By By SUZANNE CARLSON Daily News Staff
Copyright virginislandsdailynews
V.I. Water and Power Authority customers were hit with yet another round of blackouts Wednesday morning, which left thousands of residents without electricity and caused two schools to announce early dismissals.
Following a brief outage that affected 2,500 customers on Feeder 7A on St. Thomas Tuesday night, other feeders on St. Thomas went out around 1 a.m. Wednesday morning.
Thousands of customers spent hours waiting for communication from WAPA as the outages expanded throughout the morning.
Approximately 7,000 customers were without power as of 7 a.m.
WAPA first issued a public alert at 8 a.m.: “Due to reduced generation capacity caused by mechanical issues needed on several generation units at the Randolph Harley Power Plant, a rotation outage schedule will go into effect shortly.”
The number of customers without power grew to 10,300 as of 9 a.m., and WAPA did not issue an outage schedule. Instead, WAPA published another alert at 9:40 a.m. that “personnel have brought an additional generation unit online, and the previously anticipated outage rotation schedule is no longer in effect.”
But 9,200 customers remained without power on St. Thomas, and even more customers on other feeders subsequently lost power at around 10 a.m., including 2,000 customers on St. John.
WAPA gradually restored feeders until all but 32 customers had power again as of 10:40 a.m.
Full restoration came 10 minutes after the Education Department announced that Ulla Muller and Jane Tuitt elementary schools would both dismiss students early at 11 a.m. “due to an electrical service interruption impacting school operations.”
It was the third major grid failure in 10 days.
Fuel leaks at the plant caused rolling blackouts on Sept. 8, which forced employees to temporarily evacuate, and caused three schools to close early.
There were more blackouts on Sept. 11 that affected more than 23,000 customers at the height of the plant failure. WAPA CEO Karl Knight said in an email Sunday that “we temporarily lost the use of 3 of the 7 Wartsila engines for three unrelated issues.”
The seven smaller Wartsila generators do not have enough capacity to meet peak demand, and so at least one of the plant’s three older, less efficient units must be in operation to avoid rolling blackouts.
Units 27 and 23 are still offline for major repairs, and Unit 15 is available for dispatch, but if Unit 15 or any one of the Wartsila generators fail, the grid is unable to keep electricity flowing to all customers in the district.
Knight and WAPA Communications Director Shanell Petersen did not respond to questions about what caused several generators to fail Wednesday.
The Daily News asked Wednesday if Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. plans to issue another state of emergency to help address WAPA’s ongoing challenges, but Government House Communications Director Richard Motta Jr. did not respond.
