Power Fully Restored In St. Thomas-St. John District After Weekend Outages, WAPA Says

After a weekend of sporadic power outages in the St. Thomas-St. John District over the weekend, the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority said the situation stabilized overnight, and that operations were back to normal.

On Saturday WAPA reported that customers on Water Island and Smith Bay in St. John had lost power. The utility said the interruption was caused after Feeder 5A tripped.

WAPA said in a release issued late Sunday that electrical service was restored to customers at 8:30 p.m. Sunday night, hours after three generating units tripped at the Randolph Harley power plant, seen above. The first of the units fell off-line at 2:20 p.m. Sunday after a fault was detected in an underground transmission line. The location of the fault was identified and isolated to facilitate the service restoration process, WAPA said.

Interim Chief Executive Officer Clinton Hedrington, Jr. apologized to the public for the inconvenience caused by the Sunday afternoon service interruption. He also expressed his gratitude to the WAPA employees who worked tirelessly for hours to troubleshoot and isolate the fault. The fault resulted in the units tripping followed by the feeders falling off-line. Feeders provide electrical service to residential and commercial customers.

Plant personnel worked to restore generation capacity prior to re-energizing the electrical grid. “With one unit restored, we immediately began to restore customers on Feeders 5A and 8A and continued the effort until full service to our residential customers had been achieved,” he said.

In once again apologizing to WAPA’s customers for the inconvenience of the Sunday service interruption, and in thanking the authority’s employees for their dedicated efforts, Hedrington assured the public that all steps will be taken to ensure that this type of service interruption will not be repeated in the future.