number, which was quickly overwhelmed. Calls poured into the city desk and into the voice-mail boxes of everyone with a phone number listed in the paper.

My mailbox totaled 31. Assistant Managing Editor Stephen Downes, who handles our corrections and complaints, received more than 80. Cusato got 55 at the office and a few at home.

Normally our circulation number gets 850 calls on a Sunday and 750 on a Monday. Last Sunday's number was 4,836 and Monday's was 2,660. And those numbers are only those who got through. Countless others got busy signals. We estimated about 500 calls to the city desk.

One woman found my home phone in the telephone book and politely inquired about her paper. I applauded her ingenuity and explained what happened. She understood.

Readers were mostly upset that they could not get through to a live person and assumed the phones had been taken off the hook, which was not true. In fact, circulation telephone operators were working from 5:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Several editors and editorial assistants calmly fielded as many angry phone calls as possible for hours.

Some asked why there wasn't a prerecorded message telling people what had happened. There was a message informing readers the papers were late but with the heavy call volume, nobody heard it because it never kicked in.

Others wondered why we didn't deliver a flier or insert with the delivery of the preprinted sections letting them know the rest of the paper was coming, but carriers get those sections delivered to them early Saturday. To print the inserts and get them to the carriers would have delayed delivery even more. Carriers often work several jobs and they are obligated to be with us only for their normal delivery hours. On Sunday, they had already been waiting for their papers for three or four hours. They were anxious to be done.

So we tapped the agents who oversee the carriers and circulation district managers and redelivered the last three sections of the paper. Most of the papers nearest to downtown were delivered by 3 p.m., but those in the more rural areas such as Hale'iwa (4 p.m.) Wahiawa (6 p.m.) took longer. A story Monday indicated that all editions had been delivered Sunday, but some of the final sections were delivered to subscribers with their Monday morning papers.

Each of us at The Advertiser was upset that the paper could not be delivered on time.

"In all my career, I've never put out a paper that late," said Bogert, who has worked in newspapers for 49 years.

We are exploring ways to get backup power through generators, an expensive proposition. The Advertiser also is exploring engineering solutions to the switch that caused the power outage. We are also reviewing all our procedures to see what we could have done better. We will always continue to post Web site updates if we have a substantial delay in delivery.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience and support, and please accept our sincere apologies.

One subscriber wrote to me asking for an explanation. She deserved one, and after I explained what I've described here, she seemed to understand.

"The numerous calls to The Advertiser are a good measure of how important the newspaper is to the customers and it should be viewed as a good thing," she wrote. "Thank you."