ST. THOMAS — The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority (WAPA) Executive Director Hugo Hodge apologized to customers in the St. Thomas/St. John district on Sunday evening for two separate power outages that left residents without service during the Easter holiday weekend, and said that the system is now in “stable” condition, although work would continue today to fully restore power to the district.
In a press release issued late Saturday night, WAPA said unit 23, referred by the authority as its ‘workhorse’ unit, went offline and tripped several feeders as a result.
Then, early on Sunday morning, WAPA issued an updated press release revealing that the entire St. Thomas/St. John district had experienced a blackout triggered by a fault in an auxiliary transformer at the Randolph Harley power plant at approximately 7:45 a.m. on Sunday, which compromised the generation protection scheme.
Part of the problem, Hodge said, was that unit 25, which is the unit WAPA uses to maintain stability in the system, was offline for scheduled maintenance and therefore was not available to address the shortfall over the weekend. And although he confirmed that unit 25 will come online on Monday, no specific time of day was given.
Even so, the WAPA chief said they’ve done “what it takes” to bring the system back online.
“All-in-all two separate events, and we’ve done what it takes to get the system back to a stable condition, and we expect to have that continue into Sunday night and Monday,” Hodge said.
The director also thanked the employees of WAPA who reported to work over the holiday weekend to work on getting the system up and running, and added that he “definitely wants to apologize to our customers for any inconvenience caused by the outages.”
Audio files with Hodge’s comments are here, here, here and here.
Tags: blackout, hugo hodge, outage, virgin islands water and power authority, wapa, wapa power outage st croix, wapa power outage st thomas
Share On Facebook
Tweet It
