WAPA failure on St. John leads to call for protest today

CRUZ BAY — A major failure on the underground transmission line that carries power from St. Thomas left all 2,600 Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority customers on St. John without electricity throughout Thursday, as WAPA board members met for hours to discuss the utility’s grim situation.

“We can never get to a zero outage scenario,” WAPA CEO Andrew Smith said during a governing board meeting Thursday morning. “That would be impossible to achieve here.”

Board members discussed WAPA’s myriad of ongoing problems in public session for about two hours, before taking a break and going into executive session, where they met in private for six hours.

When they returned, board Secretary Juanita Young reported that, “we discussed legal matters and took action relative to legal matters related to Wartsila, Vitol, and a battery energy storage lease with VI Electron.”