By By SUZANNE CARLSON Daily News Staff

Copyright virginislandsdailynews

Public schools on St. Croix will remain closed today, after flash flooding and power failures closed all government offices and schools throughout the territory on Thursday.

Schools in the St. Thomas-St. John District are open today, but the Education Department said heavy rainfall “has left some schools in need of assessment and cleanup.”

Thursday morning started with chaos and confusion for parents as the Education Department initially announced at 7:30 a.m. that all schools would remain open, despite major flooding and a power failure in the St. Thomas-St. John District.

At 8:14 a.m., the District reversed course and announced that all schools would be closed per Gov. Albert Bryan Jr.’s order.

Bryan also ordered all government offices closed due to the V.I. Water and Power Authority outages and flash flooding.

WAPA announced at 7 a.m. Thursday that there was a major power failure “due to loss of a transmission line.”

At 8 a.m., WAPA announced that there was a district-wide outage “due to a loss of generation at the Randolph Harley Power Plant,” and “estimated restoration time is 1 hour.”

As 9 a.m. came and went without improvement, more than 24,500 customers were left waiting for answers that didn’t come until 10:30 a.m., when WAPA finally acknowledged that repairs were ongoing and “there is no estimated time for restoration.”

Meanwhile, WAPA’s governing board held a meeting where WAPA CEO Karl Knight acknowledged that “it’s been a very eventful month of September thus far,” with Thursday marking the fourth major grid failure since Sept. 8.

“Our customers, particularly in the St. Thomas-St. John District, have had a real trying time the last couple of weeks, so I certainly want to apologize for the inconvenience and the disruption,” Knight said.

The plant has a total of 10 generators — seven smaller Wartsilas and three larger, less efficient units, two of which have been offline for repairs.

“We’ve been running very thinly with Units 23 and Units 27 offline, and any shortfall in generation has prompted us to have to rotate and load shed to meet capacity,” Knight said.

Unit 27 had been offline since December, and Knight said the unit was returned to service a few weeks ago, but failed again “for an unrelated issue.”

The unit was brought back online Wednesday, but “deferred maintenance has caught up to us” because there isn’t enough generating capacity to allow for generators to undergo a major overhaul, Knight said.

Power failures Wednesday were caused by “an air leak on Wartsila 6,” Knight said.

Four of the newer Wartsila units have a shared air system so three other generators also tripped offline, he added.

“So rather than losing 9 megawatts of generation yesterday morning, we ended up losing 36 megawatts essentially,” and they’re working to reconfigure them so they can operate independently,” Knight said.

According to Knight, staff at the WAPA plant were hoping they could “breathe a sigh of relief” after power was restored Wednesday, but Thursday morning’s thunderstorms caused a cascade of new problems.

“Lightning is not our friend,” Knight said, but “the two enemies of the electrical system are wind blowing obstructions into the lines and lightning striking the system.”

St. Croix “fared fairly well today,” but “we had a number of feeders” that failed at various times, “almost all of which was related to lightning strikes,” which crews were able to clear rapidly, Knight said.

On St. Thomas and St. John, the issues were much more severe.

While rain is typically not an issue, there was “water intrusion” that “knocked Unit 15 offline,” which caused the grid to become unstable and the Wartsila units also failed, Knight said.

In addition, “one of the precipitating issues was a fault on Feeder 13,” Knight said.

Without Unit 27 available, “we’ve been flirting with disaster the last few weeks, and we’ve had a run of bad luck,” Knight said.

Crews gradually restored feeders to service throughout the day, and WAPA announced that work was complete at 3:20 p.m.

During Thursday’s WAPA meeting, board members voted unanimously to approve several change orders and contracts, including $3.73 million to Island Roads to replace leaking iron water lines in an area of Blackbeard Hill on St. Thomas with larger diameter PVC pipe.

A recent fire in the area raged for hours and destroyed an apartment and office building, and V.I. Fire and Emergency Medical Services Director Anthony Stevens told The Daily News that “The greatest challenge during the operation was securing a reliable water source.”

WAPA’s water distribution director Noel Hodge said they are working to improve water infrastructure to improve firefighting capability, and “they were able to manage during the fire event, but this is going to improve the hydraulics of the system going foward.”

Board members also voted to approve a similar waterline replacement project at Mahogany Estate on St. Croix for $2.72 million.

The WAPA board also approved a no-cost change order to close out punch list items for the latest phase of Wartsila generators, a reduction of $181,297 for a total $7.3 million revised cost for the Hannah’s Rest project, a cost reduction of $293,964 for the $10.6 million Queen Mary Highway Project, $1.6 million to replace a faulty transformer at the Richmond substation on St. Croix, and a 24-month contract with Falcon USVI for security guard services at all WAPA facilities for $4.97 million.