ST. CROIX \u2013 The Majority Senators based in St. Croix issued a joint press release Monday saying that the 14-hour power outage this past weekend was a good dry run in case of a real emergency.<\/p>\n
The blackout \u2013 caused when a heavy surge interrupted the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority\u2019s ability to distribute electricity to its feeders about 4:50 a.m. Saturday \u2013 revealed that the Juan F. Luis Hospital\u2019s two generators were not in working order and that some wireless and landline communications did not function with WAPA down.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn my opinion, Saturday\u2019s outage highlights the need for better contingency planning throughout government,\u201d Sen. Novelle Francis Jr. said. \u201cContingency planning is the backbone of emergency preparedness and should be second nature in the territory as we must constantly maintain a state of readiness for hurricanes and other natural and manmade disasters. Clearly, there needs to be a greater examination of our overall planning and readiness, to include public communication, which would have helped to allay our residents\u2019 concerns as the outage progressed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Referring to the emergency room patients who sat in the dark for several hours during the outage, the Majority Leader Sen. Sammuel Sanes said lessons must be learned from what happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur most vulnerable were left in the dark for over 6 hours,\u201d Sanes said. \u201cThis must not happen again, and going forward better planning and preparation for \u2018worst case\u2019 scenarios need to be in place. WAPA personnel, emergency personnel and Virgin Islands officials should find it necessary to create a plan of action. A territory wide plan which will prevent this type of \u201cblackout\u201d from occurring again must be implemented now, rather than later. The entire government should have learned from this unfortunate event the importance of more effective Crisis Management. We must not allow our island, our territory to fall into darkness like this again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Senate President, Sen. Neville James emphasized the link between a poor economy and the power outage.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe unfortunate day long WAPA outage over the weekend only strengthened my resolve to work towards getting our government back to the days of solvency and productivity,\u201d James said. \u201cIf we can generate the revenues that we once did, then meeting our financial obligations where WAPA is concerned would decrease and, in a perfect world, eliminate equipment failures at our local power plants. The facilities cannot maintain themselves. We need resources, both human and financial, to meet the electricity needs for all of the residents, territory-wide.\u201d<\/p>\n
All the senators commended WAPA\u2019s employees for resolving the issues that led to the outage as quickly as possible, including Sen. Kurt Vialet.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would like to commend WAPA for expeditiously dealing with a very difficult problem,\u201d Vialet said. \u201cI was so impressed by the nurses\u2019 commitment to ensure that patient care wasn\u2019t compromised during the power outage.<\/p>\n
Vialet praised the people of St. Croix for being patient during the blackout and said lauded \u201cthe nursing staff\u201d of the Juan Luis Hospital and their \u201cvaliant efforts\u201d in attending to patients during difficult times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ST. CROIX \u2013 The Majority Senators based in St. Croix issued a joint press release Monday saying that the 14-hour power outage this past weekend was a good dry run in case of a real emergency. The blackout \u2013 caused when a heavy surge interrupted the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority\u2019s ability to distribute […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":21106,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[191,147],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n