WAPA Hoping Proactive Maintenance And New Generators Will Lessen Future Outages

With short outages on St. Croix and St. Thomas over the past two days after months of steady reliability, V.I. Water and Power Authority officials said they are pushing forward with a few proactive measures to keep future incidents down, while looking at how they can speed up the process of bringing new units online.

St. Croix experienced a 21-minute outage Monday night, while power went out on feeder 9C on St. Thomas around 6:45 a.m. Tuesday, was restored about two hours later, then went out on feeder 8B.

In an interview with the Source, WAPA Executive Director Andy Smith said issues with propane affected generating units on St. Croix, but that crews were able to start another unit – which takes about 20 minutes – and get power back online quickly. With propane, factors such as temperature and pressure have to be right, and when something is off, the machines shut themselves down to stave off any potential damage.

On St. Thomas, Unit 27 tripped closer to 7 a.m. Tuesday and since it wasn’t immediately clear why, crews are working with General Electric – which leases the generator to WAPA – to figure out what happened and to source parts.