WAPA Board Talks Meter Maladies, Pole Problems, Multimillion-Dollar Monthly Deficits

When the lights went out during Tropical Storm Ernesto, the rumor mill picked up.

As new Water and Power Authority CEO Karl Knight and team worked to assess what knocked much of the territory offline, the coconut telegraph had already diagnosed a critical lack of power transformers. Of all the myriad storm-specific issues and broadening systemic challenges at the long-troubled utility, an immediate shortage of transformers was not on the list, officials told the WAPA Governing Board Thursday.

There were plenty of other things to worry about. Problems presented at the marathon meeting included WAPA’s monthly deficit of between $5 million and $8 million, cost and timeline overruns for various projects, equipment failures that botched automated meter readings, and mistakenly turning an elderly person’s service off. WAPA officials said they’d apologized for squelching the aged person’s utilities and urged other elderly people or those in poor health to sign up for a program meant to avoid the issue.