💧 Water and Power · U.S. Virgin Islands
WAPA said equipment failures and accident damage caused weekend outages in St. Thomas-St. John district
The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority said on January 11, 2021, that it had identified the causes of four electrical service interruptions that affected customers in the St. Thomas-St. John district over the weekend and on January 11.
The utility said outages occurred shortly before 4 p.m. on January 9, just after 1:30 a.m. on January 10, and at 2:10 a.m. and shortly before 7 a.m. on January 11. Customers on St. Thomas, St. John, Water Island and Hassel Island were affected.
WAPA said the January 9 outage began when a faulty fire detector in a utility-owned generator caused the unit to shut down, triggering a cascading effect on other dispatched units and a district-wide interruption. Service was restored to all customers shortly after 8 p.m., according to the utility.
The utility said a fatal automobile accident in the Estate Nazareth area early on January 10 damaged a WAPA pole and aerial transmission lines. That damage affected the Tutu electrical substation and interrupted service to customers on the east end of St. Thomas and on St. John. WAPA said all customers were fully restored shortly after 4 a.m. on January 10.
Crews returned to the accident site later on January 10 to make temporary repairs, and customers on part of Feeder 9C experienced an outage of about 90 minutes while that work was underway.
On January 11, WAPA said a failure of equipment at the hurricane-damaged Donald Francois Electrical Substation caused a district-wide outage. Service was restored to all customers shortly before 6 a.m., the utility said. About an hour later, a high-voltage breaker on a dispatched unit tripped, causing that unit to go offline and interrupt service again to affected customers.
WAPA said repairs at the Francois substation were completed on January 11 and the facility was returned to service. The utility said the electric grid was normalized by early afternoon.