Failure of Equipment at Substation Damaged By Hurricane Irma Caused Latest St. Thomas-St. District Power Outage, WAPA Says

An electrical service interruption which spanned across several distribution feeders in the St. Thomas - St. John district Monday morning resulted from equipment failure at a hurricane-damaged electrical substation and later, compromised primary service lines, WAPA said in a release.

The outage began shortly before 6 a.m. and all customers were restored at 2:30 p.m.

The Donald Francois electrical substation in Long Bay experienced equipment failure Monday morning which required grid reconfiguration to assign all “B” feeders usually serviced by the substation to other substation feeders, facilitate service restoration and equipment repair,” said WAPA Interim Executive Director and CEO Noel Hodge.

At mid-morning, due to increased load on Feeders 7A and 8A, which were by then carrying the electrical demand of Feeders 6B, 7B, 8B, and 9B, primary service lines on 7A and 8A became compromised which tripped the feeders resulting in a service interruption. Hodge explained that in the Subbase area, Line Department crews made repairs to more than a half dozen primary lines which make up feeders 7A and 8A before restoring service to customers on the six feeders.